Rereading Louis Menand...
"Emerson was a genuine moralist whose mistrust of moralism led him continually to complicate and deflect his own formulations. He was a preacher whose message was: Don’t listen to preachers. “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,”33 as he put it in the essay on “Self-Reliance.”
We are still going to church, in other words, but we’re no longer there to hear someone else tell us what to do. Emerson represented the tradition of the New England churchman, which is one reason he became an honored and respected figure despite his anti-institutionalism; and, at the same time, he represented that tradition’s final displacement. Unitarianism had rescued the integrity of the individual conscience from Calvinism. Emerson rescued it from Unitarianism—which is why after his famous address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, in which he scandalized the Unitarians by renouncing organized Christianity in favor of personal revelation, he was not invited to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.34
By the time he returned, religion was no longer an issue most people in Cambridge cared to fight about; the last of the anti-Darwinists were just going under. “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible,” Emerson announced in 1832, in a sermon in which he also announced his disbelief in a supernatural Jesus.35 He had, as usual, gotten there about a generation ahead of schedule."
"The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America": https://a.co/9b9ayvq
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