With Liberty, Justice, and Salvation for All: The Religious and Social Ethic of Christian Universalists in the American Founding

Abstract

There have been few doctrines as provocative in the history of Christianity as Universalism, the belief that all people shall be saved and reconciled to Jesus Christ at the end of time. There have also been few times in history as volatile for institutional religion as America during the Revolution and early republic. In late eighteenth-century New England, though, the founding of the Universalist General Convention saw Universalism and American republicanism converge. It was no coincidence that a Universalist denomination spawned at this time and place, nor was it viewed as such by its leaders at the time. The “founding fathers of American Universalism” saw themselves as possessing a unique theological and political vocation. The Universalists forged their theological and social ethic in the aftermath of a breakdown of trust in New England’s Calvinist religious consensus and many clergy's perceived surrender of the region’s popular culture to selfish individualism. Universalists believed their distinct doctrine would provide the social cohesion that neither old-line Calvinism nor deistic Enlightenment values could offer on their own, building a communal piety that used the love of God demonstrated to all creation in universal salvation to spur the believer to a life of good works. Thus, universal salvation served as the optimal theological facilitator of republican values and social ethics, manifested in Universalist public piety's situation of individual liberty and assurance of salvation within an irenic communal ethic.