We tend to forget that we owe something back to the larger world, and are not complete until we have found a way to make a necessary and organic connection with society and his-tory. As conservatives have to guard against sliding into fundamentalism and fascism, liberals have to guard against sliding into narcissism and selfishness. I know that you know these things, but they re worth repeating. So the heretics I m praising here are those who ve not only chosen their own path, but who have, in retrospect, also chosen wisely. An irony of history is that when heretics attract followers, their followers almost never have the same beliefs as the heretics.
Heretics have a fundamentally different religion than their followers.
But Jesus was not a Christian, Luther was not a Lutheran, and for that matter Marx was not a Marxist and Freud was not a Freudian. This same pattern exists in the history of Unitarians. All of these men were heretics who chose the road less traveled, and did not care who approved or dis-approved. Not one of these men would ever have let his beliefs be articulated by another person or group of people. William Ellery Channing was a Congregationalist minister who started American Unitarianism in 1825 when he refused to repeat the trinitarian creeds of his Congregational church, and we love to tell that story.