Quakers

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Quakers

Members of the Religious Society of Friends, popularly known as Quakers, have never been dominant in number, but their influence on American culture has surpassed their size. With roots in radical Christian movements of seventeenth-century England, Quakers linked their religious experiences and convictions with their daily lives in ways that placed them at the center of controversy and cast them into leadership roles in movements advocating reform and social justice. While their worship practices have changed over four centuries, the Quaker commitments to pacifism and to social equality have remained constant, making their history particularly relevant in understanding Quakerism today.

Like Puritanism, Quakerism arose amid the social and religious upheaval of the Protestant Reformation in England. Initially Quakers shared the Puritan desire to reform the Church of England, but by the 1650s, when George Fox, credited with founding the Society of Friends, began preaching in northern England, differences between the Quakers and the Calvinistic Puritans were already evident. Most important among these differences, the Puritan doctrine of election ran counter to the more democratic and universalist Quaker belief in the Inner Light. Unlike the Puritans, who believed salvation to be limited to those predestined to be among God's elect, the Quakers believed that everyone had the capacity for salvation and that one had only to turn inward to be saved. The nickname "Quaker" reflected the physical shaking early Friends sometimes exhibited as they wrestled to find the Light within themselves.

The Inner Light is central to Quaker religious practices. Early Quaker worship was marked by silence, when Meetings sat quietly waiting for God to lead someone to speak. Early Friends wrote of the difficulty in finding a balance between inappropriate speech and the need to wisely use every opportunity to speak when God leads one to do so. The Inner Light also mandates that Quaker actions follow "testimonies" of honesty, simplicity, equality, and peace. Adherence to these ethical principles has placed Quakers in conflicted positions throughout American history.

From their earliest arrival in the American colonies, Quakers were seen as a "peculiar people." Their plain style of dress in adherence to their testimony of simplicity, their use of "thee" and "thou" to address all persons regardless of class or title, their refusal to remove their hats as a sign of deference that would violate their testimony of equality, and their refusal to take oaths in a court of law because it would imply that they were at other times less honest—these practices set them apart from the dominant culture. More importantly, however, their belief in the Inner Light threatened the foundations of Puritan culture, making the early Quakers seem like dangerous heretics who could not be allowed to spread their message in the colonies. When the first Quakers in America, Mary Austin and Anne Fisher, arrived in Boston in 1656, they were imprisoned as witches and their books burned. This harsh treatment notwithstanding, Quakers continued to arrive in increasing numbers, and anti-Quaker laws proliferated throughout the colonies. By 1658, punishment for Quakerism included imprisonment, deportation, whipping, ear-cropping, and death for repeat offenders. Among the most famous of these repeat offenders was Mary Dyer, who was hanged in Boston Common and symbolized Quaker martyrdom for later generations. At the end of the seventeenth century, almost every New England and mid-Atlantic colony had enacted anti-Quaker legislation, much of it reserving the harshest punishments for local converts to Quakerism.

The eighteenth-century Quaker population grew, and brutal persecutions of Quakers ceased. Owing to large land grants in Pennsylvania and in western New Jersey, Quakers were concentrated the mid-Atlantic colonies. Friends in these areas became successful, wealthy businessmen, and their names appeared in almost every list of political, legal, and civic leaders. One of the challenges facing eighteenth-century Quakers was how to reconcile their financial success with their testimony of simplicity. As the Revolution loomed large, Quakers also faced tests of their pacifist beliefs. Rather than violate Quaker practice that mandated strict neutrality and noninvolvement in war efforts, most Quakers relinquished their positions of political power. Even with diminished political power, the Quaker presence spread. Friends migrated westward into the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia and also moved southwest, to the Carolina Piedmont. By the 1790s, Quaker communities dotted the Ohio Valley and were spreading into the Midwest, with many of the migrants fleeing from southern states to protest slavery.

As Quakerism spread geographically, the consensus that characterized eighteenth-century Meetings could no longer hold. Nineteenth-century debates resulted in a series of schisms among the Society of Friends. Most severe among them was the separation in the 1820s between Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers. Following Elias Hicks, a quietist who called for greater strictures against commercialism and wealthy lifestyles, the Hicksites opposed the so-called Orthodox Friends, who had begun to find pure forms of quietism less useful in facing the challenges of their daily lives. Hicksite Meetings, composed largely of recent immigrants and rural Friends, gained dominance in many rural areas, while Orthodox Meetings, including members of the socially cohesive business community, remained dominant in Philadelphia and other urban centers.

Central to the lives of nineteenth-century Quakers were reform efforts. Quaker women led campaigns for prison reform and women's rights, with four of the five women responsible for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention being Quakers. From the 1830s onward, Quakers such as William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, and Lucretia Mott, heeding their testimony of equality, provided leadership in the abolitionist movement. When their peaceful efforts failed and the Civil War began, Friends faced traumatic decisions. Their testimony of peace in direct conflict with their testimony of equality, they were torn by their desire to support the Union cause, even though their faith prescribed complete neutrality. Many Quakers risked disownment and banishment from their Meeting by fighting in the war, and others found numerous ways to support them.

Beginning with these divisions and continuing through the twentieth century, the varieties of Quaker practices have become legion, with many contemporary Friends rejecting traditional quietism in favor of liberalism. What remain constant, however, are practices supporting the Quaker ethic. The American Friends Service Committee provides an institutionalized means of spreading the pacifist message and of renegotiating the meaning of the peace testimony in the face of global conflicts. Social justice and racial equality continue to be hallmarks of Quaker activism, with twentieth-century Quakers on the front lines of civil rights efforts, protests against the Vietnam War, and antinuclear activities.

Quakers are no longer a "peculiar people" marked by differences from the dominant culture, and contemporary Quaker Meetings are composed of members of that dominant culture, often attracting professional and working-class members dissatisfied with more mainstream denominations. If the image of Quakers has changed, their adherence to an ethics of peace and equality and their willingness to bring these beliefs into their daily lives link contemporary Friends to their seventeenth-century ancestors.