Description of the UU History Project

“Comrades in a Common Cause”:

The Remarkable Story of Unitarian Universalism

in Western Pennsylvania

First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, PA

Summary of the Project:

In 1808, Benjamin Bakewell came to Pittsburgh to run a glass factory. By 1820 he was financially able to finance the founding of the First Unitarian Church in the city. The remarkable story of Unitarian Universalism in Southwestern Pennsylvania needs to be recorded and preserved for present and future generations.

This special story is unique in Unitarian Universalism because of the English origins of those who first carried the vision of liberal religion across the Allegheny Mountains. This story is unique in southwestern Pennsylvania because of what this congregation of religious liberals brought to a conservative community.

At the heart of this story is the unfolding of congregational life and what the people did to sustain each other and their neighbors. Their struggles and commitments can teach us much about how we came to be what we are – and where we may go from here.

Goals of the Project:

The primary goal of this project is to document this nearly 200-year history in a well-researched book and to produce an exhibit, bringing it alive to the people who are living out this faith tradition today in the cluster of UU churches in the Greater Pittsburgh area, including Meadville, home of Meadville Theological School, and Smithton, the site of an early Universalist congregation. This history will show how our principles have been lived out in relation to evolving UU writings and teachings, reveal our long history of engagement with contemporary social and ethical concerns, and articulate the many ways our liberal religious message has manifested itself.

A second goal is to create a record and a resource that will be available to future generations of UUs and potential UUs in the Pittsburgh area. This record will make clear the vital importance of the grounding from which twenty-first century UUs will be inspired to build. One hymn reads: “What They Dreamed be Ours to Do.” Each generation better appreciates its actions and achievements when they are understood in light of the prior struggles and achievements of those who came before.

A third goal is to make our denomination more meaningfully visible to the general population of this region, which has historically viewed Unitarian Universalism with suspicion. It is our hope that the availability of a book that reveals the personal dramas, as well as the theological and institutional developments in Unitarian Universalism in our region, will contribute greater understanding for improved inter-faith relations in the greater Pittsburgh area.

A fourth goal of this project is to provide a model of how UU history can be researched and written, as it developed in a particular community of UU churches. As a movement our ability to move forward into succeeding generations will be enhanced with an honest sense of who we have been, both as individual congregations and as a larger movement. The presentation of our story will be personal, as well as theological and institutional. It will seek to show the intimacies of life in the churches – such as Benjamin Bakewell’s discouragement over the transience of ministers, and the personal grief experienced by Charles and Martha St. John over the deaths of their tiny twin boys. This story will also show our experience in regard to developments in liberal religious theology. Finally it will show our history of doing “practical” religion, where people came together, regardless of their theological differences, to work for fairness, equity, and compassion in the community and the world.

Themes this History will address:

The approach taken in this project will be both sympathetic and critical. It will be both personal and institutional. It will bring out the histories of the individual congregations and also show the processes of their growth in the context of the larger Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist movement. It will draw out the “western” quality of our situation in Pittsburgh, particularly in its first 80 years. It will explore the social and political controversies that were of consequence to the people in our congregations in the twentieth century. It will examine particular moments of decision and evaluate the growth that resulted. It will acknowledge the intergenerational quality of congregational life and show how religious worship, education, fellowship, and mission to the larger community have been necessary components of church vitality and growth.

A Brief Summary of how this History will be Structured

What follows are very brief descriptions of the chapters that the author anticipates being developed. It should be understood that these descriptions are very preliminary, since much of the research is yet to be completed.

Chapter One: The Bakewell Years

The story will begin with Benjamin Bakewell, an English glass industrialist who made possible the financial support of the first congregation and financed construction of its unheated brick building on the corner of Smithfield Street and Virgin Alley. This part of the story will emphasize our geographical situation as a church in “the trans-Allegheny West,” where few easterners were willing to come, let alone stay. The congregation remained tiny and faced much hostility due to the preponderance of Presbyterians and Episcopalians in the city.

The first minister, Rev. John Campbell, arrived from England in 1820 in answer to the invitation of his daughter already living in Pittsburgh. When Mr. Harm Jan Huidekoper, a Dutch land developer in Meadville, heard Rev. Campbell preach, he was moved to change his thinking and to become a Unitarian. Huidekoper would by 1836, provide the funding to found the Meadville Theological School. Bakewell and Huidekoper maintained a 20-year correspondence that reveals their close friendship and their mutual embrace of a Channing view of Unitarianism.

Chapter Two: Hard Field of Labor

When Bakewell died in 1844, the congregation had dissipated and Bakewell passed the church building on to his heirs. The congregation revived for another fifteen years, from 1849 to 1865, under the leadership respectively of Rev. Mordecai De Lange and Rev. Walter Wilson. De Lange was a Jew who had become a Unitarian through the influence of Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot in St. Louis. After that De Lange studied at the Meadville School begun by Mr. Huidekoper; he then took on the work of Minister at Large to the West, which in that day included Pittsburgh.

De Lange’s eleven-year stay with the Pittsburgh congregation was interspersed with his travels across the west to bring congregations into the Western Unitarian Conference. In the West, Unitarian congregations had to struggle with hardships not present among the churches in the East. The Western Unitarian Conference became the source of support and connection for the widely dispersed churches dotting the landscape from Western Pennsylvania to Illinois to Missouri. The Pittsburgh congregation played a crucial role in supporting De Lange’s work as he went about organizing this Conference, begun in 1852.

What we know about these stories comes from a number of sources: the letters Bakewell penned to Huidekoper over a period of twenty years, their writings published in the Western Unitarian, numerous archival documents of the city of Pittsburgh, cemetery records, etc., and books like Freedom Moves West, an classic volume (now reprinted) by Charles Lyttle, and The Makers of the Meadville Theological School, by Francis Christie.

When Rev. Henry Miles wrote from retirement to Charles St. John in 1891, he wished St. John well. “You are in a hard field of labor,” he said. He was thinking of his own time in Pittsburgh, an uncongenial place for the planting of liberal religion in the nineteenth century. Miles’ description serves as an apt title of this chapter.

Chapter Three: Unitarian Conscience: Charles Eliot St. John in Pittsburgh

The story of Unitarianism in the 1890s comes alive through the prolific writings of Rev. Charles Eliot St. John, a minister with New England roots, who came to Pittsburgh on a mission. Determined that Unitarianism “lay its loving hand on the city of Pittsburgh,” St. John solicited financial contributions from the established member churches of the American Unitarian Association to get a new church building constructed for the Pittsburgh congregation. This was not about serving the congregation, said St. John. It was about what the AUA and the congregation could do for the city of Pittsburgh. “To make Unitarians is not the aim of our preaching,” claimed St. John. “We aim solely to give men moral enthusiasm, and it is because we have found that Unitarian beliefs do this for all who nobly and deeply accept them that we work for Unitarianism.”

This history aims to more fully develop the story of Charles St. John, whose leadership in the Pittsburgh church was pivotal, to say the least. St. John took the congregation and the city in hand, exhorting congregants to attend services and exhorting the city to rid itself of corrupt government. St. John became involved in many civic projects, among them the Kingsley Settlement House and the project to run an experimental water filtration system on the church lawn, making filtered water available to city residents who came to collect it. The city papers regularly printed St. John’s sermons and other writings. St. John’s story will not be complete, however, without due attention to Martha, his wife. The letters she wrote to her mother over the course of their nine-year stay in Pittsburgh reveal much about their private lives and how they were intertwined with the life of the congregation. Martha’s letters offer an invaluable personal perspective into the St. Johns’ time in Pittsburgh, and provide needed insight into the critical role of people in the congregation like Mary Semple, (Miss) Mary Lyman, and many others.

Chapter Four: The Road Widens: The Times and Ministry of L. Walter Mason

After St. John left to become Secretary of the AUA, Rev. Walter Mason arrived. It is significant that Mason got his ministerial training at the Meadville Theological School. This was the dream that the founders of the school had in mind when they established it. Its durability as the school for western (now Midwestern) ministers was evident. Walter Mason soon oversaw the construction of a larger church building on the corner of Morewood and Ellsworth, and then facilitated the founding of a Second Unitarian Church, in Allegheny (the North Side). This was an extremely important development. That the city of Pittsburgh could now support two Unitarian churches was evidence of the new diversity in its population since the mid-nineteenth century.

Of primary importance to Rev. Mason’s ministry were the traumatic events of the early twentieth century: World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the arrival of the idea of the “Death of God.” Mason’s sermons, a great number of which are collected in the archives, show how seriously these matters affected the lives of people everywhere. He spoke about the waste of war in 1915, and by 1919, had lost his own son in France. In the 1920s, he addressed the question of atheism, particularly as it was mandated in the new Soviet Union. His ambivalence on the subject reflected the ambivalence of the congregation at that time. This was followed by sermons that addressed the practice of Humanism within Unitarianism. Mason valued Humanism, but saw it as the ground from which all other religions drew breath. Mason has been called an atheist by some; the record does not support that. The record needs to be made clearer and more accurate.

Chapter Five: North Side Church: Voice for Social Justice

It was during Mason’s ministry that the North Side Unitarian Church (later the Allegheny Unitarian Universalist Church) came into being. Rev. Mason worked with the Rev. Thomas Clayton, who had left his Lutheran church to become a Unitarian minister. They worked with interested people in Allegheny to start a Unitarian society there. This church would be founded in 1906 and a church building constructed on West North Avenue and Resaca Place in 1908. The mission of this church would always be an outward looking one, with a conscientious focus on social justice ministry in the community. About the founding and early development of the North Side congregation, there is much to be learned and recorded. Several boxes and files of records are currently archived at the church; what they might show should be a part of this story.

Chapter Six: Pittsburgh Unitarians at Mid-Century

This history will continue with the work that took these congregations into the challenges of the twentieth century – its labor struggles, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement. After a period of quiet perseverance in the 1930s, the First Church congregation experienced unprecedented growth by the 1950s. At this time the Rev. Irving Murray was preaching his sermons to a city-wide radio audience via KDKA Radio. As the church found itself with inadequate space to house its expanding numbers, especially in religious education, Murray began to encourage some church members to form new congregations in the suburban neighborhoods where they lived. In the 1960s, soon after the merger of Unitarians with Universalists, three new Pittsburgh congregations came into being: the North Hills and East Suburban congregations began as offshoots of the First Church, and the South Hills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship began independently. All three started out as fellowships, and would in time invite the leadership of ordained ministers. Each congregation had its own “personality” and pace of development, which was an important aspect of its survival and growth.

Within the “cluster” of Pittsburgh Unitarian Universalist churches, it will be important to see how the Allegheny Church had been from the beginning an outspoken voice for social justice in the North Side community. Among the churches begun in the 1960s, East Suburban provided an enduring network of support for Unitarians far removed from the “home church” in the city; the North Hills congregation proved ingenious as it transformed an old country barn into a useful and intriguing church building; the South Hills Fellowship grew dramatically, attracting members from the rapidly growing neighborhoods in the southwestern reaches of the city. In addition, a tiny UU congregation at Smithton grew out of what had been a Universalist church. The development of these churches became integral to the ongoing work of the Ohio Meadville District. We need to know more about their respective experiences and see as well where there may have been connections and/or parallel decisions. The landscape for Unitarian Universalist worship and mission in Western Pennsylvania was dramatically changed from the realm of inferiority it once held one hundred years before.

Chapter Seven: “New Occasions Teach New Duties”: The 1960s and 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s became of a time of much tearing apart as old social prescriptions were exposed for their deleterious effects on particular segments of society. This historian has elsewhere referred to this as a period when “new occasions” were calling churches and individuals in society to fulfill “new duties” – borrowing words from a favorite hymn based on the words of abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell, “Once to Every Man (Soul) and Nation.” The new challenges of these decades brought opportunity as well as division to Unitarian Universalist churches, a particularly painful dilemma coming on the heels of denominational merger in 1961.

In 1961, the First Church Board voted to host Pete Seeger after his performance engagements on a WQED children’s show and at the Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association had been cancelled due to a number of public complaints. Seeger had been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee on the basis that such questions violated his freedom of speech and association. While his appeal was still pending, Seeger performed two concerts before the packed First Church sanctuary and received standing ovations. Well known at the time as a “people’s” folk singer, he would later acquire fame for his activist stance against American involvement in Vietnam. Related to this same issue, it was in the 1960s that the Rev. Edward Cahill urged the congregation to open the church as a place of sanctuary for draft resisters. The congregation voted in the affirmative, but the vote was so close that the Board decided it was best not to pursue the plan. The details of these stories are yet to be gathered and recorded.

At the Allegheny Unitarian Universalist Church, the Rev. Jesse Cavileer (known simply as Jesse) lived out that church’s social justice ministry. The coming together of the partners in this relationship at that point in time was propitious. With city plans underway for Urban Renewal, Jesse saw the need for more neighborhood participation. He arranged for a course in grass roots community organizing to be offered at the University of Pittsburgh – to train ordinary people “untried” in neighborhood decision making. When city laborers arrived to put up a fence that would cut off the Allegheny Commons from the neighborhood, Jesse lay down where they were about to dig. This attention led to a halt in construction and the fence was never built. The Jesse Cavileer chapter at Allegheny UU Church is a vital piece of the larger Pittsburgh UU story and will be examined and told in this book.

Chapter Eight: Paul Beattie and the Humanist Claim

In the 1980s, the First Church was home to the Rev. Paul Beattie, a man who achieved national acclaim for preaching a message of Humanism. Beattie has been raised in a Christian faith tradition – Methodism. It was his encounter with Socrates that inspired his move toward Unitarianism and Religious Humanism. Socrates, said Beattie, was a courageous person, refusing to follow civic orders when such actions violated his moral convictions. But equally important, Socrates embodied a commitment to free inquiry. For Beattie, religion without God was possible, but life without religion was difficult. In other words, Humanism was good, but Humanism practiced as religion was better. Beattie’s ideas will be explored in relation to the ideas of other prominent UU Humanists, namely William Shulz, who was grew up in the First Unitarian Church and became a UU minister after overcoming the idea that Humanists could not be ministers. Paul Beattie’s work in Pittsburgh needs to be documented, in particular as it relates to his larger significance to the UU movement in that time. The story of Humanism, or Religious Humanism as Beattie preferred to think of it, was an important development that directly impacted Unitarian Universalism. This study of Beattie and the Pittsburgh congregation under his leadership will be researched and described in the context of developments in the larger UU and Humanist movements.

Chapter Nine: Growth and Theological Diversity

Paul Beattie was loved by many, but was admittedly a controversial figure for others. When he died suddenly in 1990, the Board acted to find a minister who would hew a more nuanced theological path. This person was found in the Rev. David Herndon, who saw the potential for cultivating and nurturing a more theologically diverse spectrum of thought within the congregation. What Rev. Herndon brought to the First Church of Pittsburgh was consistent with the direction of thinking among UUs more generally in the last decade of the twentieth century. In other research, I have discovered that UU ministers who received their training in the 60s and 70s were more Humanist in their orientation; UU ministers who received their training in the 80s and 90s, tended to be more accommodating to a balance between Humanism and Theism, broadly conceived. David Herndon has reflected that movement, and as a consequence, the congregation today spans a greater theological spectrum of people than it once did. The oral histories we are collecting from senior members of the church offer important testimony to these changes. It should be recognized that this move toward greater theological diversity is widely viewed as a positive development consistent with the threads of our history. It is outlined in the 2005 Report by the Commission on Appraisal, Engaging Our Theological Diversity. To the extent that our varied theology “frames” our worldview, our First Church community today participates in this engagement.

Significant to the work of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh in the last fifteen years has been the campaign for needed capital improvements to the church entrance and lobby, as well as the installation of an elevator. More recently, with money from a large UUA grant for urban churches, work has been done to clean and preserve the interior of the sanctuary and clean the stained glass windows. A plan was undertaken to develop a Campus Ministry program, which has become an important model for campus ministry programs within the UU denomination. Given our situation near several universities and colleges, the First Church has undertaken a significant ministry of outreach to students in our area, and currently there are approximately 150 students registered in the program. This has been accomplished through David Herndon laying the groundwork through prior contact with the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, and through the enthusiastic leadership of Devon Wood. Finally, David Herndon has brought an expanded emphasis on participatory music to the First Church with a greatly enlarged adult choir, a family choir, a more prominent role for the folk orchestra, and a multi-talented organist who offers a highly professional, as well as inspirational, complement to the services.

Recently a celebration was held to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Allegheny UU Church and the 40^th anniversary of the East Suburban UU Church. This historian conducted preliminary research on these two congregations and presented a paper that revisited their origins and highlighted significant events over the years. This work showed how personally meaningful it has been for so many to participate in the ongoing life of a UU community. Critical to this research was the discovery that both congregations had separately come to points of decision in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to revitalize their mission and invite new ministerial leadership. In both cases, committed individuals consciously confronted the need for change, rather than face the loss of the church and/or witness its limited relevance to the community. It is these kinds of connections that this study will discover and make known. Thus, we will all better understand the implications of our past.

Conclusion:

Fundamentally, this history will make us feel good about who we are. But it will do so by providing us with the long view of our origins and development and by taking into account the critical points of decision and leadership that made possible subsequent growth. We are who we are because of where we have been, what we have done, and how we have been connected to a wider movement. We need this book to be written, and it should be done professionally and well. The researcher/author who proposes to complete this project brings her academic background and liberal religious grounding to its fulfillment. Moreover, she will bring to it her own consciously held liberal religious commitment, which will necessarily inform her presentation of the record.

About the Primary Researcher/Author: Kathleen Parker

The primary researcher/author of this work holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and is an eight-year member of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh. She has taught American history for fifteen years at the college and university level and has published numerous scholarly works. She recently completed a book entitled, Sacred Service in Civic Space: Three Hundred Years of Community Ministry in Unitarian Universalism, published by Meadville Lombard Press. For eight years she served as lead member of the Adult Religious Education Ministry Team at the Pittsburgh church. She views this project as a call to extend the ministry of the church by recording its history.

How you can help make this project a reality:

Locate and donate whatever documents or records you have. These papers can be returned to you – or housed with our church records at the Heinz History Center Archive.

Consent to be interviewed, particularly if you have been in the church for 15 years or more. Your memories can provide the experiential base from which to interpret documents.

Make a financial contribution. Estimated cost for completion of this project – the book and the exhibit – in the next year is $12,000. Your contribution will help make the completion of this history a reality. It is an undertaking that will be of lasting importance for Unitarian Universalism in Western Pennsylvania. (Details of the funding proposal for this project are available in the church office upon request.)