QUAKERS

QUAKERS . The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, arose in seventeenth-century England and America out of a shared experience of the Light and Spirit of God within each person. This source of worship, insight, and power they identify as the Spirit of Christ that also guided the biblical prophets and apostles. Quakers also affirm each person's ability to recognize and respond to truth and to obey the Light perfectly through the leading of an inner witness, or "Seed," called by some Quakers "Christ reborn in us" and by others "that of God in every [hu]man," out of which transformed personalities can grow. They therefore ask of each other, and of human society, uncompromising honesty, simplicity of life, nonviolence, and justice. Quakers have often been sensitive to new forms of social evil and creative in their programs to overcome them. Their worship has been based on silent waiting upon God without outward ritual.

The early Friends, as Quakers were named (from John 15:5) by their first leader George Fox, arose in England during the Puritan Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, manifesting an inward intensification of radical and spiritual forms of Puritanism; they were influenced by uncompromising Baptists, quietist Seekers, antinomian Ranters, and theocratic militants; and these were in turn influenced by English Lollards, by European Anabaptist Mennonites who rejected both the state and class inequality, and by mystics like Jakob Boehme and the Familists. Unlike their predecessors, Quakers held distinctive ideas on the purely inward nature of true baptism and Communion, on the ministry of all laymen and women, on God's power judging and working within hearts and history, and on the need for biblical events to be fulfilled within each person's life-story; but many of these ideas simply carried further those trends, already active in the mainstream of Protestant doctrine, that had turned English Christians from Catholics into Anglicans, and then into Presbyterians or radical Puritans. Indeed, many Quakers had fought in the Puritan armies of the English Civil War and had turned back from the futility of merely military millennia.

A regional mass awakening in the English Northwest, which had not been strongly reached by Puritanism or any other vital religious movement, sprang up in 1652 around George Fox and the Quaker preachers inspired by him. From open-air meetings on the Yorkshire, Westmorland, and Cumberland moors, groups were gathered who were convinced to sit under the Light, largely in silence, for months of anguished self-searching of their motives and habits. The name Quaker reflected the physical impact of their inner struggles to yield all self-will to the judgments and guidance of the Light until they could live purely and speak entirely by its "leadings." Only then would joy and love come.

The early Quaker mission throughout England, in 1654–1656, was presented as the "Day of Visitation" by the Lord to each town or region; newly transformed Friends spoke in markets and parish churches despite mobbing and arrests. In New England, Quakers challenging the "biblical commonwealth" were banished on pain of death, and Mary Dyer and three men were hanged in Boston. The pope and the sultan of Turkey had been visited but not converted. To Quakers, Puritan apocalyptic hopes for God's cosmic victory over evil seemed fulfilled as through their work the spirit of Christ conquered the world nonviolently in "the Lamb's war" (Rev. 19:11–15). Outward violence they saw as only the devil's distraction, injuring God's good physical creation. All early Quaker ethical standards were part of the crucial inward war of truth against human pride and, thus, were sure to arouse anger; among them were the use of "thee" and "thou" to individuals, the making of true statements without oaths, the refusal of titles such as sir, doctor, and my lady, and the refusal of hat honor and of tithe taxes to state churches.

To persecution for these offenses under the Puritans was added, after the restoration of Charles II, mass arrests—due to the Anglicans' Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670. Out of fifty thousand Friends, five hundred died in jail. Quaker courage won over to Quakerism such leaders as William Penn, the mystic Isaac Penington, and the theologian Robert Barclay. Quaker ethical testimonies of speech and dress and the continuing of silent Meetings for worship were increasingly stressed as badges of loyalty and as the fruits of the Spirit guiding "the sense of the Meeting."

The formal network of Quaker Meetings for Business, held monthly for a town, quarterly for a county, or yearly for a state or nation, was set up to replace reliance on individual leaders. The duties of these Meetings were to register births, marriages, and burials and to aid prisoners, widows, and poor Friends. Fox insisted after 1670 on independent Women's Meetings for Business throughout Quakerism. The monthly Meeting for Sufferings in London and local Meetings recorded imprisonments, oversaw publication of Quaker books, and disowned actions untrue to Quaker norms, disavowing those who so acted until they renounced their acts. Later, Yearly Meeting Epistles and Queries became regular parts of Quaker books of discipline.

Quaker theological writings began with 461 wordy debate tracts poured out by Fox and all other major Quaker leaders to answer the charges made by anti-Quaker writings; Penn wrote more systematically on the universality of the saving Light; Robert Barclay's 1678 Apology became the most-read statement of Quaker beliefs and worship, presenting the Bible as testimony to authentically inspired experience, parallel to that of the Friends. In Barclay's words, the death of Jesus atones for past sins, but the power of the Spirit can purify from sinning in the present. The cross stands for self-renunciation. The essence of the sacraments is inner washing, nurture, and Christ's real presence in worship; outward water, bread, and wine are needless. Ministry and even prayer must wait for and result from direct divine leading.

Toleration was always a concern for Friends: their arguments early turned from protests against persecution of God's messengers to moral, rational, and pragmatic appeals. Penn spoke for increasing groups of Englishmen convinced of the need to allow dissenting or nonconformist worship outside the national Anglican church, which led both to the Toleration Act of 1689 and the tradition of liberal Protestant reformers; he made moral appeals to all consciences, advising nonviolence and loyal opposition to government policies and people in power.

Quaker governments were set up in 1675 and 1682 by Edward Billing and Penn in their new colonies of West New Jersey and Pennsylvania; the charters of these governments mandated toleration and political and legal rights for all including the Delaware Indians. Yet even after Quakers had become a minority in these colonies, all citizens' consciences were expected to concur with the Quakers' in rejecting forts and arms, oaths, most capital punishment, and the slave trade. England's wars with France forced increasingly unacceptable compromises on Pennsylvania Quaker legislators, most of whom resigned in 1755–1758. By tender persuasion, John Woolman and others led Quakers also to make collectively the harder decision to liberate their slaves and disown Quaker slave owners. Friends were jailed and fined throughout America in the wars of 1755–1763 and 1812 and during the Revolution; the few Friends who joined or paid for the militias were disowned by their Meetings.

Friendship with the American Indians was a Quaker policy: a Quaker committee shared in peace negotiations in 1756–1758 and 1763–1768, and others set up schools and mediation for the New York Senecas and for the Shawnees and other tribes evicted from Ohio and sent to Oklahoma after 1830. In the 1870s, President Grant asked Friends to administer the Indian Agencies of Kansas-Nebraska.

The antislavery work of British and American Quakers and their allies helped to end legal slave trade in both countries in 1807, but tension piled up against Quakers such as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Lucretia Mott, and the Grimke sisters (pioneers also in the women's rights movement) who advocated immediate national abolition of slave-owning. Many Quakers felt driven for the first time to break laws secretly in order to protect fugitive slaves through the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, southern Quakers suffered much; northern Friends were inwardly torn; some enlisted to fight. In England, John Bright sacrificed his parliamentary career to oppose both England's entry into the Crimean War and cotton mill owners' support for the American Confederacy.

Change and growth characterized Quaker activities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Eighteenth-century English industry, banking, and science were increasingly led by the interbred Quaker families of Darbys, Barclays, Lloyds, and Gurneys, who (notably Elizabeth Fry) also pioneered in reforming prisons, mental hospitals, and education for Quaker youth and the poor. Philadelphia Friends emulated them. Quaker worship, watchful against self-will, rationalism, and emotionalism had turned quietist. Among non-Quaker partners in trade or philanthropy, an evangelical orthodoxy that returned to the Bible and Christ's atonement was resurgent and began after 1800 to shape the experience of urban Quakers such as banker Joseph John Gurney, who wrote theology and traveled in America. Community revivals and regional awakenings further stimulated evangelicalism in both the creed and the experience of fifty thousand Friends who between 1795 and 1828 had been drawn to the American frontier in Ohio and Indiana from Virginia, the Carolinas, New England, and Pennsylvania by the promise of open land and freedom from slave-owning neighbors.

The 1827–1828 separation was initiated by the preaching of quietism and the urging of a boycott of slave-made products by Elias Hicks, the patriarchal farmer from New York State. The breach was widened by the influence of evangelical English Quakers traveling in America and disciplinary acts of evangelical urban elders. Friends from older close-knit rural Meetings who withdrew in protest from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting did not foresee that the split would extend to Yearly Meetings and most Monthly Meetings, as well as to schools and committees in New York, Baltimore, Ohio, and Indiana, and that it would continue permanently.

New methods of revivalism begun after 1830 by Charles G. Finney in midwestern America seemed to the Rhode Island Quaker John Wilbur to be reflected in Gurney's Bible study methods. Rural Wilburite Friends, evangelical in doctrine but rejecting evangelism, were driven in 1846 into a second split, followed by like-minded Friends in Ohio and Canada and later in Iowa and Carolina.

The word holiness, in midwestern revivals and Bible conferences after 1858, came to mean a sudden second work of grace totally purifying the hearts of already-converted Christians. This experience predominated in Quaker Holiness revivals in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa after 1867 led by John Henry Douglas and David Updegraff and others close to non-Quaker revivalists. Simultaneously, evangelical Friends were aroused to foreign mission projects in India, Japan, China, Jamaica, Cuba, Mexico, Kenya, Guatemala, Bolivia, and among both Indians and Inuit in Alaska.

Quaker organization and worship, not greatly changed since 1690, were now centered in the American Midwest on revivals and hymns and hence on pastors and superintendents, led by Douglas in Iowa and Oregon. By 1898 half the Meetings, even in Indiana, supported pastors and programmed worship with sermons and hymns and biblical Sunday schools. The Richmond Conference of 1887 gathered all orthodox Friends to look at these new patterns and to restrain Updegraff's advocacy of water baptism. The Richmond Declaration of Faith reaffirmed evangelical orthodoxy. Concern for unity led in 1902 to a formally gathered Five Years Meeting, which since 1960 has been called Friends United Meeting, and is still centered in Richmond, Indiana; it currently includes seven Orthodox (evangelical) American Yearly Meetings (mostly midwestern); the reunited Baltimore, Canadian, New England, New York, and Southeastern Yearly Meetings; three Yearly Meetings in Kenya; and one each in Cuba, Jamaica, and Palestine arising from missions. Their total 2002 membership was 34,863 in North America and about 100,000 overseas. The year 1902 also saw the gathering of Hicksite Yearly Meetings into the Friends General Conference, centered in Philadelphia, with a 2002 membership of 34,557, including Yearly Meetings of "silent Meeting Friends" in western and midwestern cities and colleges. The three Wilburite or Conservative Yearly Meetings had shrunk by 1981 to a membership of 1,832. Intensifying of the biblical and Holiness concentration, however, drove evangelical Yearly Meetings of Ohio, Kansas, and Oregon out of the Richmond network and led in 1961 to their forming the Evangelical Friends Alliance, to which were added other Friends Churches, some begun by Quaker missions in Asia and Latin America. In 1998, there remained 20,000 Friends in England and Scotland, 1,750 in Ireland as of 1985, approximately 3,000 in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as of 1996, and 20 to 400 each in eight post-1918 Yearly Meetings in nations of continental Europe.

Quaker universalism and mysticism were replacing quietism as the central religious experience of many Hicksite and British Friends even before Rufus Jones, student and teacher at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, drew on Emerson and European mystics to make normative for their language "positive" or "ethical mysticism" and the experience of the soul's unity with "the divine in every [hu]man." Quaker education and service programs became linked to these humanitarian or humanist ideas. Rufus Jones channeled the service of Quaker conscientious objectors in World War I by helping to found the American Friends Service Committee, which then joined with the older British War Victims Relief and Friends Service Council in feeding two million German children and many victims of the 1922 Russian famine. The 1929–1939 Depression and World War II prompted Quaker interest in their own nations' unemployed and then in issues of world peace. In 1943 the Friends Committee on National Legislation was formed to coordinate and lobby for Quaker ideals in American policy. Quaker schools of all levels moved away from the guarded education of a purist sect toward a humanism aimed at developing the whole person. American colleges of Quaker origin (Haverford, Guilford, Earlham, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and others) and the famous Quaker secondary boarding schools on both continents increasingly draw brilliant students of all faiths and none. Graduate study centers have been set up at Woodbrooke by the Cadbury family and at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. The Earlham School of Religion trains all branches of Friends for ministry of all kinds.

New patterns of unity and division have emerged since the 1960s. Conferences, international visits, and sharing of theological concerns are sponsored by the Friends World Committee for Consultation. Increasingly periodicals such as Friends Quarterly and The Friend in England and Quaker Life, Friends Journal, and The Evangelical Friend in America transcend Quaker divisions. Reunion of Yearly Meetings and local Meetings from the Hicksite separations have occurred in Philadelphia, Canada, New York, and Baltimore. Young Friends, who have often led Quakers into new ways, are concerned now with nuclear arms, communes, and new foundations in theology.

See Also

Fox, George; Penn, William; Puritanism; Quietism.

Bibliography

The Journal of George Fox, edited by Thomas Ellwood (1694; reprint, Richmond, Ind., 1983); John Woolman's Journal (1774; reprint, New York, 1971); Robert Barclay's Apology (1676; reprint, Newport, R.I., 1729); and William Penn's No Cross, No Crown (London, 1669) remain the central classics of the Friends. The Papers of William Penn (Philadelphia, 1987) photocopies of The Works of George Fox, 3 vols. (1831; New York, 1975), and A Collection of the Works of William Penn, 2 vols. (1727; New York, 1974), are in print. Other primary sources are in Early Quaker Writings, 1650–1700, edited by Hugh Barbour and Arthur O. Roberts (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1973).

Joseph Smith's Descriptive Catalogue of Friends Books, 2 vols. (London, 1867), remains the most complete bibliography, but see also Donald Wing's Short-Title Catalogue of Books … 1641–1700, 3 vols. (New York, 1945–1951). Leonard Hodgson's Christian Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1950), with topical selections from all periods, and Church Government, rev. ed. (London, 1951), together make up the London Yearly Meeting's Book of Discipline ; those of other Yearly Meetings are less complete.

William C. Braithwaite's The Beginnings of Quakerism (1912; 2d ed., Cambridge, U.K., 1955) and The Second Period of Quakerism (1919; reprint, Cambridge, U.K., 1961), together with Rufus M. Jones's studies titled The Later Periods of Quakerism, 2 vols. (1921; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1970), and The Quakers in the American Colonies (1911; reprint, New York, 1962) were designed to form the normative "Rowntree Series," based on documentary work by Norman Penney. A. Neave Brayshaw's The Quakers (London, 1921) combines history and ideas, as do Howard Brinton's study of Quaker mysticism titled Friends for Three Hundred Years (New York, 1952) and John Punshon's Portrait in Grey (London, 1984). Each is an outstanding interpretation. Elbert Russell's The History of Quakerism (1945; reprint, Richmond, Ind., 1980), centered on America, with Efrida Vipont Foulds's The Story of Quakerism (London, 1954). Both are good one-volume histories.

Each Yearly Meeting has a printed history, and biographies have been written of most key Quakers. On early Quaker history, see various works by Edwin Bronner and Frederick Tolles; on the eighteenth century, by Sydney James and Arthur Raistrick; and on the nineteenth, by J. Ormerod Greenwood, Elizabeth Isichei, and Philip Benjamin. On Quaker ethical outlooks and doctrines, especially for the early periods, Richard Bauman's Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth Century Quakers (Cambridge, U.K., 1983), Melvin B. Endy, Jr.'s William Penn and Early Quakerism (Princeton, N.J., 1973), J. William Frost's The Quaker Family in Colonial America (New York, 1973), and works by Hugh Barbour, Lewis Benson, Maurice Creasey, Christopher Hill, and Geoffrey Nuttall give solid data and a variety of insights. Thomas R. Kelly's A Testament of Devotion, 6th ed. (New York, 1941), remains beloved as inspiration.

New Sources

Benefiel, M., and R. D. Phipps. "Practical Mysticism: Quakers and Social Transformation." In Mysticism and Social Transformation, edited by Janet Ruffing, pp. 129–142. Syracuse, N.Y., 2001.

Steinkraus, W. E. "Quaker Mysticism." In Mysticism and the Mystical Experience: East and West, edited by Donald H. Bishop, pp. 110–132. Selinsgrove, Pa., 1995.

Hugh Barbour (1987)

Revised Bibliography