Quaker Theology - Issue #5 - Autumn 2001

Late nineteenth century American Quakerism was a denomination in crisis. Of its c. 100,000 adherents, about two-thirds were to be found west of the Appalachians, while a quarter still lived in the Atlantic seaboard cities and their hinterlands, from Baltimore to southern Maine. Quakers were divided into two main groups as an enduring result of a doctrinal schism in 1827. Hicksites–the schismatics–made up about 17 percent of the total, and were the largest group in the mid-Atlantic states. The Orthodox were themselves further subdivided among Conservatives, Wilburites, Gurneyites, and the far more numerous evangelicals who had sprung from the latter camp but had diverged so far that they "risked becoming, as one British Friend put it, ‘a second-rate holiness sect’." ⁵

Sectarianism flourished among American Quakers, but the denomination itself stagnated. Midwestern Friends’ numbers were comparatively buoyant as a result of the evangelical impulse; but the Hicksites and the eastern Orthodox were slowly fading away. These well-educated, bourgeois Friends, particularly the original core communities of American Quakerism, the Philadelphia region’s c. 4,000 Orthodox and 11,000 Hicksites, still represented the greatest concentrations of wealth, intellect, and organized influence within their small, scattered, fissile denomination. They financed and controlled most of its magazines, its prestigious schools and colleges, and its reformist agencies, notably the Friends’ Freedmen’s Association, the Indian Rights Association, and the Peace Society. But they did not strive to make converts, were not especially welcoming to the few outsiders who wished to join, and, crucially, disowned anybody who married outside their particular branch of Quakerism. They also suffered demographically as a paradoxical result of their commitment to women’s education and active benevolence. These offered satisfying careers and ways of life outside of marriage, a choice which was itself rendered difficult by the rules of endogamy; so about 40 percent of their female members remained single.  It did not take a rocket scientist to work out that theirs was a denomination with more past than future⁶.

The crisis of eastern seaboard bourgeois Quakerism was more than demographic, it was also spiritual. In a denomination utterly dependent on lay activism and personal commitment, about half of its members were Quakers through family tradition rather than real conviction; these nominal ‘birthright Friends’ scarcely participated in its religious or benevolent activities. Its younger members were also exposed to the intellectual challenges to Christian belief which afflicted Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic–critical Bible scholarship and modern scientific, in particular Darwinian, interpretations of the natural world and humankind’s place within it. The midwestern evangelical majority was less threatened, and took easy refuge in fundamentalism when it took notice of the problem at all. But well-educated younger Quakers, in the seaboard cities and in Britain, to which they remained closely attached, felt the need for, in the words of the key English modernist manifesto, "a reasonable faith," some way of reconciling their traditional beliefs with contemporary thought, and of making their religion once again meaningful in their lives. ⁷

British Friends wholeheartedly embraced theological modernism; actively recruited a small new working-class member-ship through the Adult School Movement, which engaged the energies of a generation of Friends, and, together with their other benevolent activities, introduced them to the realities of life across the class divide; adopted a Christian Socialist or at least a Social Gospel perspective; and became increasingly involved in the overlapping worlds of Fabian Socialism and the ‘New Liberalism’ in late Victorian and Edwardian England. A renewed commitment to social service and activism gave Friends a sense of religious purpose, as participants in the common liberal Protestant design to perfect the Brotherhood of Man and to begin building the Kingdom of God on earth by the unselfish efforts of men and women of reason and good will. At the same time as it took them out of their sectarian isolation, they were also able to interpret this work as re-establishing their connection with original and historic Quakerism. ⁸

British and Mid-Atlantic Friends were closely linked by bonds of family, visiting, reading the same denominational magazines, and even by business, so it was natural that the modernizers’ solutions to common problems of faith would swiftly be disseminated among the Americans. ⁹ The principal agent of change among, first, the Philadelphia Orthodox, and later American Quakerism more generally, was Rufus M. Jones (1863-1948). Jones served from 1893 as Instructor in, and later Professor of, Philosophy at Haverford College, where most of the male Orthodox proceeded on graduating from the Friends’ day or boarding schools in the Philadelphia region; he was also editor of The American Friend, the leading denominational monthly. He collaborated closely with the British modernizers in a common project aimed at renewing Quakers’ theology, spirituality, and sense of a distinctive religious identity and purpose. ¹⁰

Jones’s task was in some ways easier than his British friends’, at least as far as reaching the Philadelphia Orthodox was concerned: the latter were a small, concentrated community of overlapping family groups, relatively homogeneous in social background and outlook, and when their young men went to Haverford, they all had to take at least one course with him. ¹¹ In other ways, it was much harder: American Quakerism’s divisions prevented the modernist impulse from spreading far beyond the Mid-Atlantic city-regions; even in Philadelphia itself, ethnic, religious, and class barriers made it much more difficult for bourgeois WASPs to reach out to, or even sympathize with, their working-class immigrant neighbors, than in more culturally homogeneous milieux like the Cadbury family’s Birmingham, or the Rowntrees’ York. ¹²

In addition, American Friends did not at this time exper-ience as great a revitalizing challenge to their most distinctive core conviction. For them, pacifism remained fairly unproblematic, unex-amined, a commitment without cost; in Britain, a great imperial power engaged in the brutalities of the Boer War, 1899-1902, then embroiled in the international rivalries and arms races leading up to the First World War, members of a denomination devoted to the re-moval of force from human affairs were compelled to begin some hard thinking. Their opposition to the Boer War revealed to Friends that, though in most respects they fit comfortably within the world of provincial Liberal Nonconformity, their unwillingness to go along with imperialism and militarism set them apart from their commun-ity. Becoming ‘outsiders’ was a price many were willing to pay for their religious convictions; and, having become outsiders on one great issue, some of them felt free, even compelled, to embark on wide-ranging social criticism. Faith in the inevitability of human progress was soon questioned: the material prosperity of Atlantic capitalism provided reasons and resources for international conflict as well as the potential for social advancement. Capitalism itself came to be viewed through a Hobsonian, even Leninist frame of reference: it rested on inequality and exploitation at home, and resulted in conflicts between individuals, classes, and nations. The connected challenges of the Boer War, the pre-war social unrest, and the uneasy Edwardian peace, therefore encouraged a thoroughgoing modernization of British Quakerism which extended well beyond its original areas–theology, spirituality, and the details of denomina-tional practice–to include an extensive engagement wradical or at least reformist politics. ¹³

No such changes occurred in the United States. The most that happened was a faint impulse toward Progressivism–stronger, it seems, among Quaker women making their way in the worlds of the settlement house and social work, and in some ways substituting the religion of reform for their ancestral faith, than it was for their male contemporaries. ¹⁴

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