Review: American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion Available to Purchase

In 1906, Unitarian reverend Rodney F. Johonnot wrote of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois: “Without tower or spire it expresses the spirit of the ideal. By its form it expresses the thought, inherent in the liberal faith, that God should not be sought in the sky, but on earth among the children of men.”¹ The building’s rejection of the spire (a symbol of God in heaven) and its embrace of the grounded square form (a symbol of God “on earth among the children of men”) communicated the core Unitarian belief in the fundamental dignity of the human person mirrored in the founding documents of the United States. As Ann Marie Borys argues in American Unitarian Churches, American Unitarianism possesses a unique relationship to American democracy precisely because, “of Christians, Unitarians alone prioritized this value [of the dignity of human beings] over scripture” (31). Borys...