One of the greatest problems that readers of Emerson have is grasping his religious beliefs. We know that religion is important to him because every essay seems saturated with references to attaining a more perfect relationship with God. His emphasis on a universal soul flowing through individual souls can strike us as mystical and abstract, and, therefore, hard to grasp. The key to understanding his religious views lies in Unitarianism, a religious association that, to an outsider, might appear to be oddly non-religious. Not surprisingly, given Emerson's belief in the sanctity of individualism and his accepting Unitarian principles, this denomination is based fundamentally on an individual's private relationship with God — the God within each of us — and on the individual's personal judgment in matters of morals and ethics.
Unitarianism denies that the God of Christianity can be identified as the three-person Trinity — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Unitarians consider Christ to be of great importance, but not divine. Rather, they believe that he had a divine mission to make human beings more aware of God's goodness and of our obligation to care for each other. Hence, they are not Trinitarian, but Unitarian — God is one being, the Supreme Being. The emphasis of this movement lies not so much with a discussion of God's existence, but with the religiousness of human beings, and especially with our ethical natures.
The Unitarian doctrine had wide-ranging implications for students and religious seekers in Emerson's time. The movement became more than a curiosity in late eighteenth-century England, and in the New England of the young American republic. Suddenly, the basic Calvinist idea still lingering in 1836 New England of humanity's helpless dependence on God's grace was superseded by the transcendentalist doctrine of the God within each individual. The followers of this belief prospered strongly enough in New England that Unitarianism became an independent denomination.
