Henry Ward Beecher was a very liberal pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. While being there he allowed Unitarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley, and even the agnostic Mark Twain to share his pulpit. Henry Beecher once argued “that a Sharps rifle held a better argument than a Bible for persuading slaveholders--hence these rifles were nicknamed ‘Beecher’s Bibles’ when used to combat the spread of slavery in the Kansas Territory before the American Civil War” (http://www.embassy.org.nz/encycl/ulencyc.htm).
The Beecher’s were related to Julia Ward Howe. She was a Unitarian Universalist and wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is unbiblical for two obvious reasons. One, she called God’s alter with “the watch fires of a hundred circling camps.” Secondly, claimed that His gospel was “writ in burnsh’d rows of steel.”
