Channing, William Ellery (1780–1842), clergyman and author, leader of American Unitarianism.Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Channing graduated from Harvard College in 1793. In 1803, he was ordained minister of the Federal Street Church (now the Arlington Street Church) in
Boston. He engaged in theological debates with the Calvinist Congregationalists; his
Unitarian Christianity (1819) was widely circulated. During the 1820s, he led in the development of a distinct Unitarian denomination, which he hoped would remain a branch of Christianity. Channing accepted the
Bible as divine revelation and strongly believed in free will.
Channing wrote on a wide variety of subjects, and his essays won international attention. His social views, derived from his religious principles, called for the full development of the potential of every human being; “Self‐Culture” (1838) expressed this belief. Channing supported many reform causes; his
antislavery statements offended conservatives, even within his own congregation.
Channing synthesized
Protestantism's moralism with the Enlightenment's commitment to human dignity. The transcendentalists admired him, although he never became one of them. He influenced such contemporaries as Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Margaret
Fuller, Senator Charles Sumner, Horace
Mann, Lydia Maria
Child, and Dorothea
Dix. As a result, his cultural significance far transcends the small Unitarian denomination he helped found.
See also
Religion;
Transcendentalism;
Unitarianism and Universalism.
Bibliography
Jack Mendelsohn , Channing: The Reluctant Radical, 1971.
Daniel Walker Howe
