Channing, William Ellery

born April 7, 1780, Newport, R.I., U.S.

died Oct. 2, 1842, Bennington, Vt.

U.S. Unitarian clergyman.

He studied theology at Harvard University and became a successful preacher. From 1803 until his death he was pastor of Boston's Federal Street Church. He began his career as a Congregationalist but gradually adopted liberal and rationalist views that came to be labeled Unitarian. In 1820 he established a conference of liberal Congregationalist clergy, later reorganized as the American Unitarian Association. Known as the "apostle of Unitarianism," he also became a leading figure in New England Transcendentalism, and his lectures and essays on slavery, war, and poverty made him one of the most influential clergymen of his day.

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▪ American theologian

born April 7, 1780, Newport, R.I.

died Oct. 2, 1842, Bennington, Vt., U.S.

 U.S. author and moralist, Congregationalist and, later, Unitarian clergyman. Known as the “apostle of Unitarianism,” Channing was a leading figure in the development of New England Transcendentalism and of organized attempts in the U.S. to eliminate slavery, drunkenness, poverty, and war.

      He studied theology in Newport and at Harvard and soon became a successful preacher in various churches in the Boston area. From June 1, 1803, until his death he was minister of the Federal Street Church, Boston. Preferring to avoid abstruse points of doctrine, he preached morality, charity, and Christian responsibilities. He became a popular speaker on ceremonial occasions and reached an even larger audience by writing for liberal Boston periodicals, one of which was The Christian Disciple (from 1824 called The Christian Examiner). In 1815 he was attacked by the orthodox Calvinist periodical The Panoplist, whose editor, Jedidiah Morse, denounced the Boston clergy as “Unitarian” rather than Christian. During the next five years Channing issued several defenses of his position, especially “Unitarian Christianity,” a sermon delivered at an ordination in Baltimore in 1819.

      Reluctantly accepting the label of Unitarianism, Channing described his faith as “a rational and amiable system, against which no man's understanding, or conscience, or charity, or piety revolts.” Although he did not wish to found a denomination, believing that a Unitarian orthodoxy would be just as oppressive as any other, he formed (1820) a conference of liberal Congregational ministers, later (May 1825) reorganized as the American Unitarian Association.

      Channing sympathized with the beliefs of several social and educational reform movements but did not believe that society could be improved by collective action. He denied that government—the only legitimate function of which was, in his view, the essentially negative one of maintaining public order—could advance the moral sensibility of the human race.

      In his time, Channing's reputation as a man of letters was based on several long essay-reviews, among the first of their kind in the U.S. One took John Milton's “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” as a starting point; another, Sir Walter Scott's biography of Napoleon I, in whose career Channing saw the great social danger of taking prominent soldiers for heroes. Most of his manuscripts were destroyed by fire.

Additional Reading

William Henry Channing (ed.), Memoir of William Ellery Channing, 3 vol. (1848), contains extracts from his correspondence and manuscripts organized by his nephew. William Henry Channing, The Life of William Ellery Channing, D.D. (1880, reprinted 1975), is a condensed version. Robert Leet Patterson, The Philosophy of William Ellery Channing (1952, reissued 1973), analyzes Channing's thought. Jack Mendelsohn, Channing, the Reluctant Radical (1971, reprinted 1980), is a biography.

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