From Unitarian Roots to Multifaith Vision: Four Historical Highlights Between HDS and Unitarian Universalism
As the American Unitarian Association marks its 200th anniversary, a look at the deep and evolving ties between Unitarian Universalism and Harvard Divinity School.
Since its founding in 1816, Harvard Divinity School (HDS) has been closely intertwined and shaped by many of the same figures, ideas, and commitments that defined the early Unitarian movement in the United States.
In April 2026, the Harvard Divinity School Library hosted a panel discussion marking the 200th anniversary of the American Unitarian Association (AUA), one of the founding organizations that shaped the Unitarian Universalist Association today, bringing together faculty, students, and staff to reflect on this history.
From their Unitarian origins to their present-day multifaith identities, HDS and Unitarian Universalism (UU) have developed in parallel—what Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, describes as a “sibling relationship that has taken new form in every generation.”
Liberal Religion and the Founding of HDS
In the early nineteenth century, liberal religious thought was already gaining influence at Harvard. The 1805 election of Henry Ware Sr., a minister in the tradition that would soon be known as Unitarianism, signaled a shift toward a more open and less doctrinal approach to theology. That shift deepened in 1810, when John Thornton Kirkland—who preached a nondogmatic, ethical religion—became president of Harvard University.
In 1816, HDS was established as the first non-denominational divinity school in the United States. Though the new school was formally committed to free inquiry, it was shaped in its early years by Unitarian leadership, funding, and students preparing for ministry. As McKanan notes, the founders shared a commitment to a “learned ministry,” grounded in deep intellectual training and open to change over time.
Even as it took shape, HDS existed in a creative tension between nonsectarian ideals and Unitarian influence. The School was never under direct denominational control, and many of its founders—most notably William Ellery Channing—were ambivalent about formal denominational structures and committed to a broader vision of religious inquiry.
Interior of Divinity Hall Chapel / Photo: Tony Rinaldo
Challenging Tradition and Expanding Possibility
In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his Divinity School Address in Divinity Hall, often seen as a turning point in both Unitarianism and the history of HDS. His critique of “historical Christianity” challenged the tradition and, over time, helped reshape approaches to theological education. As Emerson argued in the address, “The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul.”
According to McKanan, Emerson’s ideas also clarified that a divinity school need not prepare students for a single professional path—a vision that continues to shape the wide range of vocations HDS students pursue today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1857 (daguerreotype, Southworth & Hawes)
Broadening the School’s Religious Landscape
In the years following the Civil War, HDS began to expand in new directions. Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows reorganized the denomination and led the School’s first major capital campaign, an effort that had lasting institutional impact.
As McKanan explains, the campaign helped make HDS more pluralistic by funding new professorial chairs held by scholars trained in other traditions, including a Southern Baptist seminary. Their work, in turn, contributed to the expansion of Jewish studies at Harvard, signaling a broader shift in the School’s intellectual and religious scope.
By the turn of the twentieth century, HDS continued to broaden its reach. Charles Eliot’s long tenure as Harvard president coincided with his son Samuel Atkins Eliot II’s leadership of the American Unitarian Association. Though both were deeply rooted in Unitarianism, they also sought to bridge divisions with other Protestant traditions.
Their efforts helped lead to the construction of Andover Hall (now Swartz Hall) in 1911 and to an increase in mainline Protestant students at HDS, further diversifying the School’s community.
Ven. Mahayaye Vineetha, a Buddhist monk (right), and Sadhak Vandan, a visiting Hindu monastic (left), talk outside of the newly renovated Swartz Hall. / Photo by Kris Snibbe
A Shared History, A Multifaith Present
In 1967, the Harvard Divinity School Library became the official archive for the archives of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and Beacon Press. This development reflected the enduring institutional connection between HDS and Unitarian Universalism. Today, the Library’s collections continue to draw scholars from around the world, making HDS a central site for the study of Unitarian Universalism.
According to McKanan, “both HDS and Unitarian Universalism embraced a multifaith identity around the turn of the twenty-first century,” a shift that continues to shape both institutions today. Just as HDS prepares students for scholarship and leadership across religious traditions, many UU congregations include Buddhists, pagans, Jews, humanists, and liberal Christians alongside one another.
When McKanan was named the inaugural Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Chair of Divinity in 2008, the appointment reflected the ongoing relationship between the School and the UU tradition. The “sibling relationship” between HDS and Unitarian Universalism, he says, continues to take new forms in every generation.
Portrait of Dan McKanan by Evgenia Eliseeva
Banner photo by Kristie Welsh
[AUDIO LOGO]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: HDS & the American Unitarian Association. April 9, 2026.
SOFIA BETANCOURT: I am the Reverend Dr. Sophia Betancourt. It is my privilege to serve as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. And I really want to offer my thanks to Harvard Divinity School for hosting us. I know that our joint institutions have been in partnership for a very long time, and in a time when we're celebrating our history, it makes really good sense for us to do so here. And we are grateful for the ways that we maintain those connections.
And it is my job just to introduce you to our panelists this afternoon. Briefly, since I see that there are some folks who have joined us, we are spending the next few days doing a deep dive into especially Unitarian history as we're marking the end of our 200th year, depending on how you count, as the American Unitarian Association, which is, of course, part of the current UUA.
So this panel is about creating new things, which is very exciting. And I'm going to introduce our folks from the farthest end back to me. Come on in. Welcome. Welcome.
So we have the Reverend Aisha Ansano, who I would be remiss if I did not lift and celebrate that Reverend Aisha is one of our two new co-directors of our new communities program, which is really seeking-- that is worth applauding.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you. Which is encouraging the entrepreneurial ministries that support, especially our folks that often least get support and services in ministry, both in Unitarian Universalism but also in the world and helping our religious professionals of a wide range, I think, who are called to that work to really establish those communities and support them well. So I am delighted that you have newly joined the staff of the UUA. Welcome, Reverend Aisha.
But I should also tell you that the Reverend Aisha Ansano believes that gathering at the table is one of the best ways to strengthen community and work for justice. She serves as co-minister of Nourish UU-- I hope some of you have had experience with this program, I have-- which feeds Unitarian Universalists in body and spirit-- please come in-- through embodied worship experiences. Reverend Aisha is also co-director, as I just said, for our new UU communities at the UUA, supporting innovation within our faith.
Since 2021, she has journeyed alongside the UU students here at HDS as a denominational counselor, providing vocational and pastoral support. And she lives in Malden, Massachusetts with her partner, their enthusiastic black lab bramble, who I want to see pictures of, and an ever in progress garden. Welcome, Aisha. I'm so glad that you're with us today.
I also wanted to introduce in the middle, Terry Dixon, who is a third year MDiv candidate here at HDS and also a candidate for Unitarian Universalist Ministry. He is currently serving as an intern minister at UU Wellesley Hills and First Parish in Framingham.
Terry grew up in Dublin in Ireland, but also lived for many years in New York City and the Philadelphia area. And before feeling a call to ministry, he was an intellectual property lawyer for 30 years. He has two adult daughters, India and Lizzie, of whom he is immensely proud.
And last but not least is Dr. Dan McKanan, who is the Emerson senior lecturer here at HDS, where he has taught since 2008. Dan works closely with seminarians at Harvard and emerging UU scholars around the world-- I benefited from that work, thank you-- and researches the role of religious movements in promoting social justice, ecological harmony, and intentional community.
Will you join me, please, in celebrating our panelists.
[APPLAUSE]
DAN MCKANAN: Thank you so much, Sofia. Thank you for making the connection to make this happen. Thank you to all of you who've worked hard to organize this event and for your thoughtfulness in fully including our Harvard Divinity School community in celebrating this bicentennial.
As a member of the faculty, I am delighted to welcome you into our space here in the Carter room, which some of as the Sperry room. And we have not forgotten Dean Sperry. He still looks over us as we celebrate the new things that have come about in recent years, as generous donors have equipped us for the work ahead.
Before I start talking about the American Unitarian Association, I'd also just like to mention that I spent yesterday here in-- as part of the Divinity School's kind of founding conference of our Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is charged with building on the work of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report, and also digging into stories of Harvard's history of complicity in colonization, to tell honest stories that will enable building relationships, and sharing resources in a more just way in the future.
This is not an easy time to engage in the work of telling truths. And we've been blessed at the Divinity School that our leadership has supported that work. And we have been doubly blessed that so many Unitarian Universalist congregations and organizations that have overlapping histories with the Divinity School are also working hard to tell hard truths in ways that create new opportunities for real relationship. So thank you to all of you who've been part of that work in one way or another.
The American Unitarian Association, founded 200 years ago. The story of that association is a story of congregations. Now, many of you are probably immediately thinking, oh, but that is not an association of congregations. And that is true. Unlike the UUA, the American Unitarian association, when it was founded, was an association of individuals, both ministers and committed laypeople.
But what those individuals were committed to was the work of supporting congregations, especially new congregations beyond the New England heartland. The founding of the AUA coincided with the first great wave of specifically Unitarian congregation creation, and thus part of its legacy for us is inspiring ongoing waves of bringing new communities into being.
In addition to that, the AUA brought together four distinct clusters of congregations, each with its own culture. And I'm going to say a little bit about each of those clusters and then a word about the new things that came about because they came together.
The first cluster are what I call the Brahmins. Funny word Brahmins. I won't go into its etymology. But the Brahmins are wealthy congregations in Boston and seaport towns, like Salem and Newburyport. They are one of the topics of my current research. So I've been thinking a lot about them.
They include King's Chapel, the first congregation in North America to declare itself theologically Unitarian. They include Federal Street, where William Ellery Channing was minister. And they include a few congregations that were very prominent 200 years ago but no longer exist, such as Brattle Street Church and New South Church.
Compared to the congregations in rural Massachusetts, the Brahmin churches had a mixed religious pedigree. Most of their members were descended both from the Puritans who'd arrived in the 17th century and from Anglican merchants who came in the 18th. Most of these congregations began their journey towards theological liberalism early in the 18th century.
When the First Great Awakening broke out, these were the congregations that strongly opposed, for better or for worse, the fervent emotions and anti-authoritarianism of the revivalists. These congregations did not actually follow the polity of the Cambridge platform that those of you who are ministers learned about in your polity classes. Which is to say, they did not have this balanced mix of church and parish.
Power in the Brahmin congregations, was concentrated in the wealthy people who owned the pews. And these are the congregations that have some of the most difficult stories of deep-- well, I was going to say complicity, but as Gloria remembers from the event yesterday, our colleague Kelly Brown Douglass, speaking about the Episcopal story, is sometimes we have to name the ancestors who were not complicit in past oppressions, but instigators and leaders of past oppressions. These are the congregations that were very closely identified with Harvard and other cultural and scientific institutions, such as the Boston Athenaeum and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Some key leaders of the AUA were associated with Brahmin congregations, such as Ezra Stiles Gannett of Federal Street Church. But these congregations wealthiest members did not necessarily donate to the AUA. And when they did donate, the dollar amounts were much, much smaller than what they were giving to Bostonian cultural and scientific organizations.
Second cluster. These are often the ones we might think about as the Unitarian roots. Congregations in rural and suburban Massachusetts, as well as Maine and New Hampshire. They're often referred to as standing order congregations because of their participation in Massachusetts distinctive form of religious establishment.
While European religious establishments operated on the national level, the standing order worked town by town. Meeting houses doubled as town halls. Property taxes were what paid for ministerial salaries, and ministers were chosen by a double vote. First, the full church members, then-- the first full church members who were the people who experienced a proper Puritan conversion, and then after they selected the minister, the taxpaying parish had to concur.
For these congregations, the first two decades of the 19th century were a time of intense conflict. Should they identify with the liberal theology being taught at Harvard and preached in the Brahmin churches, or should they stick to their Puritan roots?
Typically, the conflict came to a head when there was a ministerial transition. Rival factions put forward rival candidates. Sometimes, as in Dedham and here in Cambridge, the parish chose a Unitarian and the church chose a Trinitarian, and they split right down the middle. Sometimes, church and parish concurred one way or the other, but a disgruntled minority separated anyhow.
The towns that emerged with strong Unitarian congregations were often those that had received funding from the confusingly named Evangelical Mission Society, which was something of a precursor to the AUA. These also tended to be very education-minded towns. Lancaster, Massachusetts is a great example. It had received funding from the Evangelical Mission Society.
It had a vigorous village academy founded by Dorcas Cleaveland, a Salem sea captain's wife, who read the latest educational theories and wrote tracts for the AUA. Several people who would later be prominent transcendentalists, people like Elizabeth Peabody, actually got their start in Lancaster, not Concord.
And the other big struggle for these congregations in the early decades of the AUA was learning to live without that tax support, as the standing order structure broke down within a decade of the creation of the AUA.
Third cluster are the Priestlians. Joseph Priestley, one of the founders of the Unitarian movement in England, a significant scientist and strong supporter of the US revolution, migrated to Pennsylvania around the time of the revolution and began forming congregations. These congregations had a very different culture than either of the Massachusetts clusters. They held the more radical Socinian version of Unitarian theology and were highly critical of the religious establishments that the standing order churches enjoyed.
While the New Englanders generally voted Federalist, Priestley was a good friend of Thomas Jefferson and strongly supported Jefferson's party. So they represent a real different culture, embodied institutionally at Meadville seminary. It was a big risk for the Brahmin and standing order congregations to make common cause with these people. Just a decade before, the Jeffersonians had waged a war with England that devastated the New England economy. Yet somehow, people on both sides of that political divide decided that the free and responsible search for truth and meaning was something that they could do together.
The final cluster consists of congregations founded by transplanted New Englanders and like-minded religious liberals in other parts of the young nation. Some of these congregations were founded just before the AUA, notably those in New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. Others were started just after, with vigorous support from the AUA in Rochester and Buffalo, New York, Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and eventually San Francisco. These remain some of the most vigorous congregations in our movement, and we have the AUA to thank for that.
We should not imagine, though, that the AUA was trying to create a truly national denomination appealing to people of all walks of life, would that it were so. These were congregations for relatively wealthy, relatively well-educated institution builders, for people who aspire to give the new cities of the frontier the same institutional culture found in Boston.
The people who founded Unitarian congregations also often founded universities and other civic organizations. It's noteworthy that three of the four Unitarian presidents of the United States were closely associated with this cohort of congregations. John Quincy Adams with what's now All Souls in Washington, DC, Millard Fillmore with the Buffalo congregation, and William Howard Taft, whose father was a founder of the Cincinnati congregation. So the idea that religious liberalism goes hand in hand with social and cultural and political power was part of the vision of those AUA-inspired churches.
So what do these four clusters of congregations achieve when they come together? What they achieved, though I don't think it would have been fully visible to them immediately, was the possibility of what I call a prophetic establishment. Like the churches of the Massachusetts standing order, all the congregations of the new AUA had a sense of responsibility for the social order as a whole, and not merely for the spiritual lives of their members.
But they no longer were an establishment. They no longer were tied to the conservative forces of society, which meant that, step by small step, over many generations, Unitarian congregations achieved a critical but not irresponsible distance from sources of social power, enabling our movement to do the prophetic work that is so desperately needed in our society today. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
TERRY DIXON: Good afternoon.
AUDIENCE: Good afternoon.
TERRY DIXON: Yes, my name is Terry Dixon, and I am a student here, a third year MDiv student at HDS. Yes, and this idea of creating new things I think is very appropriate. I feel that I'm a new thing that's being created despite the gray hair and everything else.
Because yes, I'm obviously here at Harvard. I am a candidate for Ministry. I am looking forward to becoming a minister, I hope, if the MFC sees so fit when the time comes. Yeah, and I very much see myself in this model of-- well, sort of Luke 10 lawyer, one of those that was-- the one that was asking the awkward questions of Jesus that led to the story of the Good Samaritan, and then hopefully the lawyer waking up and realizing that he ought to do something different. So hopefully that's the model I will be able to follow.
So I want to talk about two things. First of all, what brought me here to HDS and why I've-- why I chose to be here and what I've got out of it as a Unitarian Universalist, but also then some of the research that I've done, particularly on the early years of the AUA and its financing, and as I'll get to, I think I find most important, the critical role that women played in that early funding of the AUA, without which I think it's pretty clear the AUA would not have-- certainly would not have been what it became. I think probably would have failed in its early years if it hadn't been for that funding that women provided.
So in the first, yes, I was sort of looking obviously at different divinity schools and theology, the various different seminaries. What brought me here, I think, was very much the very intentional and meaningful pluralism at HDS, and this opportunity to interact and learn from a broad range of students from all over the world and from a very diverse range of theologies and wisdom traditions. And I've certainly got to enjoy that.
Also, of course, the breadth and rigor of the academics and scholarship at Harvard, both obviously at HDS, but more broadly, but also the opportunity to take specific Unitarian Universalist courses with U history with Dan, U polity with Reverend Dr. Stephanie May, U faith development with Gail Forsyth-Vail and Kathy Segal, and preaching in the liberal tradition with Reverend Clair Feingold Thorne. So having the opportunity to have the breadth of the academics and scholarship, but also get to do specific UU coursework has been great.
Obviously, having Reverend Aisha as well as denominational counselor, and also HUUMS, the Harvard Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Students, which I'm honored to lead this year. But also very particularly the HDS Library and in fact, the whole Harvard library system and the important role it has, as I think many of you know, as the designated archive for the UUA and also for so many of our congregations. There's a richness of materials here in the library and the archives that are just unmatched, and particularly for Unitarian Universalism.
But the thing that finally sealed it for me. I was a unadmitted student trying to decide where to go, and I went over to the Divinity Hall and went into the Chapel. And I went up to the pulpit in this holy space as I saw it. And right there on the pulpit was a copy of Emerson's Divinity School Address, just sitting there. And I was like, OK, yes, Waldo, take me. Take me now.
[LAUGHTER]
So I ended up here at HDS. And I say, I've thoroughly enjoyed my time here. And it has given me the opportunity to do a fair amount of scholarship of my own in the Unitarian Universalist history and policy field.
I did a biography of Charles Follen, who you may was a Unitarian minister and a very early abolitionist, also the first professor of German here at Harvard, and the designer and first minister of what is now known as the Follen Church in East Lexington, and a very interesting person in terms of his background in Germany and as a student revolutionary, an advocate, for example, of assassination as a political weapon.
He changed his view somewhat here. But also the history of his relationship with Harvard, how he was, shall we say, eased out by the administration. Harvard doesn't fire people. You just get eased out.
[LAUGHTER]
And so anyway, that's one piece I worked on. I also did some work on the early history of UU Wellesley Hills, which is the church I'm honored to-- one of the churches I'm honored to serve at the moment as an intern minister, and in particular, exploring its role in the exploitation of Indigenous people.
Wellesley Hills was not formed until after the Civil War. But the early financing, particularly the financing of some of the early church buildings in the 1870s and 1880s, very much relied on money from HH Hunnewell, who you may know was a very prominent philanthropist in the Wellesley area. Not a member of the Wellesley Hills, but was a member of Arlington Street, after whom the chapel there is named, but also was a railroad baron, very much involved in railroad enterprises and various forms of extractive capitalism in the Midwest, and had quite a lengthy history of exploiting Indigenous people in various ways. So I've done some work on exploring some of that history for that congregation.
I'm also working, hopefully finalizing soon, my MDiv thesis, which is exploring models of greater co-leadership and collaborative leadership amongst religious professionals in UU congregations. Trying to look at how the current leadership models perpetuate paradigms of patriarchy and white supremacy, and how maybe these alternative leadership models, which are certainly being worked with, as you probably know, in various places within our faith, may be able to help deconstruct some of those paradigms and make Unitarian Universalism more inclusive and relevant faith as we move forward.
And then most relevant for today, I did write a piece on the founding, as I say, of an early history of the AUA from about 1825 to 1833, so those very early years, and particularly looking at how the organizational structures of AUA were linked clearly very much with how it raised its funds and how the issues with the structural issues and the organization and the fundraising efforts and how they succeed or didn't were intimately linked.
And for all of this work, I'd very much like to thank the staff here at the HDS Library, particularly Gloria Korsman and Alex Buchan and others for all the assistance they gave me in all those projects.
Yeah, so I mean, I think as Dan was saying, that you can see in some ways the AUA as an expressly, more expressly denominational and overtly Unitarian version of some of these earlier tract and missionary and related organizations that liberal Christians had been involved in before the founding of the AUA.
And there were certainly multiple factors going into the founding of the AUA, obviously, in 1825, in particular those relating to the Unitarian controversy. But one of the clearly the concerns that were being raised at the time was this issue, that money that might have otherwise gone to more Unitarian purposes was being contributed to these other organizations, which were not necessarily Unitarian, were more Orthodox.
As the first annual report said, that the people were having money thrown into the treasuries of other denominations of Christians from the want of some proper objects among ourselves on which they could be bestowed.
[LAUGHTER]
And certainly Ezra Stiles Gannett raised the same concerns that the people were putting money into these organizations and these societies which were not necessarily certainly-- well, he said, there was an opportunity here to diffuse our own views through an association, which we might address the greater truths of religion to our fellow man without the adulteration of erroneous dogmas. And that was clearly the way it was.
So money was clearly always been an important part. There were certainly at the time a number of factors that were hampering both the organizational and financial success in those early days. And I might suggest some of them may have some resonance even today.
First of all, as Dan said, it was structured as an association of individual members rather than congregations, and its basic funding model matched that, which was that it relied primarily on membership fees and donations from those individuals. And also, the churches did guard their congregational polity carefully, and they were certainly not necessarily wanting to put funds into a denominational entity when they could put it into the congregations. I'm assume that doesn't apply today.
[LAUGHTER]
But also, there was also a lot of caution amongst Unitarians, particularly older Unitarians at the time, about some of the sectarian implications of establishing a denominational organization, particularly one with the word Unitarian in its title. There was certainly at that time, at least some-- there was concern about sectarianism generally, and also some of the more prominent liberal Christians thought it might be possible to avoid a complete split from the congregationalists, and that it might be possible to have, as they put it, a sect without sectarianism. So that was also a caution as to why they weren't necessarily completely on board with the AUA in those early years.
And there were also generational differences. Again, say some of the older leaders were less in favor. It was some of the Young Turks, the likes of Henry Ware Jr. and James Walker, John Gorham Palfrey, and Ezra Stiles Gannett, who were more enthusiastic about setting up something that was specifically denominational.
So if we turn to the funding, the AUA stated in its first constitution that membership required a contribution of either at least $1 a year or alternatively, $30 for a life membership. Not quite sure how the math there works out, whether it's-- but I don't-- I think the idea was more that they wanted people to donate a larger amount of money, not necessarily because it was better value for money, as it were, for 30 years, depending on how old you were.
But they also, the AUA, also sought some additional donations and special collections in various ways. But those initial membership subscriptions and donations were certainly lackluster. As William Channing Gannett, who was the son of Ezra Stiles Gannett, put it later, in something of an understatement, funds did not overflow the treasury.
[LAUGHTER]
Again, not something I'm sure we have to worry about today. In fact, from May to December, the first few months of 1825, the association generated less than $850 in memberships and donations. And even in those first few years, the annual memberships and donation revenue range from about 1,500 to $3,000, although it did start to pick up a little in the 1830s.
And as I say, a lot of those contributions were also ones, which I'll talk about in a moment, from women at various Boston churches that were specifically earmarked for-- to support Tuckerman's. This is Reverend Tuckerman's missionary work in Boston and could not you be used for other purposes.
And as Dan alluded, the Boston congregations particularly were somewhat lackluster in their support. In that first year, only 65 Bostonians joined the association out of a total membership of 891. And during the first 25 years of the association, only one third to maybe one half of the Boston churches offered financial assistance. So there was definitely reluctance, particularly in Boston.
And again, as Dan alluded, many of the more prominent Unitarians would rather give their money to other charitable or philanthropic work, in particular the hospitals and colleges. In fact, there's a suggestion that some of the most wealthy, some wealthy individual Unitarians laypeople gave more money annually to support educational and philanthropic causes than the whole denomination was given for its common work.
Also, one of the goals had been to take these life subscriptions and create a permanent fund, which would allow for the funding of the AUA generally. But certainly in those early years that proved not to be possible, and the executive committee had to reach into those funds to fund day-to-day operations. So it wasn't very successful financially initially.
Another significant obstacle was that there was difficulty in collecting membership dues and donations from these far flung congregations across New England and elsewhere. And the early annual reports are full of pleas to set up auxiliary organizations in the congregations to do some of that work. The goal was of course, to have an auxiliary in every congregation. Certainly that didn't work in the early years. In fact, well, there were 15 local auxiliaries in 1826. By 1833, that had increased to 80, but it certainly wasn't every congregation.
And then another strategy was to get agents to go to the local congregations. And there were a number of people who were doing some of this work. Reverend Samuel May was one. Ezra Garnett himself did this work at some point.
And also notably in the early years, as the second annual report indicates, this also included, quote, "the services of several members of the theological school of Cambridge who devoted a part of their vacation to journeys on behalf of the association." So HDS was involved then too trying to come up with the money. But by the 1830s, we realized you need to be a more permanent agent. And there was a general agent appointed, which had a special collection for that. So even then, you could see the AUA expanding and having a more permanent staff.
Of course, there's also tracts and pamphlets. That was a major way to try to raise money. But certainly, in the first year or so, it was less than $155 was raised from the sale of those pamphlets. And there was some difficulty, particularly in the early years, of getting enough material to publish.
Partly, they found it was difficult to get the right material that would be suitable for general consumption, but also it seemed that some of the more prominent Unitarians were reluctant to donate the copyright in their materials to the association. They maybe thought they could do better somewhere else. And again, this general reluctance to support the association was part of it.
I do want to, though, turn particularly to the role of women, because I say this is the principal thing I found in my research. In those early years, there were a few women who were themselves subscribing members of the AUA, and many were members of the auxiliary organizations in those congregations. And they did provide a significant amount of the financial support for the association. But of course, the officers of the association were all men, and the majority of the early members, especially the life members, were also men.
Now, it had been a deliberate strategy from the beginning for the AUA to try to use this network of women to raise money for the association. It was one of the stated objectives of the association from the beginning. And certainly I think without that fundraising, the association would have been financially crippled, and particularly the work of Joseph Tuckerman in the missionary work in Boston, which is now, of course, today the UU Urban Ministry would not have been possible at all.
There were a few, say, a few wealthy women who contributed. For example, Sarah Parkman, who was the widowed mother of Franklin Parkman, the minister at New North Church in Boston. She contributed $300 to a fund for the appointment of this general agent. And in 1833 there were five women who were life members of the association.
And I say, when it came to Reverend Tuckerman's work, all of the money raised for his missionary work came from women from Boston congregations. And from 1826 to 1833, those contributions amounted to between 700 to $1,500 annually. And in 1831, women from 11 different Boston congregations participated in those efforts. And to facilitate that work, some of them founded female-specific auxiliaries. So, for example, the 12th congregational society formed a Female Benevolent Association in 1828.
And then third is this group of women who were encouraged from the outset by the AUA to purchase life memberships on behalf of their ministers. And this was a big piece of the fundraising. In fact, the initial objectives of the executive committee in 1825 included, quote, "to induce ladies and others to collect money to constitute their pastor life subscribers."
[LAUGHTER]
And by 1833, a total of 54% of all of the life memberships had been purchased, and this represented 24% of all the life membership, so 54 in total, 24% of the total by women, which was about $1,600 in revenue during those first years. And the women would just collect this money in these various auxiliaries on behalf of the minister of their congregation and send it in. And indeed, it was this increase in life memberships over time that was also essential for setting up what became a permanent fund that did allow the AUA to continue to expand.
So, in conclusion, I would just say if these women had not been involved in the management-- they were obviously not involved in leadership. They were not involved in the management of the association in those days. But without them, without particularly the work on all these fronts by the women, I do believe that the association would not have succeeded. It would have probably died in infancy, and we might not have the UUA today.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AISHA ANSANO: Hi, folks. Good to be with you all today. So I'm an alum of HDS. I started here in 2013, graduated in 2016 with my MDiv, and then have been serving as denominational counselor since 2021. And so with a short gap, I've been a part of the UU community here at HDS for a long time now and have gotten to see the trends and journey alongside people, first as a peer and now as a counselor.
And since I started here and even before, UU students have-- at HDS have had this really wide range of what they are looking to do, not just parish ministry, chaplaincy, justice organizing, religious education and parish ministry and so many more things. And in all of those fields, including parish ministry, the work has been deep and broad. So focusing on the wider community, as we've been talking about, right. Not just the people who show up on Sunday Morning, but the community in which they are based, whether that is as a parish minister or in other work.
I came into HDS, and I was not a Unitarian Universalist. That is not what brought me here. I became a UU here for all that. Technically, my home congregation is in Arlington, Mass, just up the street. My real home congregation is here in HUUMS, the Harvard UU Ministry for Students. That is where I experienced, discovered, fell in love with Unitarian universalism.
And that is a real particular kind of Unitarian Universalism. To be surrounded by students who are so invested and also figuring out what this faith means to them, what ministry means to them, what comes next, right.
My experience of UU worship started with new ways of worshiping, with experimental rituals and preaching about things that made your heart sing. I participated in pulpit communion, which is where you rotate through the pulpit and everyone says something, whatever it is, and maybe you've prepared it and maybe it is what's on your heart, and maybe you read the Emerson Divinity School Address that sits in that pulpit. Whatever it is, right. So these ways, these expansive ways of being UU have been at the core for me of what it means to be Unitarian Universalist, right.
I also, in my time here, got interested in this idea of dinner church in this new way of-- and also ancient way of doing worship, of gathering at the table, of being together with people in that way. And that has also been an integral part for me of my ministry and of my faith. So these new things, and at the same time, we're here at Harvard Divinity School. We're here in Boston. There's this deep historical grounding, too, in that.
A couple of years ago, I attended a gathering put together by the Wesleyan Impact Partners, which is a Methodist philanthropic organization. It was for innovators about spiritual innovation. And the metaphor for that gathering has stuck with me for a long time and really, for me, encapsulates the way that I think about spiritual innovation, particularly in our faith. And that is the metaphor of grafting.
So in agricultural settings, there is often new varieties, new species with exciting new flavors or colors or things that we want to have. And at the same time, they are new. The established varieties have been bred for resistance to pests or to drought, for capacity to grow in a particular place in a particular soil.
And so we graft those things together. We take the old variety, the rootstock, which is deeply established, and we attach to it the new variety, the scion. The rootstock gives us the sturdiness, the resistance, the consistency which allows the scion to flourish and to build into something new.
So I think that the AUA is one of our rootstocks, right, that grounds our faith, that holds steady, and that allows us to keep growing in these new ways without having to start over from scratch. It is really easy when we want new things to say that the old is worth nothing anymore, right. To say we are moving into a new space. But it's so important to hold that tradition, that grounding, that steadiness from there to be able to do something new.
I say to people a lot that I love church. That is why I am a minister, right. And I love Sunday morning. And I also love all these other ways of being church, of being in worship and in spiritual community with other people. Sunday morning works for a lot of people, and that it doesn't work for a lot of people.
And so this spaciousness in Unitarian Universalism to explore other ways to gather in community, other ways to be spiritual, to be in community, to grow alongside each other feels so important. And it's not new, right. Our youth and our young adults in particular have been doing church the way that works for them for a very, very long time. That looks different than what Sunday morning looks like in most of our churches.
And I think that's this piece that feels this tie to what Terry is talking about, right. The AUA continuing to exist and thrive because of women, because of folks on the margin saying this is important and I'm going to put my time and my money into this. I think we see that these days with marginalized groups, with youth and young adults, with our UU's of color, with our trans and queer UU's, all of these spaces with our incarcerated UU's, especially through the Church of the Larger Fellowship, right, saying this faith is important to me, and also I get to do this faith in the way that feeds me, that speaks to me, right.
And so I think both in my time here at HDS, seeing the way folks come through. And I will say the other thing I didn't say too, is not all the UU students who are here are here to go into ordained ministry, right. We have folks who come and get grounded here, get a master's and do work in the world that is ministry but is not ordained ministry, right. We have a pathway to chaplaincy now for lay folks, but also folks who work in nonprofits or who teach or all of these other things who live their faiths in the world.
We have parish ministers who are broadening what congregational life looks like, right. Saying this place is for you too to a wide variety of people. Saying that this place is not just Sunday morning. We've had these kind of over time, coming back to full week faith, coming back to the idea that the church is doing things that aren't just on Sunday morning.
And we have people who are creating what I would call spiritual community when they might not call it spiritual community, right. My colleague Shannon Fong in San Francisco is creating neighborhood-based community that looks what church community looks like, but it is not based in a congregation.
We have folks going to folks in marginalized community and saying, how can we serve you? Our trans folks, our queer folks, our young adults on campuses, all of these people who are yearning for community, who are yearning to be in these spaces, who are yearning for people who have values that are like theirs, who have experiences, people who want multigenerational community, right. We have lost so many places to have multigenerational, deep community. Church is one of those places still.
And so all of these things are things people are yearning for and saying, we will give our time. We will give our money. We will give our energy for these things to thrive, because it is important to us to be able to show up in these ways.
Dan was telling us that the work of the UUA or the AUA created these possibilities for holding responsibility, not just for members of the congregation, or of the association, but for this wider community. And I think that is the deep work of our faith right now.
It was just admitted students week here. I spoke to five UU students considering coming to HDS. There were more I know that Dan also spoke to. And the conversations that I have with them are not about, how can I get all of this history and things and do everything exactly like that? I want to be grounded in UU history, in UU space. I want to be in Boston and be able to go to a million UU churches.
And then I want to dream new things into being. I want to serve people. I want to be a chaplain and show up in these spaces to a wide variety of people. I want to be a parish minister, but think about going deep into the community. And these things feel so important. And they feel like a spiritual successor of the work of the AUA, right.
So much of what I'm talking about would be illegible to our Unitarian ancestors in form, in language. And I think it is the same work. I think we are doing the same work in new ways because it is a new time. We are going to the people who want and need community and saying, what is it that you need? Not saying we're here and if you need us can come find us, but what do you need and how can we do that for you?
So I think, again, that the AUA is one of these rootstocks that grounds us, that holds us, and that allows us to scaffold and build and grow into these new directions, new ways of going without just floating freely, with being able to say, this is who we are and have been, and here's how that shows up in these times.
And so I think for me, both in my role here at HDS and in my new role at the UUA, really getting to watch that flourishing, watch that way that we are showing up and say, this is who we want to be in the world. And it feels so powerful to be able to trace that back and say it's because of who we were that we get to be this now in 2026, in these ways.
And we're going to try things. And like former congregations, some things will close, and we will try new things. But it feels powerful to trace that lineage into who we are today. So thank you all.
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SPEAKER 2: Sponsored by Harvard Divinity School library.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2026. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.