Early in the fight for America’s soul, rationalists emerged from within the ranks of the Congregationalist churches in New England where, in no small part as a reaction to the stirrings of what would become America’s Second Great Awakening, they began to propound “Unitarianism,” a heresy as old as the Reformation itself. Unitarians saw man as inherently good, Jesus as strictly human, Satan as non-existent and God as a hands-off Creator. Evil was attributable to a lack of education and opportunity (sound familiar?) thus rendering sin the playing out of ignorance and repression. Give a man enough information, their reasoning went, and his natural inclination must be to better himself and his world around him.

Information plus opportunity equals paradise. It was an idea as old as the seduction of Eve, and it proved as powerful, especially around Boston. By the early nineteenth century the new world’s first Congregational church had bitten the apple to become America’s first Unitarian church.

While the evangelists of both Awakenings had drawn thousands to arbors and altars where tears of repentance were emphasized, these humanist forebears quietly set their sights on key areas of society like economics, civil government, and especially education.