Channing, William Ellery

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Channing, William Ellery (1780–1842). American Christian pastor, originally a Congregationalist: in the schism between conservatives and liberals, Channing espoused the liberals, rejecting the Trinity and the radical consequence of original sin. He is thus regarded as a leading Unitarian thinker, but he said that he belonged only to ‘the community of free minds’. He supported social reform, though not at first the abolition of slavery. Rebuked for this, he published Slavery (1835), which became a key text for the opponents of slavery.

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