A Polish student's objection in 1556 helped launch Unitarian Christianity
At a Calvinist synod in the Polish village of Secemin, a student named Peter Gonesius stood up and denied the Trinity. Nine years of argument later, his side was expelled and formed its own church. Twelve years after that outburst, Transylvania legally recognised a Unitarian church, one of Europe's boldest acts of tolerance.
Unitarians hold that God is a single being, not three persons, and treat the Trinity as a later distortion of the faith. In most versions Jesus is honoured as an inspired moral teacher, often as saviour and exalted Son of God, but not as God's equal. That position puts Unitarians outside the ecumenical councils and creeds, and most also reject original sin. Their stated aim was to recover Christianity as it stood before later corruptions.
The movement rose almost simultaneously in two places in the mid-16th century, during the Radical Reformation. In Poland, the anti-Trinitarians who split off in 1565 became the Minor Reformed Church, better known as the Polish Brethren. Critics called them Arians, but their doctrine followed Fausto Sozzini, so outsiders labelled them Socinians. Their Racovian Catechism of 1605 set out the faith with biblical proof-texts. In 1658 the Polish parliament ordered them to become Catholic or leave, and most went to Transylvania or Holland, where they took the Unitarian name.
In Transylvania, the former Reformed bishop Ferenc Dávid began preaching the doctrine in 1566, and the Edict of Torda, issued under Prince John II Sigismund Zápolya in January 1568, recognised his church. The word itself first shows up as unitaria religio in a document from the Diet of Lécfalva in 1600. Italians fleeing persecution by Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches swelled the early congregations.
Britain was harsher: John Biddle and Theophilus Lindsey both suffered persecution, and England's first Unitarian church opened only in 1774, on Essex Street in London, still the home of British Unitarian headquarters. In America, King's Chapel in Boston became the first congregation to adopt the faith, with James Freeman teaching it from 1784. The movement is distinct from Unitarian Universalism: after the American Unitarian Association began admitting non-Christian and non-theistic members in the 1890s, those members eventually outnumbered the believers.
Source: Unitarianism
