The Religious Society of Friends, also known as “Quakers, Quakerism”
Creators: name: Taylor, Andrew
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2023

description: The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) The Religious Society of Friends, better known by the once derogatory and later reclaimed moniker “Quakers,” are a historically Christian group. One of many small religious sects to emerge in the wake of the English Civil War, the Quakers formed under the inspiration of the teachings of George Fox, a weaver turned preacher who elevated the “priesthood of the believer” to a hitherto unseen extreme. Fox argued for the abolition of the priesthood (or the laity, as Friends might say), in favor of a Christian community modeled on Fox’s understanding of the early church, one in which all were called to ministry and equally able to communicate with a divine “Light Within.” Fox and the early Friends seem to have been a premillenarian sect who felt Christ’s return was immanent and prepared accordingly, but by the 1670s the Friends had begun to internalize the second coming and institutionalize in earnest. Friends became notorious throughout England for the uniqueness of their theological and social practices—worshipping in silence, eschewing paid ministers and tithes, refusing to use the “pagan” names of months and days, adopting plain clothes and the informal “thou” in place of the honorific “you,” refusing to doff hats for anyone but the Lord, and, most importantly, their refusal to swear oaths in courts of law (after Matthew 5:34) which led to their frequent imprisonment. Even after the Friends were granted formal toleration in the Toleration Act of 1689, a number chose to immigrate to the New World, driven by economic and religious motivations. Though Friends began arriving in the Americas as early as 1655, they founded their most influential settlement in Pennsylvania (awarded as a charter to Quaker William Penn in 1681 to repay a lien owed his father), where Friends remained the dominant force in the legislature until 1756, when they resigned en masse rather than dedicate taxes for the French and Indian War, objecting on pacifist grounds. Though never a numerically significant portion of the American population, Friends assumed outsized importance in American religious history by spearheading a variety of social movements: The American abolition movement, women’s suffrage, Native American rights, and pacifist movements all have Quaker origins and inspirations. A series of schisms split the American Quakers in the nineteenth century, following the trajectory of many Protestant denominations at the time. The most significant was the 1827 Orthodox-Hicksite split, the Hicksites rallying around the teachings of Elias Hicks, who taught that Jesus became Christ but was not born divine, and that any modern Friend who might follow Jesus’ example in discerning the will of the Inward Light within all. For Hicks, the Bible was valuable as one source among many attesting to God’s previous revelations but was not the unique word of God and should be subordinated to reason and experience. Orthodox Friends, by contrast, affirmed the traditional Christian beliefs that Christ was the sole Son of God who was sent to earth to redeem humanity by dying on the cross. Orthodox Friends increasingly integrated with other Protestant denominations in both theology and practice, while Hicksite Friends grew closer with other progressive denominations active in social movements. The split foreran the two most important Quaker bodies today, the liberal Friends General Conference (FGC) and evangelical Friends United Meeting (FUM). FGC Friends have maintained the distinctively quiet (“unprogrammed”) style of Quaker worship but are arguably post-Christian, while FUM meetings are effectively Protestant. The two groups share little with one another except competing claims to a shared spiritual lineage and the Quaker name itself. The Quakers were not historically known for missions after their initial proselytization efforts in the seventeenth century, but a series of successful international missions initiated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have led to large Quaker communities in Kenya, Burundi, Guatemala, and Bolivia. These international meetings are typically, though not invariably, affiliated with either the Evangelical Friends or the Friends United Meeting, and so more closely resemble other Protestant Christian churches than the more liberal FGC Friends. Over a third of the world’s Quakers live in Kenya, the likely provenance of the next stage of Quaker history.