In 1822, Thomas Jefferson predicted, "There is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an [sic] Unitarian."

If you consider official church membership, he was off by, oh, a couple hundred million. But if you consider the spiritual approaches championed by Unitarians and Universalists from his time to ours, and the number of people whose spirituality matches those approaches without sharing the denominational labels, then his assertion hits closer to the mark.

The influence of these faith traditions has always seemed disproportionate to the size of their official rolls. As Minneapolis prepares to host some 3,000 Unitarians-Universalists for the denomination's General Assembly June 23-27 in the Convention Center, it's a good time to examine the history and present-day appeal of this liberal brand of religion.

For two centuries, before and after merging in 1961, followers of Unitarian and Universalist traditions have been forerunners of profound change – the kind the mainstream culture initially views as threatening but ultimately accepts as a given. If you want to see what will be mainstream tomorrow, you'd be well advised to examine what Unitarian-Universalism is doing today. Let's look at the track record.

Unitarian and Universalist churches were among the first to welcome abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and suffragists like Susan B. Anthony to preach from their pulpits. Universalist minister Olympia Brown was the first woman to be ordained by a religious denomination in this country, in 1863. A Unitarian minister, Dr. Newton Mann, was the first American clergyman to preach evolution from the pulpit, in the 1870s.

Partnered on civil rights
Jumping ahead to the 20th century, Unitarian-Universalists were among the first predominantly white denominations to partner with African Americans on civil rights, and two Unitarians were martyred in Selma, Ala., in 1965 while registering African Americans to vote.

In 1984, the denomination became the first mainline church to approve homosexual unions. (Gay marriage still falls short of universal acceptance, but any reasonable analysis would surely conclude the trend is moving steadily in that direction.)

Despite this long record of being on the "winning side" of history on scores of cultural and theological issues, the denomination remains relatively small, about the same size today as when the Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961. Indeed, evidence would seem to suggest that, at least in the political realm, the U-U label carries greater risk today than in the past.

No less than five U.S. presidents have been Unitarian, including some of our most revered founders like John Adams and James Monroe, but there have been none since William Howard Taft. The last Unitarian who had a chance, Adlai Stevenson, was endorsed half a century ago.

It's hard to imagine a Unitarian-Universalist winning the presidential nomination of a major political party today. Indeed, the fact that Barack Obama's mother and grandparents attended Unitarian-Universalist churches prompted vitriolic attacks on websites such as the American Thinker in 2008, and Obama himself didn't exactly shout it from the rooftops.

Yet, for a religion that often faces scorn when it isn't being ignored, Unitarian-Universalism's approaches bleed into the culture regularly.

A familiar message
Dan Brown's novel, "The Lost Symbol," for example, underneath all its breathless, credulity-stretching secret codes, carries a message that would feel familiar in many a U-U gathering: that wisdom is found in the sacred books of all peoples (though U-Us would be quick to add there is also wisdom in the science books of all peoples, and the poetry books, too); that what we call the written word of God is "really the word of man" (though U-Us would surely substitute a more gender-neutral term); and that the very notion of God may actually be "a symbol of our limitless human potential" (the potential inherent in everyone is reflected in the denomination's Seven Principles).

A 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life found that "large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. ... Many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs. …"

What is this if not Unitarian-Universalism without the label? It is a denomination that, by its own description, "draws from the wisdom of the world religions, as well as the prophetic examples of great women and men, and our own direct experience of the divine."

If the polls are correct, millions of Americans follow this same approach.

Scoffers and adherents
While critics dismiss this "cafeteria" approach to belief, its practitioners find it empowering. Says folksinger and Unitarian Peter Mayer: "There is something powerful and even baffling about a church where one can find a Buddhist, a pagan, a Christian and an atheist all in the same pew, singing together about how beautiful and mysterious life is, and isn't it grand that we're all here, and let's try to make the world a better place."

This approach would appear to have strong appeal in the Twin Cities, which is home to four large Unitarian-Universalist congregations of 500 to 1,000 members and six smaller congregations of 200 members or fewer. That gives the local metro has the highest concentration of active Unitarian-Universalists per capita in the country, with the possible exception of Boston, one of the birthplaces of the denomination and home to the church's headquarters.

While those numbers may not compare with the mega-churches of the mainstream, don't sell today's Unitarian-Universalists short — they could prove equal to their forbearers in influencing tomorrow's culture out of all proportion to their numbers.

Rob Eller-Isaacs is a senior minister at Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul.