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gations fell precipitously thereafter. The continuing downward spiral also brought
geographical contraction; in the twentieth century, the churches that remained were
concentrated in New England and New York, where the movement had always
been best established.1 The 1961 merger with the Unitarians was a move made partly
on the basis of simple denominational erosion; had they not pooled resources with
another church, the Universalists might have ceased to exist altogether as a national
organization.
The evidence of this study suggests that the movement was already losing its
particular appeal and reason for being as early as the middle decades of the nine-
teenth century. As the generation of preachers that had shared Hosea Ballou s basic
insights and outlook began to pass from the scene, Universalism lost its distinctive-
ness as a popular movement that sought to combine faith and reason, to sustain an
objective communal piety; it was already virtually dead in this respect by the time
of the 1870 centennial celebration. Readers familiar with well-worn models in the
sociology of religion will inevitably see a familiar pattern in this rise and decline of
a popular church.2 But such categories, no matter how carefully refined, cannot
make much sense of the profound shifts in eschatological thought that were affect-
ing all of American religious culture in the nineteenth century. By focusing on the
Universalist movement, a unique attempt among common people to preach a syn-
147
148 The Universalist Movement in America, 1770 1880
thesis of faith and reason, a genuinely popular communal piety, this study has
sought not to explain those shifts but to illuminate their meaning for popular reli-
gious liberalism generally.
Ballou s Treatise on Atonement had provided theological coherence and direction
to the emerging Universalist movement at the opening of the nineteenth century.
Addressing a culture increasingly split between evangelical piety and liberal ration-
alism, Ballou advanced what he saw as a reasonable piety that could uphold a
religious sense of community. We have seen that his thought reflected and en-
couraged a popular synthesis of ideals inherited from both Puritan culture and the
Democratic Enlightenment, a synthesis that allowed room for radical individual
freedom but insisted upon the organic wholeness of society and the necessary in-
terdependence of all persons.
But it is clear that the sensibility represented by Ballou and his followers in the
first decades of the century proved increasingly unappealing in the fast-changing
society of the antebellum era. By the later antebellum period, the Universalist move-
ment was gaining ground far less on account of its revised Calvinism than because
of its Enlightenment call for rationality in religion. A significant number of Amer-
icans responded to the Universalist plea that religious belief not offend reason; far
fewer embraced Universalism s broader expression of the sovereignty of God. Prot-
estants of many persuasions had chafed against the communal constraints of Jona-
than Edwards s organic spiritual vision, and they hesitated to answer his call to
consent to being as part of a common, sinful humanity. Now, citizens of the new
republic increasingly demanded that religion afford a large berth to personal re-
sponsibility and virtue. Both Charles Finney s pronouncements about the voluntary
nature of sin and conversion and William Ellery Channing s summons to moral
improvement manifested a high regard for individual human obligation and po-
tency.
With their belief in transcendent, universal salvation and communion, Univer-
salists sought to recast Edwards s consent to being. In this doctrine, they found
ultimate eschatological hope within the context of a modified Calvinism. It was a
belief that encouraged faith not in current human power but in the power of God
eventually to realize his kingdom. But most Americans in the Methodist age had
little use for such a deeply eschatological and organically minded conviction. Iron-
ically, the Brahmin Channing reflected the popular religious mentality far more
than the man of the people, Ballou.
Despite the opposition of a number of prominent adherents, Universalist preach-
ing and writing began to reflect the moralism, individualism, and perfectionism that
pervaded the main forms of nineteenth-century religious thought. It seems evident
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