CONRAD WRIGHT: HISTORIAN OF AMERICAN UNITARIANISM 1917- Photos
courtesy of Nielsen Wright
A
SON'S APPRECIATION by
Conrad Edick Wright, Ford Editor of Publications and Director
of the Center for the Study of New England, Massachusetts
Historical Society
I'd
like to share a small secret with you. But don't become too excited
at the prospect of the revelation of a transgression hidden deep
within some Wright family closet. It has to do with the professional
discipline that my father and I both pursue.
The history Ph.D. is, of course,
a research degree. It requires course work and a dissertation,
and it prepares the recipient for a career as a scholar. But even
most history Ph.D.s are unaware that the majority of people in
the field never publish and that most of those who do write publish
very little, often little more than an article or two or an occasional
book review. Teaching, advising, and administration occupy most
of the daily working hours for the great majority of college faculty
members, who can never quite find the time or the energy to finish
long delayed projects. Figures circulated a few years ago—which
were so shocking that to this day I have trouble believing them—indicated
that something like 5 percent of history Ph.D.s had published
anything and roughly half that number had published more than
infrequently.
What does this small secret have
to do with my father's life? It is simply this: historians who
are active scholars are rare enough; those whose scholarship is
enduring, whose scholarship makes a difference, are even more
uncommon. My father's writings have endured—have made a difference—in
how scholars and Unitarian Universalists alike look at the Unitarian
Universalist denomination.
There are two ways to make an enduring
difference as a scholar. One is to write about an ignored subject
and show us why we should care about it. In recent years, for
example, talented historians have shown us why we should be interested
in the stories of such groups as women, African Americans, Native
Americans, and gays. From a professional standpoint, the discovery
of these groups — how could we ever have ignored their existence?
— has resulted in several growth industries, as energetic
and committed investigators have explored previously forgotten
byways. The other way to make a difference is to show us a new
way to look at something that we think we already understand.
Here is where we will find my father's major contribution both
to historical scholarship and to his denomination.
Silhouettes
of the members of Conrad Wright's parents' family
In this series, we are asked to look
at accomplished Unitarians in America between 1936 and 1961, but
for the historiography of my father the key dates actually lie much
closer together—1955 and 1961. The Beginnings of Unitarianism
in America appeared in 1955, and Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism
came out in 1961. These books, together with some titles by other
authors that appeared at about the same time (notably The Transcendentalist
Ministers, by William R. Hutchison, a long-time fellow member of
the Divinity School's faculty) proposed two vital changes in our
understanding of the history of American Unitarianism.
Ask a Unitarian parish minister
in 1955 to discuss the origins of American Unitarianism, and if
he were relatively young the odds are that he (it was almost always
a he) would think back to seminary, where he had read Earl Morse
Wilbur's History of Unitarianism. Wilbur's History,
published in two volumes in 1945 and 1952, drew on themes he had
first laid out in 1925 in Our Unitarian Heritage. Wilbur's
writings, which drew on quite substantial research in primary
sources, primarily traced the history of Unitarian beliefs in
Europe, especially Eastern Europe.
Conrad
with his wife, Elizabeth
When my father's Beginnings of
Unitarianism came out in 1955, perhaps its central objective,
at least for Unitarian readers, was to protect misguided enthusiasts
from drawing the mistaken inference from Wilbur that to find our
roots we had to look somewhere in Eastern Europe. A student of
Perry Miller, the great Harvard scholar of American Puritanism,
my father recognized the indigenous New England origins of American
Unitarianism. These roots lay in the answer that provincial New
Englanders offered to a frequently asked question. "What must
I do to be saved?" The customary Calvinist answer to this question,
informed by the doctrine of predestination, is "nothing." That
is to say, your fate is in God's hands, and nothing you can do
can affect the outcome.
The founders of churches such as
the First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adhered to traditional
Calvinist answers to questions about salvation, but even in the
seventeenth century many New Englanders were uncomfortable at
the stern and unyielding nature of the doctrines they espoused.
The principal accomplishment of The Beginning of Unitarianism
in America was to trace the indigenous origins of our movement,
which the author found in the reaction of many New Englanders
against Calvinist predestinarianism. The key figures in this story,
including such Massachusetts ministers as Charles Chauncy, Ebenezer
Gay, and Jonathan Mayhew—denominated then and since by the
term Arminian—proposed that while the final decision on salvation
was God's alone, men and women prepared themselves for a happy
outcome by leading virtuous lives.
In
this telling, American Unitarianism grew out of Puritan roots,
not from an Eastern European origin. In scholarly circles, it
is the account offered in The Beginnings of Unitarianism in
America that has won the field of controversy. Outside the
pages of the writings of some of our ministers, it is difficult
to find anyone today who makes a serious attempt to connect Wilbur's
European research to the origins of the American Unitarian movement.
The
second important reinterpretation of Unitarian history in which
my father played a central role by 1961 involved the relationship
beginning in the 1830s between mainstream Unitarians and adherents
to the Transcendentalist movement. Traditional wisdom emphasized
the tensions between the two groups, the divisions that sundered
them, but in their writings my father and William Hutchison both
taught that mainstream and Transcendentalist doctrines nourished
each other. In Hutchison's important 1959 book, The Transcendentalist
Ministers, he went on to show that most prominent Transcendentalists
also maintained a formal institutional relationship to Unitarianism.
To be sure, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the best known of the Transcendentalists,
left his pulpit in favor of an independent career as a lecturer,
but his case was out of the ordinary. For the most part, leading
Transcendentalists remained Unitarian.
The most important consequence of
revisionist writings on the Transcendentalists was to recast them
not as rebels against Unitarianism but as the reform wing of the
denomination. All of a sudden, important links between the two
groups became obvious. Perhaps the most important of these connections
involved the doctrine of self-culture. In the tradition of the
Arminians, who emphasized the individual's role in preparing himself
or herself for salvation, such nineteenth- century writers as
Emerson and William Ellery Channing made self-improvement the
cardinal obligation of the virtuous man or woman.
Neither
of the scholarly developments I have just described was solely
my father's work. Like every historian, he built on the research
of others, and he also depended on colleagues and students to
engage with him in a cooperative effort to recast our understanding
of the Unitarian past. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that in
fundamental ways our knowledge of Unitarian history was shaped
by his research and writing.
AN
APPRECIATION
by David M.
Robinson, Distinguished Professor of American Literature, Oregon
State University
Abridged from of The Proceedings of the Unitarian Universalist
Historical Society: Essays in Celebration of the Seventy-fifth
Birthday of Conrad Wright, Volume 22, Part 2, 1992-1994.
Conrad
at his studies, circa 1929.
A detached observer, who knew something
of American religious history but little of contemporary American
academic life, would no doubt assume that Unitarian historiography
would be teeming with practitioners. After all, here is the richest
vein, the most fertile soil. The Unitarians were the theological
innovators and risk-takers. The tradition is rich in both speculative
theology and ethical reasoning. Their ministers had surpassing
erudition, and were among the leaders in the extension of theological
premises to social reform. And for rhetorical eloquence and literary
attainment, they beat the other denominations all hollow. Yet
despite this embarrassment of historical riches, it is hardly
the case that the field of Unitarian history is overrun. And it
is not because Unitarians burn their evidence behind them, as
evidenced by the repositories at Harvard, the Massachusetts Historical
Society, the Boston Athenaeum, and elsewhere.
Conrad Wright's distinguished and
continuing accomplishment in Unitarian history should remind us
of a profound irony—the difficulty of being a Unitarian historian.
If you engage Unitarianism as an
historian, that is, as one who is professionally identified primarily
with teaching and research in university departments of history,
you are cast under the suspicion of the possible use of history
for denominational special pleading. If you conduct work in Unitarian
history from within the field of religious studies, you are apt
to be marginalized for some of the same reasons that Unitarian
Universalism itself is marginalized in American Protestantism—suspicion
of its tradition of seemingly radical departures from the development
of mainstream Protestantism, and even for the fact of the denomination's
small numbers, and presumed lack of influence. If, like me, you
approach Unitarian history from a department of literature, where
a surprising amount of recent Unitarian history has originated,
or from the field of American Studies that has been heavily conditioned
by literary concerns, your work may well be regarded by your peers
as a groping around in some very dry bones of the past, worse
because they are the bones of Boston Brahmins, one of the several
categories of elite groups who are very much out of fashion in
contemporary cultural wars.
Viewed in the broader context of
American religious and cultural history, the Unitarian movement
seems inescapably central to any account of key cultural developments
in America—the transformation of American Protestantism,
especially the decline of Calvinism, the formation of American
educational institutions and traditions, the formation of a sustainable
tradition of liberalism in politics and social thought, the formation
of charitable and philanthropic organizations, and the formation
of a secular national literature.
The most distinctive characteristic
of Unitarianism, as we view it in the context of other American
Protestant denominations, is its declared creedlessness. The creedlessness
that marks Unitarian Universalism as the denomination of intellectual
freedom, innovation, and theological achievement remains perhaps
the most crucial element of its spiritual heritage. But creedlessness
can speak only partially to the need for religious self-identity,
and when one searches for a more positive and sustaining answer
to the dilemma of religious self-identity, the best alternative
to a hazy and disengaged relativism, and the only alternative
that preserves the principle of creedlessness, is history. Unitarian
Universalists must come to know who they are, I would propose,
by understanding who they have been.
Young
Conrad Wright
We pay tribute to Conrad Wright
by recognizing both his sustaining role as a historian of Unitarianism,
and the larger value that all such historical work potentially
entails. Consider the work he has done, I would emphasize three
particular insights that constitute the legacy of Wright's work,
a legacy that I judge to be crucial both to American historians
and to Unitarian Universalists.
To begin with, Wright has located
Unitarian origins and established the context for Unitarian development
in the history of New England Congregationalism. Yes, tour Eastern
Massachusetts and look at its historic churches, and it is an
obvious point. Wright's classic study, The Beginnings of Unitarianism
in America, described in precise detail how Calvinism carried
its shadow with it to the new world in the form of the heresy
known as Arminianism.
As Wright demonstrated, Calvinism's
efforts to purge and renew itself, notably the Great Awakening
of the middle eighteenth-century, inevitably strengthened the
very object of its deepest concern and fear. The intense effort
of Calvinists to reaffirm and revivify their creedal affirmations
inevitably suggested the liberal alternative that they were designed
to repress. And the strength with which Calvinism struggled to
assert and reassert its claims is evidence of the growing influence
of the Arminian alternative. Wright's study reminds us of how
alive with dissent the seemingly monolithic Puritan religious
culture was almost from the beginning and, in a larger sense,
helps us understand the essentially symbiotic relationship between
the conservative and liberal strands of the American Protestant
tradition.
The recognition of origins that
Wright's book continues to offer us is initially important not
because it offers Unitarian Universalists a piece, as it were,
of the Mayflower ancestry, but for quite the opposite reason.
It reminds us of the bounded and parochial origins of a denomination
whose aspirations are often global or cosmic. In this respect,
one of the most impressive accomplishments of The Beginnings
of Unitarianism is Wright's communication of a sense of gradual,
organic progress which typified the metamorphosis of Congregationalism
and resulted finally in the Unitarian schism. Moreover, Wright's
knowledge that Unitarianism is anchored in this congregational
past has allowed him to comment with unusual lucidity on one of
the most persistent tensions in Unitarianism, the relative roles
of the individual congregant and the larger congregation.
Wright's establishment of the emergence
of Unitarianism from the larger diversities and instabilities
of Puritan Calvinism, often wrongly thought of as monolithic in
its identity, generated, I believe, a second important aspect
of his legacy, one of particular importance to scholars like me
who are engaged in the study of New England Transcendentalism.
Wright's contributions to the scholarly
discourse of Transcendentalism have been salient, chiefly by serving
as a counter to the tendency of literary scholars to transcend
the historical grounding of their subject. I have an unshakable
conviction that literature to be understood thoroughly must be
understood historically, and that such an historical grasp of
literature is not at all opposed to aesthetic pleasure but one
of its crucial elements.
Conrad
working at home
That seems to me powerfully the
case with the literature of Transcendentalism, chiefly because
so much of it was religious discourse arising out of very specific
theological contexts, aspiring to a larger universal status as
literature. While such exclusively literary concerns have not
been those of Professor Wright, he has helped to open for literary
scholars an entire explanatory category for this situation by
noting the again obvious fact that Transcendentalism arose from,
and should be read as an integral aspect of, nineteenth-century
Unitarianism. The impressive thing about Wright's focus on the
Unitarian context of Transcendentalism is that, while it is in
some respects a restraining influence, it does not close down
the subject, but opens it. Wright's exemplary return to the historical
record is powerfully invigorating, chiefly because that record
is itself so rich and surprisingly various.
Wright's most influential essay
for literary scholars, "Emerson, Barzillai Frost, and The Divinity
School Address," advanced a trenchant argument for viewing Emerson's
Divinity School Address, a text whose crucial place in both the
American historical record and American literary canon was assured,
as rooted in a very determinate local situation, even, one might
be tempted to say, in the trivialities of professional rivalry,
personal ambition, and Emerson's vocational indecision. The operative
sentence in the essay reads as follows: "It has not been appreciated
that crucial passages of [The Divinity School Address] were originally
specific criticisms of one particular minister, later generalized
and made anonymous for a public occasion."
Much of what will have continuing
value in Wright's work is exemplified in that sentence, for it
suggests the power of careful scrutiny grounded in a body of detailed
and particular knowledge.
The effect of the essay was to take
Emerson off his pedestal, an act that Wright has performed with
I believe some relish in several other places as well. By localizing
Emerson's complaint about dead preaching to the rather special
case of his pastor Frost, Wright was able to open the larger question
of the tradition of preaching that nurtured Emerson himself. Thus
by returning to the historical record to locate Emerson's remarks
within their immediate setting, Wright in the long run helped
open the much larger question of what assumptions about preaching,
and what examples of it, had formulated Emerson's own achievement
as a preacher and lecturer.
I have been speaking here as an
academic trooper in the critical wars, but those of you without
a professional stake in the course of American literary criticism
or Transcendentalist historiography will appreciate one larger
implication of such work for Unitarianism. Insofar as the denomination
has had significant historical impact on American culture, and
insofar as Unitarianism has significant historical recognition
in the larger public mind, it is in large measure through the
work of the Transcendentalists. Unitarian Universalists are, that
is to say, of the religion of Emerson, Parker, Thoreau, and Fuller.
But such a legacy may present difficulties to those Unitarian
Universalists who have some awareness of the historical situation
of Transcendentalism. Emerson resigned his ministry, Parker was
in conflict with influential elements of Unitarianism, Thoreau
signed off from the Concord church, and Fuller, as a woman, saw
no public or professional place for herself in the Unitarian Church.
Unitarians have had to accept
Transcendentalism as a legacy of rebellion.
MIT
faculty photo, late 1940s
Wright has warned us of the danger
of an uncritical use of the Transcendentalist legacy, and we must
bear his caution about destructive individualism in mind. But
I am also convinced that Transcendentalism remains one of Unitarian
Universalism's most important intellectual and spiritual resources,
one that is more likely to be neglected these days than overused.
The Henry W. Bellows legacy of churchmanship that Wright's work
has revived is vital, but appreciation of Bellows requires a certain
connoisseurship, born of some deep experience with the care and
sustenance of institutions. Bellows may not always be the best
ammunition for the minister seeking to engage and, yes, increase
a congregation. Preach Emerson, then, even while you run your
church like Bellows.
This mention of Bellows leads me
to the third aspect of Wright's achievement, a renewed emphasis
on the importance of communal and institutional concerns and traditions
within Unitarian Universalism. In a sense, this concern has been
the foundation of the earlier points I have made. This emphasis,
when applied to the concerns of contemporary Unitarian Universalism,
has generated Wright's most prophetic work, his reexamination
of the problems entailed by the privileged place of individualism
within American liberal religion, and his call for a renewed doctrine
of the church.
Conrad
with his daughter, Elizabeth
As he argued in his 1979 essay "Individualism
in Historical Perspective," the individualistic strand of American
Unitarianism is a particular instance of a problem within the Western
intellectual tradition itself. Wright centers his critique on Jefferson
and Emerson, but as he explains, they are representative men: "In
Jefferson and Emerson, the tendency toward the privatization of
religion, and consequently the atrophy of its corporate dimension,
was carried further than it was by other religious liberals. Yet
Emerson's atomic individualism is merely a more extreme version
of tendencies widely apparent." The operative phrase in his critique
is "the privatization of religion," and the thrust of this and a
good many other of his pieces, now collected in the volume Walking
Together is the inadequacy of such a view of religion. For Wright,
a religious life must be sustained through a discovery and continual
reeffirmation of a shared bond with others. That conviction is perhaps
best articulated in the lead essay of Walking Together "A Doctrine
of the Church for Liberals," in which Wright returns to Puritan
Congregationalism to expound a concept of the "covenant" as the
basis for the church, "by which the members agreed to walk together
in mutual fellowship." Both a voluntary and a binding document,
the covenant mediated the demands of individual conscience and social
cohesion. As Wright comments, "A church united by a covenant is
made up of people who have made commitments to one another." Those
commitments, and the actions and experiences that arise from them,
are a crucial aspect of religious experience.
This prophetic dimension of Wright's
work, increasingly evident in the last two decades, is of course
closely connected to his historical research, and it is the nature
of this connection that deserves a final comment. Wright's work
has invested Henry W. Bellows with much historical authority, for
Bellows, as Wright has shown us, understood the corporate and institutional
dimension of religion, and worked effectively to bolster it within
Unitarianism. The connection between Wright's historical rehabilitation
of Bellows and his call for a reexamination of the doctrine of the
church in contemporary Unitarian Universalism should be obvious.
But in the organic development of Wright's work, it seems to me
that Bellows was more than a convenient vehicle for Wright's views.
Conrad
reading in the living room
Bellows himself had felt the powerful
influence of the call of Emersonian self-culture, and had come to
his convictions about the institutional grounding of religion after
profound struggle, as is evidenced in the confessional qualities
of his key sermon, "The Suspense of Faith. " He was far from a one-dimensional
figure. Bellows's wisdom was bought with the price of experience,
and his work was not a rejection of one form of the Unitarian past
in favor of a different one, but a building from the past to meet
the requirements of new circumstances. As Wright noted in his narrative
of Bellows's work to establish the National Conference, it was not
only the radicals of the Free Religious Association who opposed
him, although that is the debate which is best remembered, but also
some of the most conservative of the Unitarians, who were excessively
protective of congregational polity and unwilling to sacrifice any
of their ancient authority to a larger body. Bellows's work of negotiating
between Transcendentalist self-culture and the institutional requirements
of the modern religious sensibility was complex, and the understanding
with which he approached it was similarly complex. None of this
is smoothed over or simplified in Wright's account. To put it more
plainly, Wright's essay shows us that he learned from Bellows, not
merely about him.
The essay offers us a clear example
not only of Wright's passion for accuracy in the historical record,
but of his stance of humility before his subject. We might think
of this as a desire not to "make use" of history, but allow it
to mold us and refocus our concerns. Humility is, we must confess,
a virtue that has never been in great supply either among historians
or among Unitarians. Such humility before one's subject, a humility
that in the deepest sense is open to the experience of history
and its transformative possibilities, is an important lesson.
It accounts in large part for the impact of Conrad Wright's work,
and explains why it will endure.
I'd
like to share a small secret with you. But don't become too excited
at the prospect of the revelation of a transgression hidden deep
within some Wright family closet. It has to do with the professional
discipline that my father and I both pursue. 
