Few movements have been so remarkably transformed within such a short period of time as nineteenth century American Unitarianism. In the 1830s, despite its recently acquired denominational independence, it remained theologically quite close its Congregational ancestry. Its most typical leaders of that period —Orville Dewey, John G. Palfrey, Ezra Stiles Gannett, and Nathaniel L. Frothingham—were all men of gentility and moderation, with little taste for theological revolution. Thus their Unitarianism differed from orthodox New England theology in degree rather than kind and still formed, as one contemporary put it, “the liberal side of the old Congregational body.” Men like Frothingham, who filled the prestigious pulpit of Boston's First Church, continued to believe in a supernatural deity revealed by miracles and divinely inspired Scripture. They placed only limited faith in man. Although not totally depraved, humanity was filled largely with evil and needed divine mediation for salvation. Jesus, who provided this mediation, was described as “the divinely inspired Son of the Father.” The social views of these men, based as they were on the assumption that God had ordained and established the social institutions of the day, were predominantly conservative.3 Within a generation, however, this Old Unitarianism had dissolved. Not everyone changed, of course. Some Conservatives maintained the traditional views until their deaths, but they quickly became a minority as a New Unitarianism emerged.

The historical literature on colonial America is extensive and wide-ranging. Those works which deal with seventeenth-century New England in particular describe a society in which the church was an institution of overwhelming importance, and religious concerns were closely integrated with all aspects of life. Even in the diversifying and more secular picture of the eighteenth century, religion continued to occupy a central position in society, and the historiography of the period reflects this reality. Many attempts to trace the origins of the American Revolution are laced with the religious dynamic, and the influence of ministerial leadership is considered significant. In Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, religious issues and the clergy are prominent in the unfolding political struggle.1

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.

The sympathy of most English Catholics during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 lay with General Francisco Franco and the other generals who had rebelled against the Second Spanish Republic. If there was any doubt of this, the spate of literature which then appeared, much of it polemical, and the journalistic views presented could leave little doubt on the matter. The adoption of an anti-Republican stance in English Catholic circles, while not complete, nevertheless implied an adverse judgment upon the viability and legitimacy of the Republic, if not its legality, from 1936 onward. The Republic had failed in its primary obligation—to rule justly—and the military revolt had been necessary to forestall anarchy or communism. The judgment that the Republic had failed, however, was not an a priori one, nor was it enthusiastically reached so much as accepted.

Not long before he died, Lenin told a French Catholic visitor that “only Communism and Catholicism offered two diverse, complete and inconfusible conceptions of human life.” Lenin's belief that Communism and Catholicism were incon fusible was probably shared by most Communists, and most Catholics, in France in the nineteen-thirties. When the French Communists offered an “outstretched hand” to Catholic workers in 1936 in an effort to achieve a tactical alliance to head off fascism in France and Europe and to promote social progress—ignoring the incompatibilities of world view as much as possible—a number of French Catholics sought to grasp it. But these Catholics were not, for the most part, the “Catholic workers, clerks, artisans, peasants” to whom Maurice Thorez had addressed his appeal, but rather Catholic philosophers, “social priests,” journalists, and cardinals. They grasped, or considered grasping, the outstretched hand with a variety of motivations, hopes, and intentions which were quite often different from the intentions of the Communists who proffered it.

In the 1860s the controversy over the widespread revival of such African customs as “lobolo” (bridewealth) and the development of concubinage among the Christian converts almost destroyed the American Board Mission (AZM), which had been founded in 1835. Suddenly—or so it seemed to the American missionaries—the obedient converts of the previous decades began to defend customs that, from the beginning of the mission, had been denounced as “heathen” by the missionaries.

In 1790, the year John Carroll was consecrated as the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Baltimore, the Catholic population numbered less than 40,000—a very distinct minority in a country of nearly 4,000,000 people. As a small group living in a society overwhelmingly composed of Protestants, Catholics could not avoid mixing with those of different faiths in their everyday life.1 Carroll viewed such contacts with mixed feelings. As a native American he understood that so many of his countrymen considered his church, however wrongly, an “alien” institution. He resented most the accusation that the allegiance that Catholics owed to Rome detracted from their attachment to the United States.

Nihilism has been present in Western culture for many centuries, but no century has been so permeated by nihilism as has our own. With perceptive insight Alexander Salzhenitsyn recently observed that Western democracy is in its “last decline,” has no ethical foundation, and consists only of “parties, and social classes engaged in a conflict of interests, just interests, nothing higher.” Solzhenitsyn's observation can hardly be brushed aside. His words describe a nihilism that is prominent in more than Western democracy, Nihilism reaches as far back as Ecclesiastes in our Old Testament and Nargarjuna in Buddhism. Perhaps no century has been without it, but in our century it has become pervasive, finding expression not only in a flood of literature but in virtually every phase of our existence. The Nazi holocaust, Vietnam, the “death of God,” and Watergate fall within its scope. It is so pervasive that it merits attention, especially from church historians.