American theologian who for more than 50 years was an influential leader in the Universalist church.

Converted in 1789 to a belief in universal salvation, he began preaching that doctrine on a Calvinist basis, substituting for John Calvin's concept of salvation of the “elect” a concept of salvation that included all of humanity. Ballou reexamined Calvinist tenets further, however, under the influence of Ethan Allen's deistic Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784), and in A Treatise on Atonement (1805) Ballou presented his own version of Universalist theology. In 1809 he became a pastor in Portsmouth, N.H.; in 1815 he moved to Salem, Mass.; and from December 1817 until his death he was pastor of the Second Universalist Church in Boston.

Stressing the use of reason in religious thinking, Ballou shifted Universalism from its belief in a three-person Godhead to a unitarian basis that did not see God as having separately personified attributes or functions. He also discarded the doctrines of original sin and vicarious atonement, believing that Christ died not to reconcile man to God but to demonstrate God's unchanging love for man. From 1817 Ballou held that punishment for sin is limited to earthly life and that at death the soul is purified by divine love and enters immortality. The ensuing controversy resulted in the secession of the Restorationists, who believed in a limited period of punishment in the afterlife; Ballou gave his views in this dispute in An Examination of the Doctrine of Future Retribution (1834).

Among his many other writings are some 10,000 sermons and numerous hymns and essays. He founded and edited The Universalist Magazine (1819) and The Universalist Expositor (1830). On the Expositor (later The Universalist Quarterly and General Review) he was assisted by his nephew, also named Hosea Ballou (1796–1861), who continued the work of the Universalist church and was the first president of Tufts College, later Tufts University.