American Unitarian Association
The American Unitarian Association (German: American Unitarian Society ) was a Unitarian church in the United States , which in 1961 with the Universalist Church of America for the Unitarian Universalist Association united.
The church represented a Christian unitarianism that rejected the idea of a trinity of God and instead stood for anti-Trinitarian ideas.
history
North American Unitarianism developed in the 18th century in a predominantly Protestant environment. Preachers like Jonathan Mayhew , who served as pastor in Boston between 1747 and 1766, began to take anti-Trinitarian positions early on. Formative influence exerted mainly of coming from Europe Socinianism .
The first Unitarian congregation in North America was founded in Boston in 1786 when the majority of the former Anglican congregation of the King's Chapel, under the influence of James Freeman, turned to Unitarianism, rejecting the idea of the Trinity. In 1802, the first Puritan congregation founded by the Pilgrim Fathers in America, the First Parish Church in Plymouth, also became Unitarian. In 1825 the American Unitarian Association was founded as the umbrella organization for North American Unitarians. In the mid-19th century, transcendentalist ideas gained support within American Unitarianism, which can be traced back, among other things, to the work Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson published in 1836 . Some of the Unitarians began to break away from the Christian foundation of Unitarianism at the end of the 19th century. As early as 1867, the rationalists among the Unitarians together with liberal Quakers and agnostics founded the Free Religious Association . In 1899 there were initial discussions about the possibility of joining forces with the North American universalists of the Universalist General Convention . In 1961 the two churches finally merged to form what is now the Unitarian Universalist Association , in which Christian unitarianism and universalism, however, were marginalized by a more pantheistic - humanistic conception in the course of the 20th century .
In 2000, the American Unitarian Conference (AUC) was founded, a new theistically oriented Unitarian community. The Unitarian Christian Church of America (UCCA) followed in 2016 from the merger of the Unitarian Christian Emerging Church (UCEC) and the Unitarian Christian Conference USA (UCC ), which continues to see itself as a genuinely Christian church.
