Reviews of Books

Histories of religion in America give little attention to Universalism. Yet in the 1830s some accounts credited Universalism with 500,000 adherents, tying it with Roman Catholicism as the nation's sixth leading denomination.1 The figure was greatly exaggerated, but it reflected a common impression that Universalism was the most rapidly growing of the new religious movements in the American republic. Spreading belief in universal salvation horrified some observers. Martha Ballard's neighbors on the Maine frontier explained a ghastly crime by noting that the murderer was unrestrained by fear of eternal torment.2 Revivalists of the Second Great Awakening regularly alarmed audiences by pointing to the rise of Universalism as one sign of escalating sinfulness. Some intellectual leaders hailed the movement as a democratic liberation. For Benjamin Rush and other adherents of the 1790s, Ann Lee Bressler observes, "Universalism expressed in religious terms the millennial promise of the democratic revolution." Half a century later, the Transcendentalist Theodore Parker praised Universalism for having "wrought a revolution in the thoughts and minds of men more mighty than any which has been accomplished . . . by all the politicians in the nation" (pp. 19, 51). Yet early Universalists were less favorable toward Parker's theology, which strayed too far from the Bible and Christian tradition. In Bressler's account, "a determined effort to 'improve' Calvinism" (p. 14), but not to reject it, lay at the heart of the early Universalist impulse.

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Bressler's The Universalist Movement in America provides welcome guidance through the complexities of this neglected movement. It is, however, a brief interpretation rather than a comprehensive history. On important and controversial points about the movement's origins and popular roots, it relies on Russell E. Miller's denominational history, The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America, 1770–1870 (Boston, 1979). In addition, Bressler's work has a strong New England focus. It passes quickly over the story of American Universalism's founding father, John Murray, who in 1770 brought the doctrine of "universal redemption" across the Atlantic. (A parishioner of George Whitefield in London, Murray had been converted to that doctrine by a preacher named James Relly, whose published work circulated in North America.) Within its New England compass, it takes a very different approach from recent articles by Peter Hughes and Stephen A. Marini as well as books by Marini, Randolph A. Roth, and John L. Brooke, that have begun to shed light on the emergence and spread of Universalism.3 Roth's and Marini's works are cited, to be sure, in depicting early Universalists as pious, family-oriented, egalitarian, and "eagerly literate people of relatively modest means" (p. 23). While recognizing Universalism as a "unique" movement of "common people," Bressler directs most of her analysis to "Universalist thinkers" (pp. 147, 134).

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