QT: We’d like to talk about your book, British Quakerism 1860-1920 (Oxford). In particular, can you reflect for us about the sections of your book dealing with the long struggle in London Yearly Meeting over the dominance of evangelical theology, and the group’s transition out of that. Is it possible to pick out two or three of what you thought were the key theological and institutional issues which were at stake there?

TK: The chief problem that emerges is the Light, attitudes toward the Inward Light, and the emerging evangelical attitude that this idea was a seventeenth century delusion of some sort. Connected with that is a sort of theological question about the Bible, its inerrancy and whether the Bible’s authority diminished that of the Light to the extent that it effectively became an irrelevancy. It [the Inward Light] wasn’t something that nineteenth century evangelical Friends were very concerned about, or felt was a part of their continuing tradition. So that struggle lasted a long time, and even lingers to some extent into this century.

QT: When you say that the struggle was over whether the biblical perspective made the Light Within perspective irrelevant or inap-plicable, what bearing did this view have on the idea that the Light Within had been a universal human thing? Wasn’t that part of it?

TK: Yes it was part of it, and the business of "Is the Light available to –or to put it a different way–if the Light is something that’s available to the unconverted, to the heathen, for instance–

QT: – Which Robert Barclay said it was–

TK: Yes, and this was a very strong point for those who were resisting the evangelical domination in London Yearly Meeting. This affected a whole range of things: for instance, the idea of "imputed righteousness," the idea of the substitutionary atonement [by Christ on the cross], that it was necessary to be "washed in the blood" in order to be saved. Also the second experience conversion [idea, or "holiness" theology], which arrived later in the England than it did in the United States. But it was one of the things that deeply concerned many conservative Friends–that’s one of the interesting juxtapositions: there was a strong Conservative Quaker tradition in England–

QT: – Was that "Conservative" in the American "Wilburite" sense?

TK: –Yes, very much so; it remained intact [rather than producing a separation], but it was not a tradition that was very intellectually stimulating, in fact what it wished to do was to keep things exactly as they believed they had been and should be. But this tradition was appalled by many of the attitudes and, as they saw, doctrines that were being brought into Friends from outside by evangelical Quakers.

On the opposite side were those who might be called the proto-liberal Quakers, and that group really emerges as a problem in Manchester in the early 1860s, around this local here whose name is David Duncan, a convinced Friend who came into Friends from the Presbyterians, and who was very much interested in the latest ideas, and who had easily been incorporated into the Quaker perspective, because of the whole tradition of the authority from the Light allowed Quakers to accept ideas which were outside of traditional religious vision.

The "Duncanite" uprising or rebellion was a kind of tempest in a teapot, but maybe because of the pressure put on the Duncanites by local evangelicals – there certainly was a Unitarian tinge about it– but many of the things that Duncan talked about in the 1860s become views that are articulated by younger men a generation later in the 1880s, the makers of what has been called the "Quaker renaissance."

QT: Did you find any evidence that these insurgents of the 1880s remember David Duncan, or is this just something that historians would come upon later?

TK: I think that’s a good question, and I don’t think that there was a lot of personal recollection of David Duncan. But a little bit later, when John Wilhelm Rowntree–who was perhaps the most important, the most articulate, the most admired of the leaders of this transformation that was then taking place–when he went to write up his plan for a history of Quakerism, his outline includes a whole chapter on David Duncan and the Duncanite rebellion. Now, after Rowntree’s death, Rufus Jones [who wrote The Later Periods of Quakerism as part of this history] says not a word about it, there’s no mention of it in his book. The reason for that is not clear.

But Duncan had been disowned, and he was going to appeal his disownment and then he died very suddenly of smallpox, and his disownment and that of Alfred Bennett really focused a lot of even moderate evangelical Friends’ minds on the question of "Is this the direction that our Society really wants to take? Are we now going to demand that there are certain things that you must believe, and eliminate those who don’t believe these things?"

QT: A purge.

TK: A purge–well, you can call it that, but someone like Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, who was the leading spokesman for the evangelicals, was deeply concerned about these ideas which he felt would entirely undermine his own conception of what Friends were and should be. And of course, anything therefore that had a sort of hint of modernity about it he was deeply concerned with and resisted, not in any kind of aggressive way, but simply to use the power he had within the Meeting to push this sort of ideas and the individuals associated with them to the side as much as possible, and to keep Quakerism moving in the direction in which he wished to go.

And of course the whole incident of the Richmond Declaration [of Faith, 1887] was one which I think marks an important turning point, because–

QT: –Let me just say here that Braithwaite was a principal author or compiler of the Richmond Declaration, in Indiana. But when he brought it home to London, he couldn’t sell it–

TK: –That’s right. But there is a Braithwaite connection that goes behind the Richmond Declaration, because he was the leader of a Yearly Meeting committee which actually went to Manchester to deal with the Duncanite problem. And in the aftermath of this, he and the committee issued a declaration of certain Christian truths, and that declaration– if you compare it to the Richmond Declaration, there is a great similarity between them. So in the early 1870s he tried to sell that earlier declaration to London Yearly Meeting, but they wouldn’t buy it, they simply printed it as a report in the minutes.

So seventeen years later he came back from Richmond with the Declaration and asked London Yearly Meeting to adopt this as its sort of standard. And of course it caused a lot of consternation among the younger people– but not only among these younger people. And that’s a point I think which is often missed: that many, even evangelical Quakers, at least most of the moderate evangelicals, were not ready to accept some document which implied at least that what was included in this document was what each Friend must believe, and that if you didn’t believe that you would not be sound.

But is was an important event, because it set the stage for the 1890s, when the rejection of any creed opened the possibility of change in London Yearly Meeting. The Yearly Meeting’s evangelical leadership was getting older then, though they were still in charge, but all kinds of possibilities emerged, including the Manchester Conference of 1895, which was actually arranged through a Home Mission Committee, but a Home Mission Committee dominated by the younger, more progressive minded Friends, who really manipulated the agenda for that meeting.

It’s very interesting that they managed that, so that when the meeting came about, it was overwhelmingly one which reflected NOT the ideas that had been dominant in London Yearly Meeting for over fifty years, but ideas which were just finding their way into the Meeting.

There was a Friend at the conference who stood up and at the end of one session and said [in effect], "Now any of you who are visitors here, I want you to know that what’s being spoken about here is not necessarily what all Friends believe," and he certainly was right about that. It was a loaded agenda and one which reflected the future but didn’t reflect the present among the majority of British Friends at the time.

QT: I want to switch here from theology as such, to ecclesiology, because it seems as if, when your book ends, at the All-Friends Conference of 1920, it was only a few years later, that London YM lays down the institution of recorded ministers. Looking at this from the American side, that seems to have been a landmark event in ecclesiological terms. I’m interested in getting a sense of what your studies suggest was going in this earlier period along these lines, as far as the nature of the Society of Friends as a church is concerned.

TK: The role of recorded minsters is something that was certainly talked about earlier. And certainly Joseph Bevan Braithwaite did not want to lay down the recording of ministers; but neither did John Wilhelm Rowntree; Rowntree wanted to keep up the tradition of recording ministers. The problem of the ministry is one of the central controversies of this whole matter. There was a problem: there’s no question about the weakness of ministry in many Meetings. And when the ministry is weak, the Meeting is weak, no question about it.

So if you have a Meeting in which week after week it’s almost entirely silent, and whoever does speak, speaks in ways that are not considering the condition of the Friends in theMmeeting, you’ve got a serious probloem. What evangelicals wished to do was to establish a tradition of trained pastors who in fact would direct the Meeting and ensure that each time the Meeting was gathered there would be some purpose, some thrust to what was said. And of course their theological basis would be the Bible, and the Meeting would be programmed.

Of course, this was anathema to the newer, more progressive or liberal Friends. This idea would undermine one Quaker tradition that they thought could not be questioned, that is that hireling ministers had been condemned by the first Friends, and the traditions demanded that hireling minsters not become part of that system. And that fight was fought out in London Yearly Meeting in the 1880s and the 1890s, and the pastoral tradition was suppressed.

Now, the whole question of ceasing to record ministers is one which seems to me– the reasons for it are not entirely clear, except that it’s egalitarian in a way, the idea is you don’t single out individuals–I know that in many Meetings, the recorded ministers were the only ones who ministered, whether out of fear or respect for the ministers, almost nobody else spoke in the Meeting. So it came to be felt that there was a loss there; that was probably the most important reason there.

QT: In the US, the move away from recording ministers was accompanied by a move away from a church structure specifying subordination of Meetings, from lower to higher levels, to one that was quite clearly and explicitly congregational. They were moving away from the traditional idea, which was written into the older Disciplines, that the Yearly Meeting was the central and authoritative body, toward a structure in which the Monthly Meeting is the central body, and Quarterly and Yearly Meeting structures were essentially free associations, like Baptist conventions. It’s not clear whether there was a similar move in English Quakerism.

TK: In the period I studied, there was a strong sense of autonomy of Monthly Meetings; but there was also oversight, so the Yearly Meeting was a powerful institution in Britain, and so long as Monthly Meetings remained quiet, and nothing emerged from them that troubled the Yearly Meeting, or its leadership in Meeting for Sufferings which was the executive committee of the Yearly Meeting, there wasn’t much interference with what went on there. But if there was a disturbance in a Monthly Meeting, then a Yearly Meeting delegation would be appointed to visit that Meeting, and to determine what steps might be taken to resolve the problem.

I will say also that in that light, in 1902, after the Anglo-Boer War, in which the Society was split in a very serious way in England– there were many prominent Friends who supported the war and the government’s position on the war, including Thomas Hodgkin, who was probably the most renowned Friend of his day–in the aftermath of that, a committee, a peace deputation, was appointed by the Yearly Meeting, to visit every Monthly Meeting in the Yearly Meeting to ensure that that Monthly Meeting was sound with regard to the peace testimony. And while the report of this group is not very impressive in its text, it’s mainly pious platitudes, they do mention the attachment of younger Friends to the peace testimony. And it seems to me that this was an important instance of Yearly Meeting acting to establish or re-establish the idea that This is something that is one of our traditions, and this is something that we should be sound on. We shouldn’t forget that this is the case.

So up until the early twentieth century, as other scholars like Ben Dandelion has said, the Society of Friends had a testimony against war. Only beginning in the early twentieth century, and with the First World War, it becomes a real Peace Testimony. That is, it’s a double-edged thing, not just, We won’t fight, but Not only won’t we fight, but it is our duty to stop the war, and if we can’t do that, then it’s our responsibility to suffer the results of our dissent from the national position on the war. And that really establishes in London Yearly Meeting this connection, which throughout the twentieth century has been so strong, and has led to the public identification of Quakers with peace and with social reform. The peace testimony, it seems to me, is at the base of all that.

QT: Last topic: During World War I, there crept into the language of the militant Quaker war resisters and peace activists, apocalyptic language, terminology from the book of Revelation, which I think was new for them, certainly it was not typical of modern Quaker liberal thought. What do you make of that?

TK: Yes, there is an aspect of that. It’s not broadly-based, any more than the absolutist draft resistance, [only] 145 members were absolutist [draft resisters]. But it represents a response to what was a crisis of faith, the sense that This is the moment for which we – and this Society– had been preparing, we’ve been preparing for this for 250 years, and now is the moment when we have to act. There’s a quote in my book from some statement made in yearly meeting in 1916 or 1917, that their testimony was a war against the dark forces, with which we have to struggle and which we have to overcome.

Now most of the Society was on either side of this, about one third were supporting the war openly, and maybe two thirds of them weren’t. But only a very few were among the absolute resisters; most others were in some more moderate position. But that does emerge and it is a very interesting thing. For some it’s connected with a kind of guild socialism, a kind of egalitarian view which they associated with the early Friends.

QT: Part of this apocalyptic language, it seems to me, reflected a dawning awareness that the modern warfare state represented a phenomenon that was an order of magnitude beyond anything they had thought about before. I’ve seen elsewhere, in American sources, a collapse of nineteenth century optimism, the belief that modern wars would be so awful that no reasonable statesman would allow them to happen anymore. And then here comes a modern war, and it turns out to be even more horrible than anyone thought.

TK: That’s certainly true. There was a sense there that those ideas which have somehow held sway in the past can no longer speak to our condition, or the condition of the world. Somehow we have to get beyond these, and they were very, very hard on the [supporters of the British political party the] Liberals for instance.

They said that in fact that Liberalism had been a kind of half-way house that simply accommodated rulers, accommodated militarism, accommodated imperialism, with only a slight bow toward controlling these things.

[The radical independent Quaker journal] The Ploughshare certainly is the best reflection of that kind of apocalyptic vision. [Their message was] This won’t work anymore: we cannot go on doing and acting and thinking as we have for 250 years even as Quakers. We have to strike out a new path, go in a new direction. And in many cases, that is why they looked upon guild socialism as a possible answer, because it [in theory] effectively undermined the modern state, and turned the operation of societies over to small groups of self-governing people. It was an idea which was very fuzzy in its conception, but it’s one that reflected the crisis of the war and the terrible effect of the war and the fact that they couldn’t see an answer in what had gone before. They had to find an answer in what lay ahead, and in the possibility that the Society of Friends might lead toward a more peaceful and a more prosperous world.

QT: Thank you, and I think we’ll leave it there. Events in our country and the world make this discussion all too resonant – even to the point of reviving the use of apocalyptic thinking and language. Among liberal Friends.