William Ellery Channing

American religious leader

• Born: April 7, 1780
• Birthplace: Newport, Rhode Island
• Died: October 2, 1842
• Place of death: Bennington, Vermont

Channing led the attack by Protestant clergy on New England Congregationalism and helped found the Unitarian movement that established the basis for modern liberal Christianity.

Early Life

William Ellery Channing was born in British-occupied Newport toward the end of the Revolutionary War, one of ten children of William and Lucy (née Ellery) Channing. Young Channing was the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence on the paternal side, and of perhaps the richest merchant in Newport on the maternal side. The boy attended school in Newport until the age of twelve, at which point he was sent to New London, Connecticut, to prepare for Harvard. He began his collegiate studies at Harvard in 1794 and spent four happy years there. During his Harvard years, young Channing had an adolescent religious experience, and the event persuaded him to seek a career in the clergy. He was a popular student, and at the end of his stay at Harvard, the class of 1798 elected him as their graduating speaker.

Upon graduation, Channing went south to Richmond, Virginia, to take a post as a tutor to the socially prominent Randolph family. The young New Englander felt ill at ease in Richmond’s heady atmosphere of dancing, drinking, and Deism, and for the most part he shunned society and read books. Alone in his study, Channing again had a conversion experience, and his letters of 1800 demonstrate the intensity of his encounter and his belief that faith alone provided the basis of Christian belief. He returned to Newport in 1800 and struck up a friendship with the local minister, Samuel Hopkins, who had once been a follower of the great Jonathan Edwards. Hopkins had shed some of his earlier adherence to the rigid Calvinist notions of predestination, and in turn his thinking influenced Channing. In December, 1801, Channing returned to Harvard as a divinity student, and upon his ordination in 1803, he was called to the ministry of the well-to-do Federal Street Church in Boston, a post he held until his death four decades later.

Channing postponed marriage until 1814, when he wed his cousin Ruth Gibbs. The couple had four children over the next six years, but only two survived infancy. Channing himself suffered from ill health throughout his adult life. He was a small man, only five feet tall, and weighed little more than a hundred pounds. Portraits painted of him each decade after his coming to Federal Street show a once handsome man with a face growing ever thinner and more pinched. However, if his frame was unprepossessing, his voice more than made up for any deficiency in stature. By all accounts, Channing was one of the finest religious speakers in nineteenth century America.

Life’s Work

William Ellery Channing’s name has come down in history in connection with the famous “Unitarian Controversy” in early nineteenth century New England. Few of his contemporaries at divinity school might have predicted that the quiet, intense Channing would someday lead a revolt of rationalist Christians against the remnants of the Congregational church established by the Puritans during the 1630’s. The controversy first became public in 1805 when Harvard appointed a known Unitarian, Henry Ware, to a chair in theology. The name “Unitarian” implied a host of beliefs at the time, not simply the contention that the deity was single and unfragmented, as opposed to the more traditional “Trinitarian” concept of God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Many clergymen opposed to Ware publicly protested the appointment, and after failing to get Ware dismissed, the recalcitrants in 1809 established their own rival school of theology at Andover.

The years between 1805 and 1820 saw bitter intellectual and personal struggles between the Harvard and Andover wings of New England Congregationalism. The vituperation of the controversy seems out of proportion to the actual differences between the two camps, but it is worth remembering that the split came at a time of general religious fervor in the nation, a period known as the Second Great Awakening , and a time when toleration was difficult to practice.

Beyond the nominal difference between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism over the nature of God, Unitarians differed from traditional New England Calvinists in disputing the total depravity of humankind. Men such as Channing believed that human beings were a mixture of good and bad and that part of the clergy’s job was to encourage the former and discourage the latter. Unitarians also had doubts about the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, or the notion that God had already determined the fate of all human beings and that mortal actions on earth could have no influence on the divine. Moreover, Channing and other Unitarians refused to believe the old Congregationalist doctrine that humankind on earth could be divided into the “elect” (those who knew their salvation) and all the rest. Unitarians, under Channing’s leadership, came to believe that salvation was within all people’s power but that people needed careful religious instruction in order to avoid the many falsehoods and errors inherent in the various denominations of Christianity.

Channing kept a low profile during the most heated years of the Unitarian Controversy, between 1809 and 1815. He emerged as a Unitarian leader only in 1819 with a deliberately crafted public address that served as a counterblast to the Andover wing. Indeed, his address was so compelling and succinct that the split in Congregationalism became permanent. After Channing’s 1819 “Baltimore Sermon,” Unitarianism and Trinitarian Congregationalism went their separate ways.

The location for his grand theological pronouncement was a bit unusual. Instead of Boston, Channing chose the southern city of Baltimore as the setting, and the ordination of a Harvard-trained minister named Jared Sparks as the occasion. Sparks had been called to the pulpit of the newly established First Independent Church of Baltimore, an outpost as far south as any that Unitarianism had established.

Channing took as his text for his Baltimore Sermon a verse from 1 Thessalonians: “Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good.” The audience was filled with a host of Unitarian ministers, and Channing sought to summarize for them his belief that rationalism should be the core of Unitarian religious practice. He told the ordination assembly that as Christians they needed to affirm that the Bible was, in part, God’s revelation to humankind but also, in part, humankind’s imperfect attempt to understand God. Channing emphasized that the Old Testament was full of errors and superstitions and that Christians should concentrate on the teachings of Jesus. The job of the Unitarian minister, he went on, was to separate the divine in the Bible from the mundane by use of reason and scholarship, all for the benefit of the congregation. This required a sound education in many fields for the would-be clergyman, from knowledge of the ancient languages to a familiarity with modern science. More than any other Unitarian leader, Channing sought to push the clergy into seeing its role as primarily one of scholar-teacher.

Channing also used the occasion of Sparks’s ordination in Baltimore to pull together the separately articulated but as yet uncollected strands of Unitarian doctrine. He insisted that the notion of a Trinity was a logical absurdity and maintained as well that the doctrine of Original Sin mocked God by ascribing base motives to him such as jealousy and rage. From these two assumptions, Channing went on to reason that the purpose of Christ was to perform an errand for the superior God by sending a message that humankind was forgiven its sins. Moreover, Channing proposed that Christ had only partly completed his mission, which, fully understood, involved transforming humankind into a species marked by complete love and goodness.

The Baltimore Sermon of 1819 circulated widely in print and made its author famous on both sides of the Atlantic. During the early 1820’s, Channing and his family journeyed to England and the Continent, where he was received by many leading intellectuals, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He continued to speak out forcefully against the Trinitarian Congregationalists (many of whom called him an infidel), and in 1825, he helped establish the American Unitarian Association, thereby officially ratifying the schism in the Church that John Winthrop and John Cotton had created in 1630.

Though honored as a leader while still a comparatively young man, Channing had a less than happy tenure at Federal Street Church in the years after 1819, particularly in his last decade. He faced two great challenges, one moral and one intellectual, that troubled him until his death. The first was the problem of slavery in America. Channing knew of southern slavery from his Richmond days, but a visit to the West Indian island of St. Croix in 1831 upset him deeply. He saw directly the hard lot of black slaves on the sugar plantations, and he returned to Boston just as the abolitionist movement began organizing in that city.

American abolitionism during the 1830’s was highly unpopular, in large part because its backers were thought to favor interracial marriage. Boston and other cities were wracked by antiabolitionist mob violence, and while Channing condemned the mob, he also earned the scorn of the abolitionists for not wholeheartedly endorsing their cause. Only in his “Duty of the Free States,” written in 1842 just before his death, did he come to see slavery as a manifestation of evil so great that forceful means would be required to overcome it. Until that time, Channing had hoped that Christian appeals to the conscience of the southern slaveholder would work to end the institution without violence.

The other great challenge to Channing and the new Unitarian Association was from within: the intellectual challenge of the Transcendentalists. The sources of Transcendentalism are complex, found partly in European Romanticism, partly in the reflected enthusiasm of Jacksonian America, but in any event, its notions of the primacy of sensation, intuition, and nature posed a direct challenge to the rationalist approach to Christianity. Channing died in October, 1842—before his former student Ralph Waldo Emerson would call Boston Unitarianism “corpse-cold”—but even by 1842, Channing could see that Unitarianism was not satisfying the spiritual needs of many its adherents.

Significance

By devising a rational Christianity still reliant on faith, Channing reached an optimistic end similar to that proposed by a contemporary New England “Universalist” preacher named Hosea Ballou, who interpreted the Crucifixion as the sign that all sinners everywhere and forever had been pardoned in advance and that salvation would be “universal.” In their own ways, the rationalist Channing and the Universalist Ballou built the basis for an American liberal Christianity that offered hope without resorting to threats of hellfire and brimstone. Indeed, after the Civil War, Unitarians and Universalists saw their common interests and, after many fits and starts, eventually effected a merger in the twentieth century.

Channing also took liberal Christianity in the direction of social reform. His stress on the goodness of humanity and the possibility of moral instruction got him involved in many of the reform movements of Jacksonian America. He was an active temperance enthusiast, supported the emerging antiwar movement, and advocated an extensive system of public education. Channing communicated many of these concerns to the public, first in sermons at Federal Street and then in pamphlets written for a wider audience.

At the same time, Channing served as mentor to many of the young writers and thinkers in Boston, men such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Robert Lowell. Channing’s 1830 pamphlet Remarks on American Literature was a direct call for American writers to create a new, national, and republican literature that was divorced from the monarchical and antidemocratic British literature then in fashion. The call was taken up in the great flowering of New England culture in the last decades before the Civil War. Like any good teacher, then, Channing should be remembered as much for the students he helped tutor as for the ideas he advanced himself.

Bibliography

Channing, William Ellery. The Works of William E. Channing. 6 vols. Boston: J. Munroe, 1848. The chief virtue of Channing’s papers is that they allow one to gauge the breadth of his interests. Here is a clergyman involved in an extraordinary range of religious and secular matters.

Delbanco, Andrew. William Ellery Channing: An Essay on the Liberal Spirit in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. This work is concerned mostly with placing Channing in the context of American thought during the early nineteenth century. Especially good at discussing the intellectual origins of Unitarianism as a reaction against Calvinism.

Edgell, David D. William Ellery Channing: An Intellectual Portrait. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. The first modern biography of Channing. Seeks to understand him as the synthesizer of rational Christianity.

Mendelsohn, Jack. Channing the Reluctant Radical: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Mendelsohn gives considerable detail about Channing’s personal and family life. A sympathetic account of liberal Christianity then and now.

Robinson, David. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Strong on the Unitarian Controversy and its aftermath, this work also considers Channing’s response to the Transcendentalist challenge.

Toulouse, Teresa. The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. A scholarly study of sermons by Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Cotton, and other New England preachers.

Wright, Conrad, ed. A Stream of Light. Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1975. A series of essays commemorating the establishment of an official Unitarian church. The chapter by Charles Forman is helpful in giving Channing’s place in the Unitarian Controversy.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson, Parker. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. This handy volume contains Channing’s Baltimore Sermon, as well as a helpful introduction to American Unitarianism.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Unitarian Controversy: Essays on American Unitarian History. Boston: Skinner House Books, 1994. Essays on the controversy by a leading Unitarian scholar. One essay is entitled “The Channing We Didn’t Know.”