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If it did happen it would have huge implications for Christianity within Unitarianism.
You might think an alliance of High Church and Liberal Anglicans is impossible, but don’t assume that Anglican churches that are traditional, in terms of ceremony and liturgy, are necessarily traditional/conservative in their theology. I live near an Anglican church that combines a High Church approach to worship with liberal interpretations of scripture and left wing politics. I heard one of its priests express support for Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism allegations, and later preach that the book of Revelation was a piece of dystopian fiction, inviting us to imagine possible futures. It may be that the traditional packaging actually makes it easier to give a non-traditional message.
It’s been received wisdom for a while that evangelicals in the C of E have the numbers, the youth, and, in some locations, much greater diversity. They also have more money and contribute more than others to the C of E overall. And yet, Theo Hobson suggests the C of E might get on all right without them.
My own guess is that a liberal C of E would decline faster without the evangelicals, but not so fast that it wouldn’t cause profound difficulties for Unitarian Christians. A non-evangelical C of E would still have substantial resources compared to many other denominations and a strong presence in all communities. Its growth would almost exclusively come from refugees from more conservative churches, but this would keep the ship afloat long enough to see off many struggling Unitarian congregations.
If this scenario plays out then Unitarians will be in the same religious marketplace as a vast, national church that is every bit as inclusive, and supports many of the same causes. This could spell disaster for Unitarian Christians.
Unitarian Christians are so badly exposed to the emergence of a large, liberal church, because Christianity within Unitarianism has all but eschewed its most distinctive beliefs (rejection of the Trinity) and become virtually indistinguishable from the liberal Christianity that is found in most mainline protestant denominations.
Many Liberal Christians aren’t bothered by the Trinity and use a liberalised version that is a million miles from the official and historic position of their churches. Whether Unitarian, C of E, Methodist or URC, they self-identify as Trinitarians, but don’t consider Jesus to be God. There again, many of them don’t think that God is God either, believing instead in a God that is to be found somewhere between panentheism, process theology, and postmodernism.
I might want to claim that this is a departure from Unitarian history, but I’d have to concede that the departure is hardly recent. It was James Martineau (1805-1900) who proposed that excluding Trinitarians from Unitarians was incompatible with a commitment to freedom, reason and tolerance. Furthermore, Martineau’s Free Christian movement eschewed creeds, seeking a union of Free Christians. Creedless Christians could not, therefore, insist on Unitarians being Non-Trinitarian. Or to put it another way, they could not insist on Unitarians being Unitarians.
Martineau himself was keen on the Trinity, though he recast its meaning in a rather baffling way that, like other liberal updates of the doctrine, does not seem remotely Trinitarian to me. He described the new Trinities being adopted by Unitarians as offering ‘the function of the Trinity without its paradoxes’. Whether he actually achieved that, and whether this really was the Trinity is a discussion for another post*, but this is the point at which Unitarianism’s key distinctive of nonTrinitarianism was left behind.
Apparently, it was a huge moment when the Unitarians of the 1970s admitted humanists. Unitarianism had long before ceased to be purely Christian, with the equally controversial accession of transcendentalists like Emerson and Parker, but it was still a mainly Christian denomination in its self understanding up until that point. But it wasn’t exclusively Christian and hadn’t been for a very long time. So, when the humanists were knocking at the door, it was no longer a question of whether Unitarianism should remain Christian but whether it should remain committed to the transcendent.
Looking back at the ever widening circle of Unitarianism I find myself wondering if the ditching of non-Trinitarianism in the nineteenth century, along with the rejection of creeds, opened the door to Transcendentalism. And opening the door to transcendentalism made it impossible to exclude any world religion or spiritual path. And so then, Unitarianism became post-Christian, and the Christians that remained followed the same theological trends as liberal Christians in the mainline churches, but without any restraint or counter argument from more conservative voices.
As liberal Christianity, in the twentieth century, turned to existentialism and then to ‘death of God’ theology and Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity, one might question whether God, or even the transcendent was still a prerequisite before the time that atheism sought recognition as a legitimate Unitarian path. So, I don’t think that the admission of humanists into Unitarianism really was such a turning point. I mean, weren’t the atheists already within the denomination by then, albeit thinly disguised?
The history of Unitarianism seems to be a series of dismantlements, each one setting the stage for the next one. The first great dismantlement, the one that seems to have set the wrecking ball in motion, was Martineau and the Free Christians’ abandonment of non-Trinitarian (Unitarian) Christianity back in the nineteenth century. Ditching Unitarianism and accepting the Trinity meant losing the denomination's bearings, and its identity and, I would argue, has had lasting, negative consequences.
Christians within Unitarianism may well regret the decision to admit into Unitarianism a worldview (humanism) that directly repudiates Christianity. But is that really where it all went wrong? It seems to me that Christianity within Unitarianism started to deconstruct itself to death long before that.
Which takes us back to the threat posed by a national church composed largely of liberal Christians. Our few Christian congregations have, over the years, been fed by a steady supply of liberal Christians who have decided they can no longer bear to be in a church with conservatives and evangelicals. What happens when these folk no longer have that reason to quit their church and join one of ours?
Why would a liberal Christian join a tiny Unitarian Christian chapel, when they could have the same theology in a bigger, better resourced, and more professional nationwide church? And actually, why would liberal Christians in Unitarianism not leave their chapels and join this new liberalised national church?
How might Unitarian chapels resist this? One answer, inevitably, will be to become overtly non-Christian, and so retain a distinctively different identity from the new competition.
But for Christian congregations, I would suggest the best thing they could do is to rediscover what it is that is distinctive about Unitarian Christianity - that it is being literally Unitarian.
We have a really substantial theological inheritance from back when we really were Unitarian, and there’s a lot more to it than anti-Trinitarianism.
At some point there will be a big generic liberal Christian church that we simply cannot compete with. If it’s not the C of E, it will come from one of the other mainline churches. It could be a breakaway or union from among them. However it comes about, it will happen. Going from being Unitarian Christians to being just liberal or free Christians may have seemed like a good idea to Martineau in the nineteenth century. But it’s not working for us now. And once there’s a big liberal church in our neighbourhood it will be the death of us. People, get ready!
Read Theo Hobson's article here
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-the-church-of-england-need-evangelicals/
* I haven't posted on Martineau's Trinitarian formula but for other discussion of why I believe liberal Christian are wrong to embrace the Trinity see the following:
https://unitarianchristianark.blogspot.com/2021/12/why-do-liberal-christians-persist-with.html
https://unitarianchristianark.blogspot.com/2022/07/bring-back-holy-spirit-not-trinity.html
https://unitarianchristianark.blogspot.com/2022/07/why-isnt-two-magic-number.html
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