William Ellery Channing 1780 – 1842

William Ellery Channing was an American Unitarian minister, theologian, and one of the most influential moral voices of the early American republic. From his pulpit at the Federal Street Church in Boston he articulated the central principles of nineteenth-century American Unitarianism in his celebrated Baltimore Sermon of 1819 and shaped the religious imagination of Emerson, Thoreau, and the wider Transcendentalist movement. His writings on the dignity of human nature, on the duties of the religious imagination, and on the abolition of slavery made him one of the early conscience figures of American public life.

William Ellery Channing was born at Newport, Rhode Island, in April 1780, the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He graduated from Harvard in 1798, spent two years as a tutor in Richmond, Virginia, where his encounter with chattel slavery shaped his later abolitionism, and in 1803 was ordained pastor of the Federal Street Congregational Church in Boston, a post he held for the rest of his life.

His Baltimore sermon 'Unitarian Christianity' of 1819 became the programmatic statement of American Unitarianism, rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity and original sin in favour of the moral freedom and dignity of the human person. His other major works include 'Likeness to God' (1828), 'Spiritual Freedom' (1830), 'The Importance and Means of a National Literature' (1830), the long pamphlet Slavery (1835), and the lecture 'Self-Culture' (1838).

Channing taught a 'rational and natural' Christianity in which the goal of religion is the cultivation of the divine image latent in every human soul, and he made that anthropology the basis of an antislavery, anti-imperial, and anti-war public ethics. He was the principal founder of American Unitarianism and a decisive early influence on Emerson, Theodore Parker, and the Transcendentalist movement that broke beyond his liberal Christianity. He died at Bennington, Vermont, in October 1842.