Unitarian Church

The Unitarian Church enters the story through William Andrews’s family and through a conversation that makes religion newly consequential to his relationship with Charley Hoge. The novel supplies no account of the church’s doctrine or organization; instead, its significance emerges through contrasts among religious upbringing, Bible reading, formal worship, and Andrews’s sense of spiritual release in nature.

Identity and Presence

When J.D. McDonald assumes that Andrews may be the son of a priest, Andrews clarifies that his father is a lay minister of the Unitarian Church. McDonald brushes aside the distinction, but Andrews’s answer establishes the church as part of his family background without making him a clergyman’s son in the conventional sense. The scene gives no further institutional details, and the church is not depicted as a community Andrews actively attends in Butcher’s Crossing.

The religious inheritance is also qualified by Andrews’s education at home. His father encouraged him to read Emerson, but Andrews later acknowledges to Charley Hoge that he has never read the Bible attentively. The novel thus distinguishes his exposure to religious and philosophical ideas from familiarity with scripture: the Unitarian connection is present, but it does not amount to a clear account of Andrews’s own religious practice.

The Bible and Charley Hoge

The church becomes socially important when Hoge learns that Andrews’s father is a Unitarian minister. Hoge’s surprise gives way to respect, and he explains that an itinerant preacher saved him in Kansas City and gave him a cheap, worn Bible. Several pages are torn, and brown stains mark the corners; Hoge says the stains are American bison blood and worries that its accidental presence may have been sacrilegious. Andrews reassures him that it was not.

That reassurance opens a sustained, if uneven, exchange. Hoge seeks Andrews out to discuss biblical passages, events, and interpretive doubts, apparently treating his family background as a qualification for religious conversation. Andrews discovers that he knows too little of the Bible to discuss it with confidence. When he admits this, Hoge’s eyes cloud with suspicion, and his manner changes from respectful equality to evangelical admonition. The church’s association with Andrews therefore creates an expectation that his actual knowledge cannot meet.

Formal Worship and the Wilderness

As Hoge preaches, Andrews recalls attending services at King’s Chapel every morning at eight during his time at Harvard University. He compares the dim, austere chapel, where hundreds of soberly dressed young men listened to the word of God, with the rough saloon in which Hoge speaks, amid the smells of kerosene, alcohol, and sweat. The comparison makes the same religious language seem at once familiar and radically altered by its setting.

Andrews’s memory also clarifies why neither formal worship nor the saloon represents his ideal spiritual refuge. At Harvard, he had sometimes escaped beyond Cambridge to the meadows and woods, where solitude seemed to dissolve the mediocrity and confinement he felt at college. There, he experienced himself as part of something divine and unbounded. Now, on the prairies around Butcher’s Crossing, he wanders as if looking for a temple better suited to him than King’s Chapel or Jackson’s Saloon. The Unitarian Church is not presented as the source of that wilderness vision; rather, Andrews’s religious background helps set the terms of a search whose desired freedom lies beyond established places of worship.