Our Southern Journey

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

May 3, 2009

For many years it was commonplace to refer to Unitarianism and then Unitarian Universalism by the shorthand, “the Boston religion.” Boston, after all, is where we have our headquarters, where our founding ministers were educated and led historic churches and where many of the great debates of our movement were conducted.

The implication, of course, is that anywhere else we are a derivative, Johnny-come-lately presence: a religious presence that is foreign, not really of the region but transplanted there. Probably nowhere is this perception stronger than in the South, and that’s not surprising, given how we usually tell our history.

Religious freedom was a motivating force behind the Puritans who settled New England in free churches gathered under communal covenants. From among those churches emerged a liberal strain that argued for the need for a reasoned faith, and from these churches grew the Unitarian religion.

The Universalist story is a little different, arising from two strains – John Murray, who after his arrival in New Jersey preached universal salvation up the eastern seaboard, ending eventually in Gloucester, and the emergence of a reasoned, Universalist faith in the hill country of New Hampshire. Yet, both Unitarianism and Universalism in their early days were centered in New England and have long been seen as somehow endemic to that region.

It is only since moving to the South that I have begun to discover some other parts of the story, rarely told and nearly lost because of historical circumstance. Yet, they offer insight into not only how our religion has found expression in the past but also how we can argue for the enduring relevance of a liberal religious perspective in the future.

Our Southern story begins with a figure whose name is usually little more than a footnote in the discussion of American Unitarianism: Joseph Priestley. Priestley was in his 60s in 1794 when he arrived in Philadelphia from England, where he was notorious as a dissenting Unitarian clergyman. He had written a book called “A History of The Corruptions of Christianity,” which argued that most Christian doctrine was a corruption of what Jesus and the early church taught. It was an Enlightenment perspective holding that Jesus was a man, though a uniquely inspired one, and that his teachings should be the center of faith.

Priestley arrived in America a celebrated figure. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams had both known him in Britain, but of the American founders it was Thomas Jefferson whom he influenced most deeply. Jefferson claimed that Priestley saved his faith and praised him to his circle of acquaintances.

Priestley’s Unitarianism, though, was a little too radical for the churches of New England, even the liberal ministers of Boston who would later organize the Unitarian church there. But his reasoned, Enlightenment approach to religion did find a following among some of the educated elite in the South.

One of the earliest of these was Joseph Gales, a Philadelphia newspaper owner who had helped organize Priestley’s church and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina in the early 1800s. He gathered congregations at the State House to hear prominent Unitarian preachers. He tried to organize several gatherings, but failed and moved back to Philadelphia, and the Raleigh group disbanded.

A more permanent arrangement took root in Charleston, South Carolina. A newly formed church on Archdale Street called Samuel Gilpin, a Harvard graduate and committed Unitarian, to its pulpit in 1817, and 15 years later changed its name to the Unitarian church. Gilpin and the Charleston church provided help and encouragement to set up Unitarian churches in Savannah and Augusta, Georgia; Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans.

Universalists followed a more informal path. After organizing conventions in the first years of the 1800s, prospective Universalist ministers fanned out on horseback across the countryside. Many had little more to support them than a close reading of the Bible and fervor for universal salvation. They found pockets of support across the South, especially among free-thinkers and German Dunker communities. What churches they had were generally small, scattered and served only infrequently by clergy.

Unlike in New England, where class and theological issues kept Unitarians and Universalists apart, in the South they often found common cause with each other, especially in the face of the wave of evangelism that swept through in the 1820s and 30s. In Richmond, Virginia, for example, the two groups came together in 1830 to create the first Unitarian-Universalist church in the nation.

In the early years, Northern and Southern Unitarians kept in touch and traded ministers, but in time both cultural and theological issues pushed them apart. While transcendentalists like Emerson and Parker found a following in the North, Southerners were repelled by them, finding their naturalistic piety too much like the emotionalism of the evangelists. The Southern church remained centered on reasoned exploration of the Bible.

Also, as slavery heated up as an issue, the Southerners parted ways with their Northern brethren. Many Southern Unitarians, even ministers, were slave-holders, and while they would say that they agreed that in time the institution should end, they felt it was no business of the church. They resented the condemnation of the ardent Unitarian abolitionists of the North and largely supported the Southern cause.

Perhaps the most dramatic example is Savannah. In the 1850s the church called John Pierpont Jr. as its minister. Pierpont’s father, also a minister, was one of the most vocal abolitionists among Unitarians, but the son took a contrary stand, arguing that abolition would not help anyone. He was joined in Savannah by his brother, James, as organist, who, as the Civil War approached, wrote the Christmas carol, “Jingle Bells.” In time, John left the church, and it closed. James stayed, married the mayor’s daughter and wrote battle hymns for the Confederacy. That church, known in Savannah as the “Jingle Bells church,” was bought by Episcopalians, then Baptists until finally in 1997 it was purchased again by the reconstituted UU Church of Savannah.

Only two Unitarian churches – in Charleston and New Orleans – survived the Civil War, and of some 40 southern Universalist churches, only one endured after the war. By the end of the 19th century in the South only one new Unitarian church opened – in Atlanta – and the next 40 years added only two more, in Richmond, Virginia, and Memphis, Tennessee.

Universalists fared a bit better, but their success didn’t last. By the turn of the century there were about 40 churches in the South and over the next 20 years another 40 were added, thanks largely to the efforts of a minister who styled himself a Universalist missionary: Quillen Shinn. But hard economic times, migration away from rural areas and other factors drastically reduced those numbers to about 26 congregations in the 11 southern states by 1945.

Born of the impetus for free religion guided by reason and tolerance, gathered in a hopeful faith that found worth in all, both traditions had ridden a roller coaster that found them by about the time of World War II at a low ebb in the South. There were those who wrote them off as anomalies in a region dominated by evangelistic conservatism. But their story was not over.

PART II

Open up the UUA Directory to the page for any southern state and you’ll discover something curious. With the exception of a few historic Universalist churches and a handful of iconic urban Unitarian churches, Unitarian Universalism in South appears to have originated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Churches in cities ranging from Athens, Georgia, to Birmingham, Alabama, to Knoxville, Tennessee, to Asheville, North Carolina, popped up for the first time, all of them owing their existence to a Unitarian campaign undertaken in the years after World War II called the Fellowship Movement.

The idea of the program was to plant seeds across the country where Unitarian, and then Unitarian Universalist congregations might grow. Munroe Husbands was appointed at Unitarian headquarters to supervise the program and with the help of Rev. Lon Ray Call he set out across the countryside to find favorable locations.

Husbands would seek to make contact with people in what seemed a likely area, invite them to gather at least 10 who might be willing to start a congregation, travel to meet with the group, give them information about what the task might require and then wish them well. No ministers were involved. The fellowships were entirely lay-led, though some resources were available from the UUA.

This process is how this church started, with a gathering of 11 people on May 9, 1950 – 59 years ago this coming Saturday – in the Battery Park Hotel downtown. Ours was the third of seven fellowships to be established in North Carolina, after starts in Raleigh and Durham. In all, some 50 fellowships were started in the South, and nearly all succeeded. Some have remained small, but several others, like us, have grown into large congregations. And many others have followed since.

North Carolina, for example, which had only five Universalist churches and no Unitarians before World War II, now boasts 24 Unitarian Universalist congregations, the largest concentration in the South, outside of Florida, and the 12th highest state total in the UUA. Today, our Thomas Jefferson District is one of the fastest growing in the UUA.

What the fellowship movement and the growth of Unitarian Universalism in the South since then has proved is that ours is not a “Boston religion,” bound up with regional interests or parochial concerns. Instead, it is a vital, life-giving religious perspective that embraces freedom in religious search and invites us into deep appreciation of what it means to be human intertwined with all things, that invites us to accept and to love each other unsparingly, together with this green Earth.

The invitation to religious liberals across the South in the post-War era to gather as congregations, as people of hope with religious intent touched a deep thirst for meaning that in its essence was not different from the craving that those 19th century pioneers sought out, or for that matter what continues to bring women and men to our growing churches: to bring open and disciplined minds to religious inquiry in a spirit of tolerance and love.

And while the forms those churches took and their cultural settings have varied dramatically the thirst has been ever the same.

PART III

Though Unitarianism finally established itself in Asheville with the founding of our church a little more than half a century ago, it made appearances of fits and starts dating back another 50 years. The first Unitarian minister to plant the flag here at the turn of the century came with what later turned out to be quite a literary pedigree: he was Henry Addison Westall, uncle of the writer Thomas Wolfe. From what we know of Wolfe’s family, though, they never took to his uncle’s faith, even though he was Julia Wolfe’s brother. Westall preached in rented rooms to a small congregation for several years, but later left the ministry to pursue a profession that seems to draw so many here in Asheville: real estate.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that Unitarians again made inquiries about starting a church here, but the stunning losses of the depression made it no time to organize a new church, and it took another 20 years for the Unitarians to try again.

Universalists never established a beachhead in Asheville, but in the final years of the Civil War a church was settled in Haywood County that lasted about 100 years. The congregation was served for about 40 years by Rev. James Inman, leading the group, when in 1901 they had finally gathered enough money to erect a church building, to name it Inman Chapel. As it happens, this story also claims a literary pedigree: Inman was the great, great grandfather of author Charles Frazier, who modeled one of the characters in his book Cold Mountain after him.

Inman was succeeded as minister by the Rev. Hannah Powell, who, while serving as minister for 15 years made the church a social center for the area, organizing a library, a school and nursing services in a home near the church. Try as she did to find someone to follow her in what she described as this rural “mission field,” Powell could locate no minister to replace her and the church declined until, in the late 1950s, it closed. Inman Chapel still stands, with a portrait of James and Mary Inman hanging behind the pulpit, and is owned by the Inman family.

As disparate as these two stories of Unitarians and Universalists in western North Carolina are, though, it appears that in a way a circle connecting them finally closed. It seems that Hannah Powell was known and liked by many people in the area, and among the people who had visited and admired her was Reuben Robertson, CEO of Champion Paper and Fiber Company, which owned and forested timber land in the area. In the late 1960s it was a gift from Robertson’s family of this site at 1 Edwin Place to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville that made construction of this church possible.

So do the threads of history tangle and cross in many places across the South, illustrating a picture more complex than a broad brush often paints. It is true that conservative religion remains a powerful force in this part of the country, but it is equally true that since the first European settlers, liberal religion, too, has been part of the mix: not a transplant, not an interloper, but an authentic expression of human longing and hope.

As its inheritors, may we continue to serve that hope and lay a strong foundation for the future that it may ever flourish in this place.