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Despite the Harvard setback, Congregationalists pushed on with their agenda of frontier evangelism and moral reform. Lyman Beecher, the most significant Congregational evangelist of the era, sought to convict New Englanders of their depravity and emphasized that Christian faith must find practical form in visible benevolent activity—a lesson obviously learned by his daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Yet while Beecher encouraged revival and missionary work, Congregationalists still faced a number of unresolved political issues. Massachusetts did not abolish its state-established church until 1833, so many Congregationalists and Unitarians still convened together in individual parishes during the early nineteenth century. Predictably, conflict abounded when these churches had to appoint a new minister. As conservative Congregationalists and liberal Unitarians fought bitterly over the parishes' theological direction, conservatives threatened to leave if a church hired a Harvard graduate.

But in 1820 conservatives suffered a seemingly major setback. Hearing the case of one such congregation in Dedham, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, led by Unitarian Chief Justice Isaac Parker, ruled that any group separating from the rest of the parish forfeited their rights to church property and recognition as an established church. Consequently, 3,900 Congregationalists from 81 churches left behind property valued at $600,000.

Despite holding a monopoly on church assets, as well as social and political influence throughout New England, the Unitarian cause entered a period of decline shortly after the Dedham decision, according to Earl M. Wilbur, author of Our Unitarian Heritage: An Introduction to the History of the Unitarian Movement.

"The consequence of all this was that they settled back complacently, and showed far less zeal in promoting their cause than did the orthodox, fondly believing that without any particular effort on their part Unitarianism would ere long sweep the whole country as it had already swept eastern Massachusetts … Perhaps the charge that hurt the Unitarians most, and had the most truth in it, was that whereas the orthodox were deeply in earnest about their religion, zealous, self-denying, and full of missionary spirit, the Unitarians were lukewarm, often indifferent to their church, lax in religious observances, and opposed to missions."

Whatever else we can conclude from the cautionary tale of the Unitarian Controversy, this much is clear: Nobody wins a schism. The church emerges from such splits with an increasingly fractured and diminished voice in the public square. Battered, too, is the ideal (probably unattainable, but no less worthy) of the "City on the Hill": a nation whose beacon is the church.

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October (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47