Who were the evangelicals?: conservative and liberal identity in the Unitarian controversy in Boston, 1804-1833 - Massachusetts

In order to capture better the contrast between the conservative and liberal religionist styles, it is useful to look at the philosophies and orientations of two of the more prominent leaders of each "faction" in the 1820s, after the movements had clearly crystallized, in order to see how the two groups distinguished themselves from one another. Lyman Beecher was born in New Haven and educated at Yale, a conservative religionist who came to Boston in 1826 after periodically visiting to conduct revivals in order to save the city from heresy.(13) "As to the importance of the stand in Boston," he wrote upon moving to take charge of the newly formed orthodox Hanover Street Church,

I have never stood in such a place before, and do not believe that there is, all things considered, such another, perhaps, on earth. It is here that New England is to be regenerated, the enemy driven out of the temple they have usurped and polluted, the college to be rescued, the public sentiment to be revolutionalized and restored to evangelical tone. And all this with reference to the resurrection of New England to an undivided and renovated effort for the extension of religion and moral influence throughout the land and through the world.(14)

He came to Boston to stand at the head of "a united and simultaneous effort to rescue from perversion the doctrines and institutions of our fathers."(15) William Ellery Channing, on the other hand, we have already seen as the earliest and most articulate spokesman for the Unitarian establishment.(16) When we juxtapose the views of Beecher and Channing on manners and morals in the 1820s, we can get a better sense of what each party thought was at stake in the dispute - at least as reflected in the rhetoric of its principal advocates.

Beecher saw Unitarianism as quite simply a perversion of true religion. It seemed to him to emphasize watered-down ethics over solid meat-and-potatoes theology, and in the theology that it did preach, it disseminated dangerous heresy on the nature of God and of man which invariably had an effect on human behavior. "All the great designs which God has to answer by planting our fathers here in this nation and world depend, as I believe, on the efforts of this generation to rescue their institutions from perversion, and restore them to their native purity and glory," Beecher announced in his 1823 sermon, "The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints."(17) Thus he sounded the keynote of the orthodox effort to rescue the region from its recent religious "decay." "The faith delivered to the saints produced a stricter morality than any contemporaneous system," Beecher asserted, and such was the premise of the evangelical reform of society. Sabbath violators, drunks, and blasphemers could drag down the moral tone of society because liberal religion had become so oblivious to the design of God that it did not know sin when it saw it. The fruits of declension from the faith of the fathers, to whom Beecher referred repeatedly in his work, were plain to see everywhere; it had been forgotten "that men by nature do not love God supremely, and their neighbors as themselves." The solution was to be a revival of the faith of the fathers, replete with exclusive admissions criteria, confessional conversion narratives, and "the exemplary practice of those duties, which so honorably distinguished the first settlers of New England."(18) A strict and literal observance of scriptural mandates would restore good order to the community and godliness to the churches.