“Too Liberal for the Unitarians”: Henry Ward Beecher, Religious Liberalism, and Its Discontents

Brooklyn, New York, the self-styled “City of Churches,” was home to many of the nineteenth-century’s most famous religious figures, among them Charles McIlvane, George Washington Bethune, and former American Historical Association president Richard Salter Storrs. However, the most famous of Brooklyn’s celebrity clerics was undoubtedly Henry Ward Beecher, the minister of Plymouth Congregational Church and perhaps the most famous man in America during the nineteenth century.

               Beecher gained fame for his eloquent, fiery sermons and his advocacy of some of the most important liberal causes of the nineteenth-century. He was a committed opponent of slavery, believed in women’s suffrage and evolution, and was credited with helping to delay the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. As much as Beecher’s celebrity gave him authority, it also courted controversy, among critical observers both in Brooklyn as well as nationally. My proposed paper would examine how religious and moral leaders in Gilded Age America, including Beecher’s fellow Brooklyn religious leaders Storrs and Thomas DeWitt Talmage, reacted to Beecher’s brand of religious liberalism. My research demonstrates that Beecher’s outspoken liberalism inspired a new generation of religious activism—his rhetoric helped inspire the growth of the Social Gospel movement and Muscular Christianity—but it also provoked a fierce backlash among more conservative religious figures, including those in Brooklyn.

               In my proposed paper, I examine the intellectual discourse between Beecher and his conservative critics—in the form of sermons, correspondence and published writings by Beecher and others—to explore how religious liberalism developed in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though Beecher’s conception of Christianity proved to be nationally popular, doctrinal attacks by Beecher’s opponents and Beecher’s own dependence on his wealthy congregants limited the scope of Beecher’s intellectual and religious liberalism.