Orestes Augustus Brownson

Orestes Augustus Brownson (September 16, 1803 – April 17, 1876) was an American intellectual, activist, preacher, labor organizer, and writer. Brownson was also a noted Catholic convert. Brownson was a publicist, a career which spanned his affiliation with the New England Transcendentalists through his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Early life and education

Orestes Augustus Brownson was born on September 16, 1803, to Sylvester Augustus Brownson and Relief Metcalf, who were farmers in Stockbridge, Vermont. Sylvester Brownson died when Orestes was young and Relief decided to give her son up to a nearby adoptive family when he was six years old.

The adopting family raised Brownson under the strict confines of Calvinist Congregationalism on a small farm in Royalton, Vermont. He did not receive much schooling but enjoyed reading books. Among these were volumes by Homer and Locke and the Bible. In 1817, when he was fourteen, Brownson attended an academy briefly in New York. This was the extent of his formal education.

Religious unease

In 1822, Brownson was baptized in the Presbyterian Church in Ballston, New York, but he quickly complained that Presbyterians associated only with themselves, and that the Reformed doctrines of predestination and eternal sin were too harsh.

After withdrawing from Presbyterianism in 1824 and teaching at various schools in upstate New York and Detroit, Brownson applied to be a Universalist preacher. Universalism, for Brownson, represented the only liberal variety of Christianity he knew of. He became the editor of a Universalist journal, Gospel Advocate and Impartial Investigator, in which he wrote about his own religious doubt and criticized organized faiths and mysticism in religion.