This book offers the first cultural history of Universalism and the Universalist idea – the idea that an all-good and all-powerful God saves all souls. Ann Bressler argues that Universalism began as a radical, eschatological, and communally oriented faith, and only later became a “comfortably established” progressive and individualistic one. Although Universalists are usually classed with Unitarians as pioneering Protestant liberals, the author argues that they were in fact quite different from both contemporary and later liberalism in their ideas and goals. Unitarians began by rejecting the C ... More

This book offers the first cultural history of Universalism and the Universalist idea – the idea that an all-good and all-powerful God saves all souls. Ann Bressler argues that Universalism began as a radical, eschatological, and communally oriented faith, and only later became a “comfortably established” progressive and individualistic one. Although Universalists are usually classed with Unitarians as pioneering Protestant liberals, the author argues that they were in fact quite different from both contemporary and later liberalism in their ideas and goals. Unitarians began by rejecting the Calvinist idea of sin as corporate, universal, and absolute, replacing it with their moral self-cultivation. Universalists, on the other hand, accepted the Calvinist view of absolute corporeal sinfulness but insisted on absolute corporeal salvation. Bressler’s claim is that Universalists, in their defiance of individualistic moralism, were for much of the nineteenth century the only consistent Calvinists in America. She traces the emergence of the Universalists’ “improved” Calvinism and its gradual erosion over the course of the nineteenth century, when the effort to maintain the early synthesis of Calvinist and Enlightenment ideals failed as the Universalists were swept up in the tide of American religious individualism and moralism. By the late nineteenth century they increasingly extolled moral responsibility and self-cultivation.