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Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian controversy in Boston, 1804-1833 - Massachusetts
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Mary Kupiec Cayton
Scholars have traditionally dealt with the two groups by distinguishing them theologically. The conservatives (known at various times in the controversy as the orthodox, the evangelicals, or eventually simply as the Congregationalists) eventually assumed a common identity around what they took to be the traditional tenets of the faith of New England Calvinism: the omnipotence of God, the necessity for conversion from human depravity and corruption, the significance of membership in a body of "Saints" identified through testimony of conversion experiences, reliance on the literal truth of scripture as the basis for belief, and the necessity for maintenance of purity of doctrinal and congregational integrity in the face of the rise of religious and political heterodoxy outside the congregation's bounds. The liberals (who came to be known over time as Unitarians) had been heavily influenced by secular Enlightenment rationalism. They narrowed the distance between God and believer by endowing Him with benevolent human attributes. They also denied the doctrine of the Trinity as unscriptural, although they placed a heavier emphasis overall on the preaching of ethics than on doctrine. They maintained no particular criteria designed to insure that membership was limited to the elect, and they saw the Bible as a book given to humans by God to be interpreted by the light of reason. Its truths, while important guides to the lives of people, were not necessarily to be understood in a strictly literal way.
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The conservatives were active proselytizers, supporting missionary societies, Bible societies, young men's associations, and a variety of other organizational efforts in order to convert others to their point of view. The liberals were not only not evangelical, they were for the most part anti-evangelical until well into the 1830s, preaching the right of people to believe as the light of reason informed them, as long as they remained within the general rubric of Christianity and guided in some general way by the wisdom of sacred scripture. To the extent that they were involved with any organizational efforts, either religious or philanthropic, these were mainly educational endeavors meant to insure the development of their own learning in a variety of areas (not only, not even especially, theological and religious), and philanthropies designed to insure that the well-off met their obligations to attend with compassion to the needs of the poor.(5) The conservatives, in other words, were aggressively expansionist, the liberals more intent on maintaining strong institutional and civic leadership among groups with whom they were already entrenched.
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