Left-Wing Unitarianism and the Humanist Controversy: Theology and Politics between the World Wars

Unitarians’ engagements with social issues such as slavery, civil rights and peace during the pre-Civil War era and in the recent past are common coin among historians, but less attention has been paid to these connections during the period between the twentieth century’s turn and the beginning of the 1960s.  In that era, how did Unitarianism’s un-theological theology and its decided openness to science foster, somewhat paradoxically, passionate and recognizably “religious” commitments to social movements?  In this paper, I will discuss the engagement of Unitarian thinkers in the debates over the possibility of a rational “godless religion” and the possible political implications of such a faith that agitated American liberal religious and philosophical circles in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the publication of and controversies over the “Humanist Manifesto” of 1933.  My principal focus will be on one of the main controversialists, the Chicago-based Curtis W. Reese:  Unitarian minister, secretary of the denomination’s notably progressive Western Conference, a longtime editor of the left-liberal journal Unity, and Dean of the Abraham Lincoln Centre, an institution that engaged in various forms of social outreach and activism, especially in connection with the city’s poor and African-American communities.  Reese called for a “radical” church that would address itself squarely to the “revolutionary” currents buffeting the contemporary world.  Because he was an influential figure who clearly connected theological radicalism with insurgent social and political ideas, Reese will prove an especially useful vehicle for examining the humanist controversy’s impact not only on the interwar Unitarian left and its opponents, but also on the future political trajectory of the denomination as it moved through the impending war and into the postwar years.