FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION
From Philosopedia
FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION
The Free Religious Association (FRA) was formed in 1867 by “splendid gadflies and dissenters within the denomination” of Unitarianism.
According to David Robertson, they were
- not very influential as church builders or organizers. Their importance was in the intellectual stimulus that they provided to the denomination. Although in an immediate sense they had few followers, they were an advance guard, generally ahead of the religious thinking of mainstream Unitarianism and thus fighting an often frustrating battle. But the direction of their thinking–away from supernaturalism toward science, away from theism toward Humanism, and away from ecclesiasticism toward social reform–charted important directions in denominational development in the twentieth century.
Henry W. Bellows, Cyrus Bartol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, and Bronson Alcott were among the early leaders. Emerson was vice-president in 1879, succeeding Frothingham. But Emerson declined a second term, declaring that the FRA concentrated too much on what Kant (and Aristotle) had called “the starry heavens above,” and not enough on “the Moral Law within.”
An extensive chapter on the subject is found in David Robertson’s The Unitarians and the Universalists (1985).
According to Edwin H. Wilson,
- The Free Religious Association never went beyond what it called humanistic theism, and, because of the intense individualism of its members and gathering of dissents, its exciting meetings - usually front-page newsworthy - soon ended.
(See entry for the American Ethical Union. Also, see David M. Robinson, "'The New Epoch of Belief': The Radical and Religious Transformation in Nineteenth-Century New England," New England Quarterly 79 (December 2006): 557-77.)
