Friends, Society of

known as Quakers

Protestant denomination that arose in England in the mid-17th century.

The movement began with radical English Puritans called Seekers, who rejected the Anglican church and other existing Protestant sects. They took their faith from itinerant preachers such as George Fox, who emphasized "inward light," or inward apprehension of God, as the source of religious authority. Quaker meetings are characterized by patient silence in which members wait for inspiration to speak. The movement grew rapidly after 1650 (when a judge gave them their name because "we bid them tremble at the word of God"), but its members were often persecuted or imprisoned for rejecting the state church and refusing to pay tithes or swear oaths. Some emigrated to America, where they were persecuted in Massachusetts Bay Colony but found toleration in Rhode Island and in the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, which was chartered by Charles II under the sponsorship of William Penn in 1681. Other marks that became characteristic of Quakerism were plain speech and dress, pacifism, and opposition to slavery. The group also emphasizes philanthropy, especially aid to refugees and famine victims; the American Friends Service Committee and (British) Friends Service Council shared the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize.

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▪ religion

Introduction

also called  Friends Church , byname  Quakers 

      Christian group that arose in mid-17th-century England, dedicated to living in accordance with the “Inward Light (Inner Light),” or direct inward apprehension of God, without creeds, clergy, or other ecclesiastical forms. As most powerfully expressed by George Fox (Fox, George) (1624–91), Friends felt that their “experimental” discovery of God would lead to the purification of all of Christendom. It did not; but Friends founded one American colony and were dominant for a time in several others, and though their numbers are now comparatively small, they continue to make disproportionate contributions to science, industry, and especially to the Christian effort for social reform.

History

The rise of Quakerism

      There were meetings of the kind later associated with the Quakers before there was a group by that name. Small groups of Seekers (Seeker) gathered during the Puritan Revolution against Charles I to wait upon the Lord because they despaired of spiritual help either from the established Anglican Church or the existing Puritan bodies—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists—through which most of them had already passed. To these Seekers came a band of preachers, mostly from the north of England, proclaiming the powers of direct contact with God. Fox and James Nayler were perhaps the most eminent of these, but Edward Burrough, William Dewsbury, and Richard Farnworth also were active. The cradle of the movement was Swarthmore (Swarthmoor) Hall in northwestern Lancashire, which after 1652 became the centre of an evangelistic campaign by traveling ministers. Within a decade perhaps 20,000 to 60,000 had been converted from all social classes except the aristocracy and totally unskilled labourers. Heaviest concentrations were in the north, Bristol, the counties around London, and London itself. Traveling Friends and Cromwellian soldiers brought Quakerism to the new English settlements in Ireland; Wales and especially Scotland were less affected.

      The Puritan (Puritanism) clergy, in England and New England, greeted the rise of Quakerism with the fury that an old left often reserves for a new. Friends' religious style was impulsive and nonideological; Quakers seemed to ignore the orthodox views of the Puritans and pervert their heterodox ones. Though most Friends had passed through varieties of Puritanism, they carried the emphasis on a direct relationship between the believer and God far beyond what Puritans deemed tolerable. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 was only a change of persecutors for the Quakers, with their former tormentors now sharing some of their sufferings. From the Quaker Act of 1662 until the de facto toleration of James II in 1686 (de jure toleration came in the Toleration Act of 1689), Friends were hounded by penal laws for not swearing oaths, for not going to the services of the Church of England, for going to Quaker meetings, and for refusing tithes. Some 15,000 suffered under these laws, and almost 500 died in or shortly after being in prison, but they continued to grow in numbers until the turn of the century.

      At the same time Quakers were converting and peopling America. In 1656 Quaker women preachers began work in Maryland and in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The magistrates of Boston savagely persecuted the visitors and in 1659 and 1661 put four of them to death. Despite this, Quakerism took root in Massachusetts and flourished in Rhode Island, where Friends for a long time were in the majority. There were also many Friends in New Jersey, where English Quakers early secured a patent for settlement, and in North Carolina. Yearly meetings were established for New England (1661), Maryland (1672), Virginia (1673), Philadelphia (1681), New York (1695), and North Carolina (1698). The most famous Quaker colony was Pennsylvania, for which Charles II issued a charter to William Penn (Penn, William) in 1681. Penn's “Holy Experiment” tested how far a state could be governed consistently with Friends' principles, especially pacifism and religious toleration. Toleration would allow colonists of other faiths to settle freely and perhaps become a majority; consistent pacifism would leave the colony without military defenses against enemies who might have been provoked by the other settlers. Penn, entangled in English affairs, spent little time in Pennsylvania and showed erratic judgment in selecting his non-Quaker deputies, who were almost always at odds with the Quaker-dominated legislature. Penn also went bankrupt through mismanagement; but the Quaker influence in Pennsylvania politics remained paramount until 1756, when legislators who were Friends could no longer find a saving formula allowing them to vote support for military operations against the French and Indians fighting settlers in western Pennsylvania. Voltaire's description of Penn's agreements with the Indians as the only treaties never sworn to and never violated was exaggerated; but Friends' relations with the Indians (Native American) were more peaceful than those of other settlers.

The age of Quietism

      The achievement of religious toleration in the 1690s coincided with a quietist phase in Quakerism that lasted until the 19th century. Quietism is endemic within Quakerism and emerges whenever trust in the Inward Light is stressed to the exclusion of everything else. It suits a time when little outward activity is demanded and when the peculiar traditions of a group seem particularly worth emphasizing. In the 18th century Friends had gained most of their political objectives. Their special language and dress, originally justified as a witness for honesty, simplicity, and equality, became password and uniform of a group now 75 to 90 percent composed of second- and third-generation Quakers. Strict enforcement of rules prohibiting marriage without parents' consent or to nonmembers led to the disownment, according to one estimate, of a third of the English Friends who got married in the latter half of the 18th century. More were disowned than converted, and since most members were the children of members, it is not surprising that Friends eventually came to recognize a category of “birthright” membership, which seemed to relax the expectation of conversion.

      Seemingly self-absorbed in other ways, Friends in the age of quietism intensified their social concerns. English Friends were active in the campaign to end the slave trade (slavery), and American Friends, urged on by John Woolman (Woolman, John) and others, voluntarily emancipated all their own slaves between 1758 and 1800. Meetings, though slow to adopt this concern, pursued it thoroughly; in Rhode Island Stephen Hopkins, who was governor nine times, was disowned because he would not free his one slave.

The impact of evangelicalism

      Cooperation with other Christians in the antislavery cause gradually led Friends out of their secluded religious life. They also came closer to other Protestants through the evangelical movement originally associated with John (Wesley, John) and Charles Wesley (Wesley, Charles). Evangelical Friends were concerned with emphasizing the inerrancy and uniqueness of the Bible, the incarnation and atonement of Christ, and other characteristic Protestant doctrines which, although seldom denied outright by Friends, had tended to be subordinated to the quietistic emphasis on the Inward Light. In the early 19th century most leading English Friends were sympathetic to evangelical ideas, although they did not lose their unity with more traditional-minded Friends.

      In the United States unity proved more difficult. Friends had gone west—from Virginia and North Carolina because of difficulties over slavery, but also from Pennsylvania. As new yearly meetings were formed—Ohio (1812), Indiana (1821), Iowa (1863), Kansas (1872), Oregon (1893), California (1895), and Nebraska (1908), among others—ties with the London Yearly Meeting, the “mother” meeting, became weaker, and no American yearly meeting had a predominant position. Leaders of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, mostly rich merchants with strong ties to England, were sympathetic to evangelicalism; but many poorer country Friends left the meeting, no longer feeling a unity with the beliefs of the Philadelphia ministers and elders or with the way they exercised their authority. Elias Hicks (Hicks, Elias) (1748–1830), whose name was applied to these separatists, placed extreme emphasis on the Inward Light; he wrote that it might be a good thing if God withdrew the Bible, since he could inspire worshipers to write new scriptures that would probably be better than the originals. Since the various American yearly meetings corresponded with one another, the Hicksite separation spread to other yearly meetings that had to decide to which portion of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to write. A pastoral visit to the United States (1837–40) by the leading English evangelical Friend, Joseph John Gurney (one of the few systematic theologians ever produced in the Society of Friends), led to a further separation when the evangelical or “Gurneyite” New England Yearly Meeting disowned John Wilbur, an orthodox quietist Friend.

      Schism is often a sign of religious vitality, and so it proved then. Whether Hicksite, Wilburite, or Gurneyite, all branches of Quakerism began to show vigour unknown in their days of torpid unity. With more vital preaching, many converts not devoted to the inherited peculiarities of Quaker tradition joined Friends; to them it seemed more important to assure a saving ministry than to preserve the traditional mode of worship. There thus grew up, especially in the Midwest and Far West, “pastoral meetings” in which a paid minister assumed the functions of delivering a sermon and exercising pastoral care of members. Such meetings often called themselves “Friends' Churches”; congregational singing was a part of the service, which might have only a few moments of silence, and baptismal and marriage ceremonies were introduced. In doctrine, worship, and polity they were not unlike Congregational churches, though they remained faithful to Friends' social testimonies. Even in England, where such innovations were not introduced, Friends, under the influence of the evangelical revival, discontinued disownment for irregular marriages and curtailed the powers of elders and overseers, which had been a profoundly conservative force.

The 20th century

      Friends in 1900 were divided into three groups. Yearly meetings of evangelical, or “orthodox,” Friends were in fellowship with one another and with the London and Dublin yearly meetings. In the United States these Gurneyite meetings in 1902 formed the Five Years' Meeting (now the Friends United Meeting). The “conservative” American yearly meetings, in fellowship with one another, maintained traditional Quaker customs and mode of worship. The Hicksite yearly meetings, which formed the Friends General Conference in 1902, remained the most open to modern thought. During the century these divisions have been much softened. Theological distinctions have receded in importance, and the habit of cooperation in such agencies as the American Friends Service Committee has drawn Friends together.

      The 20th century has also seen the extension of Quakerism to Africa and continental Europe. Quakerism took root in the Netherlands in the 17th century but died out in the mid-19th, as did groups in Congéniès, France, and Bad Pyrmont, Germany. Quaker relief work in World War I and its aftermath produced new yearly meetings in Germany, The Netherlands, France, Sweden, and Switzerland, but numbers remain small.

The influence of Quakers

      Quaker customs and the exclusion of Friends from many professions in England concentrated their secular achievements. Plainness meant that painting, music, and the theatre were proscribed. For a century trust in the Inward Light inhibited the foundation of colleges (though in the 19th century American Friends founded colleges like Earlham, Haverford, and Swarthmore; and individual Friends founded Bryn Mawr College, Cornell University, and Johns Hopkins University). Friends' schools emphasized science (Royal Society); the chemist John Dalton, the geneticist Francis Galton, the anthropologist E.B. Tylor, the astronomer Arthur Eddington, and Joseph Lister, discoverer of antisepsis, were Friends. In trade Friends were trusted and got customers; they trusted one another and extended credit; thus the many successful Quaker firms and banks, of which Barclay's and Lloyd's (Lloyds TSB Group PLC) are the best known. Friends also pioneered in inventions, developing the puddling process for iron and the safety match and promoting the first English railroad line.

      Disdaining formal education and a clerical intelligentsia, Friends, not surprisingly, often failed theologically (that is, could not solve some of the intellectual problems of their faith). But they would agree with the 19th-century Danish religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard that “the highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.”

Teachings

      The “public testimonies” of Friends from the very beginning included the plain speech and dress and refusal of tithes, oaths, and worldly courtesies. To these was added in a few years an explicit renunciation of participation in war; within the next century bankruptcy, marriage out of meeting, smuggling, and dealing in or owning slaves also became practices for which an unrepentant Friend would be disowned. These latter, especially those relating to slavery, became matters for discipline because a comparative minority of Friends persuaded the rest that they were inconsistent with Friends' principles.

      But not all social concerns were corporate in this sense or were enforced by sanctions. Friends' relief work, for example, has usually arisen from an individual response to suffering, often as the result of war. From the time of the American Revolution Quakers have been active in ministering to refugees and victims of famine—so much so that the entire Society of Friends is sometimes taken for a philanthropic organization; yet this work, recognized in 1947 by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the American Friends Service Committee and the (British) Friends Service Council, has mobilized many non-Quakers and thus exemplifies the interaction between the Quaker conscience and the wider world.

      Yet the Society of Friends is grounded in the experience of God, out of which philanthropic activities may flow. There have always been Friends whose concerns went well beyond what meetings were willing to adopt. Most Friends were not abolitionists before the American Civil War; they probably did not approve of the Underground Railroad nor share the early feminist views of Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony. (Most of the early suffragist leaders in America were Quakers.) The two American presidents of Quaker background were both Republicans: Herbert Hoove (Hoover, Herbert)r and Richard M. Nixon (Nixon, Richard M.). Often the issue has been the relationship between private witness and public policy. Some Quaker pacifists make an absolute personal stand against war (for example, by refusing to register for selective service and thus forfeiting conscientious objectors' status); others are more willing to sacrifice absolute purity by working for an alleviation of international tensions even at the cost of less rigorous application of their principles.

Worship and organization

The Inward Light

      Trust in the Inward Light is the distinctive theme of Quakerism. The Light should not be confused with conscience or reason; it is rather that of God in everyone, which allows human beings an immediate sense of God's presence and will for them. It thus informs conscience and redirects reason. The experience of hearkening to this inner Guide is mystical, but corporate and practical. Meetings to worship God and await his word (always open to anyone who wishes to come) are essential to Quaker faith and practice. Although the inward Seed can work in a solitary person, Friends do not meditate like monks, isolated in their cells. It is in the pregnant silence of the meeting of true waiters and worshipers (worship) that the Spirit speaks. Sometimes the meeting is too dull or worldly for any message to be heard, and sometimes there are altogether silent meetings. Although these are spiritually beneficial to the participants, ideally someone has reached a new understanding that demands to be proclaimed. He or she—for Friends have always given women equality in worship—speaks or prays and thus ministers to the meeting, which weighs this “testimony” by its own experiences of God. Friends historically have rejected a formal or salaried clergy as a “hireling ministry.” If God can provide his own living testimony, the Bible and the learning necessary to read it can take a subordinate place, and creeds and outward sacraments can be dispensed with altogether. But despite their emphasis on silent waiting and their distrust of “creaturely” activity, Friends are no more habituated to passive than to solitary meditation. Often the “opening” of the Inward Light is a “concern” for the sufferings of others and a mandate laid upon the conscience to take action to alleviate that suffering. Such concerns typically are laid before a meeting and thoroughly considered; there must be a consensus for any corporate action. But slow as such action sometimes is, Friends have taken the lead in opposing slavery, brutality in prisons and insane asylums, oppression of women, militarism, and war.

Polity

      Insofar as George Fox was the founder of Quakerism, he was so chiefly because of the system of meetings for church business that he established in the years immediately after 1667, which essentially stands today. Most important is the monthly meeting, which considers all applications for membership, in some localities manages Friends' properties, and acts on members' concerns. Generally, in the United States each congregation has a monthly meeting; in England and in some parts of the United States several meetings for worship combine in monthly meeting. Several monthly meetings form quarterly meetings, which are combined in yearly meetings.

      This array is less hierarchical than it sounds. Any Friends can attend any meeting, which tries to remain open to the concerns or the service they can perform (much in the spirit of a meeting for worship). There is an official, the clerk, but the responsibility of the clerk is not to preside in a parliamentary manner but rather to feel for a “sense of the meeting,” which draws together the thinking of the meeting to the point of action.

      Though Friends have no ordination, they have always given a special place to Recorded Ministers (or Public Friends). Recorded Ministers are those whose testimony in local meetings has been officially recognized; they are free to “travel in the ministry” by visiting other meetings, should they be led to do so. Pastoral meetings maintain their Recorded Ministers, who also do much of the work of seeing to the relief of the poor, care of properties, and discipline of erring members. Ministers have usually had their own meetings together, and in most yearly meetings executive responsibility had been taken by a meeting like the Meeting for Sufferings in London (these are also called Representative meetings or committees or Permanent boards). London Meeting for Sufferings in the 17th century served as a political pressure group, lobbying Parliament for relief from persecution, coordinating legal strategy, and using the press for public appeals; in the 19th century they broadened their concerns to respond to sufferings everywhere.

Quakerism and world Christianity

      The cause of schisms in the past—the tension between entire reliance on the Inward Light and the profession of orthodox Christian doctrines—remains unresolved. As it has divided Friends among themselves, it has also tended to separate them from other Christians. The London Yearly Meeting in 1940 declined to join the World Council of Churches out of uneasiness with its creedal basis, though some U.S. groups of Friends sent delegates to the first meeting of the council in 1948. Looked at in the context of Christendom as a whole, Friends offer a distinctive opportunity for spontaneity of worship, fellowship in mysticism, and proving mystical insight in labour for a suffering world. Many alienated from institutional Christianity have found this combination attractive; they may well feel more comfortable identifying themselves as Friends than as Protestants or even as Christians. This may make it more difficult for Quakerism to be subsumed into a reunited Christian church; but the faith of most Friends has always been that of Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus: as “we do the work of Christ we shall come to know who he is.”

Richard T. Vann

Additional Reading

Good introductions to Quakerism may be found in Friends World Committee for Consultation, Handbook of the Religious Society of Friends, 5th ed. (1967); and in the interpretation by D. Elton Trueblood, The People Called Quakers (1966, reissued 1971). The standard histories are William Charles Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism, 2nd ed. rev. by Henry J. Cadbury (1955, reissued 1970), and a companion volume, The Second Period of Quakerism, 2nd ed. rev. by Henry J. Cadbury (1961, reissued 1979); and Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (1911, reissued 1966), and The Later Periods of Quakerism, 2 vol. (1921, reprinted 1970). More specialized works include Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (1970); Richard T. Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism, 1655–1755 (1969); Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (1984); Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (1985); and Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn (eds.), The Papers of William Penn (1981– ), with 4 vol. published by 1987. The masterpiece of Quaker theology is Robert Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1678, reissued 1967; originally published in Latin, 1676). William Charles Braithwaite, Spiritual Guidance in the Experience of the Society of Friends (1909, reissued 1941), best explains how Friends' polity should work. See also Gladys Wilson, Quaker Worship: An Introductory Historical Study of the English Friends' Meeting (1952); and Clarence E. Pickett, For More Than Bread: An Autobiographical Account of Twenty-Two Years Work with the American Friends Service Committee (1953). Quaker social thought on contemporary issues may be found in Stella Alexander (comp.), Quaker Testimony Against Slavery and Racial Discrimination: An Anthology (1958); and Towards a Quaker View of Sex: An Essay, rev. ed. (1964, reprinted 1976), published by the Friends Home Service Committee.Richard T. Vann

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