200th Anniversary of the American Unitarian Association

A dark blue circle with the words "American Unitarian Association" encircling the inside in dark blue text. The letters "AUA" are also visible, with the A's in dark blue and the U in gold with a gold-colored drawing of a flame rising above the letter. A gold banner stretches across the circle with the words "200 Years" in dark blue text.

May 25, 2025 is the 200th anniversary of the chartering of the American Unitarian Association (AUA), one of the founding organizations that makes up today’s Unitarian Universalist Association.

In 1961, the Universalist Church of America, founded in 1793, and the American Unitarian Association, founded in 1825, consolidated their organizations to become the Unitarian Universalist Association. Across the globe, our legacy reaches back centuries to liberal religious pioneers in England, Poland, and Transylvania.

Six years before the AUA was chartered, the Rev. William Ellery Channing turned the term “Unitarian,” until then used pejoratively by religious conservatives in New England, on its head. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” given at First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, MD in May of 1819, used the word to name a liberal faith that rejected the commanding trinitarian God of Calvinism in favor of an understanding of Jesus as human, not God, among many other radical and deeply influential ideas.

Channing’s foundational ideas strongly influenced early Unitarian practice and influential thinkers and writers in early American history, including author and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller. Fuller’s work in the Trancendentalist movement helped developed key concepts of individual rights and liberties which remain critically important to our understanding of civil liberties today.

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