Spiritual Unity, Social Progress: The National Federation of Religious Liberals and the Legacy of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions

What is the historical relationship between the pluralistic approach to religious differences made popular by the 1893 World’s Parliament at Chicago and the progressive reformism of pluralism’s American exponents? How did the commitment of religious liberals like the Unitarian minister Jenkin Lloyd Jones to interfaith dialogue intersect with their commitments to the peace movement, industrial reform, and social questions? How did advocates of religious pluralism reconcile their own specific religious beliefs with their wider commitment to accepting others’ differing beliefs as equally valid? And how did ecumenical efforts to treat social questions within national boundaries relate to international efforts to unite “world religions” on social issues around the world?           

This paper will examine the efforts of Rev. Jones and other leaders in the National Federation of Religious Liberals to bring together practitioners from across the American religious spectrum—Quakers, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans as well as Ethical Culturalists, Reform Jews, and Unitarians—in the service of a common social cause. What Jones and others called a “religion of democracy” provided these liberals a way of claiming a unity of human rights and human potential underlying their differences, which linked their ecumenical work to their work in reform. At the same time, Jones and others viewed their work in the United States as only a preliminary step toward a much more ambitious international goal of uniting the world’s religions for the cause of international social justice.           

Exploring the intersection of religious pluralism and progressive reform, this paper draws on existing historiography disproving the secularization thesis and building the picture of “cosmopolitanism” in liberal religion to argue that while there was much more to American liberal religion than the Protestant mainstream, there was also much more to reform than secular criticisms of modern industrialism and its discontents.