Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's own stated reason for resigning in 1832, that he could no longer administer the Lord's Supper as a literal rite he believed Jesus never meant to make perpetual, was long read by earlier biographers as the visible edge of a broader loss of faith in institutional Christianity. Robert D. Richardson's Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), drawing on sermons, letters and journal entries not generally available to earlier biographers, argues instead that Emerson transformed rather than abandoned his inherited Unitarian faith: the resignation reads, on this account, as a deepening of conviction and a refusal of insincerity rather than a rupture with belief. The Second Church congregation itself offered to let him omit personally administering the rite if he would stay, which he declined, consistent with either reading.

In A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, delivered 19 July 1839 and published the same year, Norton, the senior Unitarian scholar known to his allies as the "Unitarian Pope," charged Emerson and the Transcendentalists with denying the reality of the Christian miracles, which for Norton were the necessary historical evidence for revelation. He called the doctrine that a person could know religious truth by intuition alone, without that evidence, "the latest form of infidelity." George Ripley published a reply to Norton the same year, and the Divinity School Address remained controversial enough that Harvard did not invite Emerson to speak there again until 1866.

In The Imperial Self (1971), Anderson argued that Emerson's self-reliant individualism was, at bottom, a rejection of community and history: a desperate, self-privileging posture he read as the moral equivalent of antinomianism, placing the individual above any social or civic obligation. Set against Emerson's own record this reading has to reckon with a change over time rather than a fixed position: the Emerson of 1841 wrote almost nothing about slavery, but from his 1844 address on the anniversary of West Indian emancipation onward he became an increasingly public abolitionist, and his 1851 Fugitive Slave Law address in Concord denounced the 1850 Act by name and broke publicly with Daniel Webster over it.