The Quakers in America (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series)
There have seldom been more than 100,000 Quakers in North America, yet the religious movement begun in mid-seventeenth-century England has been amazingly influential. Quakers founded colonies; led the antislavery, woman suffrage, and black civil rights movements; spearheaded relief efforts after both world wars; launched the first religiously based lobbying organization in Washington, D.C.; and on and on. Hamm's overview shows that the sect's fierce social activism has been accompanied all along by internal turbulence over doctrine and practice. Only during the first half of the eighteenth century were Quakers separatist and socially quietist. A century later, large numbers of them exchanged traditional Quaker silent worship for Protestant-like services. During the twentieth century, the three major affiliations of Quaker congregations continued to differ from one another and within their own ranks. Theological liberals continued silent worship but welcomed atheists and non-Christian believers, while the theologically conservative embraced evangelical Christian identity, sometimes even abandoning historic Quaker pacifism. Hamm's immensely valuable book presents the ongoing complexity of this unusually potent sect with maximal clarity.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.