Religion: A Church for Scientists

A man or woman with a scientific turn of mind, a desire to believe in God, and a distrust in Christian dogma may well find himself in the pew of a Unitarian or Universalist Church. Casting up membership totals at the first annual convention of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Washington last fortnight, President Dana McLean Greeley told 1,000 delegates that he thought their church (membership: 200,000) might double in size within the next decade. "We have thought of ourselves as a tiny denomination; but with adequate vision and will, in a quarter of a century we could become a denomination of at least 1,000,000 members," said Greeley.

Such expansion would be unprecedented in the proud history of the two small "liberal" churches that merged in Boston one year ago. The first U.S. Unitarians were Congregationalist and Episcopalian rebels; they rejected the divinity of Christ because the Trinity seemed incompatible with the idea of one God. In the 19th century, Unitarianism nurtured the flowering of New England. The Harvard Divinity School was virtually a seminary for the church until 1870. Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau and Hawthorne called themselves Unitarians. Since about 1930, Unitarianism has tended to divide into two uneasily yoked branches: one seeks to preserve the church's past links with Protestantism, and asserts the fatherhood of God, the leadership of Jesus, and the hopeful march of mankind toward salvation; the other, the "humanist" branch, favors an ethical faith even more compatible with the world view of science. The Universalists, less influential than the Unitarians, were founded around 1770 by dissident Calvinists who rejected the idea of eternal punishment for unrepentant sinners, taught that all mankind would ultimately be saved. They have remained closer to traditional Christianity.

Both churches avoid making creedal demands on their members, stressing right feeling rather than right belief. This intellectual open-door policy seems to appeal to the men of a new age of science. Many of the delegates in Washington were scientists, and both Harvard and M.I.T. are considered by Greeley to be "good soil" for producing converts. The Unitarian Church in Albuquerque is composed almost entirely of Atomic Energy Commission employees. In Schenectady, N.Y., 75% of the members of the city's Unitarian church are technicians on the General Electric payroll. Says Unitarian Greeley: "We have more than the average denomination's share of scientists. That is because we are consistent with the spirit of science. We are consistent with the ideal of change, the development of new truths, the freedom that allows progress."