Confessions of a New Unitarian

I have an interest in immigration history, fuelled to some extent by my own work on nineteenth century English immigrants in the United States and the role that religion played in their Americanization. Most people assume that the English fared well in America but being an immigrant from anywhere was always hard. John Hodgson was a farm labourer from Yorkshire, who moved to Wisconsin because he heard that land was cheap there. On Christmas Day 1856, he wrote to his relatives and friends 4,000 miles away in a spirit of utter dejection and loneliness, ending his epistle with the words, ‘P.S. You cannot tell how bad I want to see someone that I have seen before.' To some extent, John Hodgson’s suffering was a result of the harsh challenges of the Wisconsin frontier. He had never been so hot in his life, nor so cold and nothing in Yorkshire prepared him for rattlesnakes and mosquitoes. However, more significant was what he had left behind, particularly the people he missed. This inevit...

In October, 2011, I decided to stop being a Methodist. I grew up in the Methodist Church, as did my parents before me and their parents before them (although one of my grandfathers started out as an Anglican and as a child I was so Methodist that this seemed vaguely exotic). For fifteen years I worked on Methodist history, for over twenty years I was a Methodist local preacher, and I even had a stint as the director of a Methodist museum. All this made me pretty Methodist! Given all this, I am finding the process of change from Methodism to Unitarianism challenging. Of course, I am still me, and my thinking has not changed very much since I was leading worship in Methodist pulpits. Certainly the jokes haven't improved. My final Methodist service was a harvest festival in which I picked vegetables out of a box and said things like 'turnip' for church, 'squash' injustice and, most irreverently, 'peas' be with you. The last thing out of the box was a lettuce an...