Quakerism (Religious Society of Friends)

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Quakerism is the religious movement, formally the Religious Society of Friends, that emerged in the English Midlands and north in the turbulent decade of the 1650s, gathered by the preaching of George Fox. Its founding conviction was that God speaks directly to each person through an inward light — Fox called it the Light of Christ within — and that this light, not an ordained ministry, not the sacraments, not even Scripture, is the final place where the divine is known. From that single claim much of the rest follows.

The openings

The claim was not, in the telling, a deduction. Fox, a Leicestershire weaver’s son apprenticed to a shoemaker, set out from home in 1647 in a long spiritual distress, and recorded in his Journal a series of what he called openings — sudden inward certainties that arrived unbidden and overrode the authorities he had been raised to consult. The priests could not speak to his condition; the “professors,” the outwardly devout, could not; and then, by his account, a voice declared that there was one, even Christ Jesus, who could speak to his condition. The further openings followed the same shape: that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge did not qualify a man to minister; that God did not dwell in temples made with hands but in the hearts of his people. Each opening dissolved a piece of the inherited apparatus of religion and returned the authority to the inward teacher. By 1648 he was preaching it in the Midlands, and by 1652, on Pendle Hill in Lancashire, he saw — again in the Journal — a great people in white to be gathered. Within weeks came the convincements at Firbank Fell and at Swarthmoor Hall, the Furness home of Judge Thomas Fell and his wife Margaret Fell, who would become the movement’s organizing center and, eventually, Fox’s wife.

What makes the openings the doctrinal foundation rather than mere biography is that Fox claimed to have learned the Light experimentally — by direct encounter — rather than from books. This is the engine of everything Friends later refused. A truth received inwardly and immediately cannot be authoritatively held by anyone whose only access to it is mediated: by ordination, by a degree, by a printed liturgy, by the letter of the text. The Friends honored Scripture as a true witness, but classed it as a secondary one — a record of the Word, not the Word itself, which is the living Christ speaking now within. This is a doctrine of continuing revelation in its sharpest form, and it set the movement against all three streams of the magisterial Reformation at once: against the Calvinist doctrine of a will in bondage and an election fixed before the world, for the Light is offered to everyone and may be resisted; against sacramental theologies that carry grace in water and bread; and against the established parish church with its tithes, its steeple-houses, and what Friends called its hireling priests.

How the premise dissolves the apparatus

If the light is given to everyone and reached through silence rather than instruction, then the trained clergy, the prepared sermon, and the outward rites of baptism and communion become, on the movement’s own reasoning, unnecessary. Friends met — and in their unprogrammed form still meet — in plain rooms in shared silence, anyone moved by the Spirit free to speak. The name “Quaker” began as a jeer at the trembling that sometimes came over them; they took it, as such names are often taken, and kept it. Their own word for one another was Friends.

The reasoning runs through every outward form and abolishes most of them. A prepared sermon is a creaturely interposition between the soul and the Light; so is a read prayer, a fixed liturgy, a hymn chosen in advance. Worship, instead, is a corporate waiting. Friends gather and settle into silence — they speak of centering down — and wait upon the Spirit; if any present is moved, that person rises and offers vocal ministry, prophecy or prayer or scriptural exhortation, and then the silence resumes and closes over the words. No one presides; ministry may come from anyone, woman or man, learned or unlettered, which is the same flattening that the doctrine works everywhere it touches. This places Friends squarely within the broad history of Christian mysticism and of mysticism more generally, as a tradition of unmediated inward encounter — though the label is a later one, applied in the twentieth century rather than claimed in the seventeenth, and the early Friends, who associated the word “mystic” with Catholic monastic spirituality, would likely have refused it. Their own vocabulary was the Light, the Seed, the Truth, the Power.

The two dominical sacraments follow the same logic and meet the same end. Outward water-baptism and the eucharistic supper are not denied as first-century practices but read as types now fulfilled and abrogated by the inward baptism of the Spirit and the inward feeding on Christ. Friends have accordingly been described as having either no sacraments or seven — every meal, every silence, every act of plain integrity participating sacramentally in the divine life. The business of the gathered body proceeds by the same discipline: decisions are reached not by a vote but by what Friends call the sense of the meeting, the clerk’s articulated recognition of where the Spirit has drawn the body together, often after long silence and never by counting heads. The corporate discernment is itself an act of waiting on the inward teacher.

The testimonies as entailments

The same premise shaped a distinctive practice in the world. Holding that the light dwells in every person without exception, early Friends refused the gestures of social rank — they would not doff the hat or use the deferential “you” to superiors, addressing high and low alike with the plain “thee” and “thou” — and they refused oaths, since an oath implies a double standard of truth. Out of the conviction grew the peace testimony, the refusal to bear arms that has marked the Society since 1660.

These testimonies were never a code handed down; they are corporate discoveries, the practical fruits of the Light’s leading worked out under pressure and then held in common. The refusal of hat-honor and of the honorific plural pronoun was not bad manners but a doctrine of equality made audible in grammar: if the Light is in every person equally, the linguistic machinery of deference is a lie about the order of things. The refusal of oaths followed from a single standard of truth — Christ’s instruction to swear not at all, and the conviction that a Friend’s plain word in the marketplace must be as good as a Friend’s word under oath, which produced in time the famous one-price trading that helped make Quaker firms trusted. The peace testimony received its dated public form in the Declaration of January 1660 (1661 by the modern calendar), issued to the newly restored Charles II by Fox, Richard Hubberthorne, and others to clear Friends of any part in armed plotting against the crown: the document renounces all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, under any pretense whatsoever. From a corporate refusal that early on cost Friends their liberty, this became the through-line of Quaker public life.

Friends were early and persistent against slavery: John Woolman’s mid-eighteenth-century journal records his slow, patient labor to turn his own meetings against slaveholding, and Friends were prominent in the later abolition movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Woolman, a New Jersey tailor, traveled the colonial meetings pressing the question one Friend at a time, and his Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (Part I, 1754; Part II, 1762) helped move the Philadelphia and London Yearly Meetings to forbid slaveholding among members between 1758 and 1776 — among the first corporate religious renunciations of the institution anywhere.

The codifiers: Barclay and Penn

A movement built on continuing inward revelation has an obvious difficulty with systematic doctrine: to fix the Light in a formula is to do the very thing the Light was meant to make unnecessary. The second generation answered the problem without surrendering it. Robert Barclay of Ury, a Scottish laird educated in part at the Scots College in Paris, produced the standard defense: the Apology for the True Christian Divinity, published in Latin at Amsterdam in 1676 and in Barclay’s own English in 1678. In fifteen scholastic propositions it answered credal Christianity not with a counter-creed but with a theology of immediate, continuing revelation: the Light is, in Barclay’s formulation, a real spiritual substance, the saving manifestation of Christ given to every person who comes into the world, and sufficient for salvation even in those who never heard the historical gospel. He retained the Reformation’s language of justification by faith but located it inwardly — Christ formed in the believer — rather than in an imputed alien righteousness, and he defended a guarded doctrine of perfectibility: a Friend yielding fully to the Light may, occasionally and revocably, be kept from sinning. The paradox of the work is exact. It is a rigorously argued book whose argument is that arguments are secondary; it uses the apparatus of credal assent to defend prophecy and continuing revelation against that very apparatus. It remained the movement’s systematic theology into the twentieth century.

William Penn, a convert from the gentry and son of an admiral, gave the movement its devotional voice and then its experiment in government. His No Cross, No Crown, drafted in the Tower of London and expanded in 1682, is the classic statement of the inward way against the world’s pomp; the library holds it. After a decade in which persecution was severe in England and in the American colonies — the Quaker Act of 1662, the Conventicle and Five Mile Acts, perhaps fifteen thousand Friends imprisoned and some four hundred dead in custody, four hanged on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661 — Penn obtained in 1681 a charter for Pennsylvania and founded it as a refuge governed on Quaker principles: religious liberty, no established church, and dealings with the native peoples conducted, at least in intention, without arms. The Holy Experiment, as it was called, was the peace testimony attempted at the scale of a colony.

Quietism and the nineteenth-century schisms

After the Toleration Act of 1689 lifted the worst of the persecution, the movement turned inward. The eighteenth-century generation withdrew from public agitation into a deep quietism — plainness of dress and speech raised to a discipline, a profound distrust of human will and “creaturely activity,” worship as a waiting so still it bordered on the self-emptying of the contemplative traditions it resembled. Isaac Penington’s writings and, in America, Woolman’s Journal are its enduring voices. The same turn that produced Woolman’s tender conscience also produced an increasingly sealed and peculiar people, a hedge around the meeting.

In the nineteenth century that hedge broke under the pressures of the evangelical revival, biblical criticism, and Enlightenment reason. The American Hicksite separation of 1827-28 split the great yearly meetings — Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Ohio, Indiana — between Orthodox Friends who emphasized the historical Christ and the authority of Scripture and the rural followers of Elias Hicks, who pressed the universality of the Inner Light. The Wilburite-Gurneyite division of 1845 then split the Orthodox themselves, Joseph John Gurney’s evangelical revivalism against John Wilbur’s conservative quietism, leaving a Conservative branch that still keeps silent worship and the plain ways. From the 1870s, under the Holiness revival, Gurneyite Friends in the American Midwest adopted programmed worship with paid pastors, hymns, and prepared sermons — the very apparatus the founders had dissolved, now reassembled around the same inward claim. Those divisions persist: some Friends today worship in programmed services with paid pastors, while others keep the older silent form, and the spectrum of belief now runs from firmly Christ-centered to frankly universalist and beyond. Four contemporary branches — Liberal, Pastoral, Evangelical, Conservative — each make a defensible case to continue the seventeenth-century movement most faithfully, and the contest among them is not one an outside observer is positioned to settle.

The mystical reading and the texts

The twentieth century brought a recovery and an argument about it. In London Yearly Meeting, the 1895 Manchester Conference opened the Liberal turn, and after the early death of John Wilhelm Rowntree the work passed to the Haverford philosopher Rufus M. Jones and the historian William Charles Braithwaite. Jones reframed Quakerism as the English flowering of a continuous Christian mystical lineage — running from the Rhineland mystics through Jakob Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists, and the Spanish Carmelites — and his Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1914) made the genealogical case. That reading determined Liberal-Quaker self-understanding and fed back into the mainstream history of Christian mysticism. It is also contested: Geoffrey Nuttall and Hugh Barbour relocated early Quakerism within radical Puritanism, finding the continental-mystical input far less direct than Jones supposed, and later scholars — Rosemary Moore, Pink Dandelion, Carole Spencer — have variously stressed the apocalyptic, sociolinguistic, and Holiness dimensions of the first generation, treating the mysticism reading as a twentieth-century overlay on a movement whose own vocabulary was the Light, the Seed, the Truth, and the Power.

The textual foundation is unusually well preserved. Fox’s Journal, compiled by Thomas Ellwood from Fox’s papers and first printed in 1694, is the narrative spine of the early movement; the Cambridge edition prepared by Norman Penney in 1911 set it on critical footing. Barclay’s Apology (1678) is the systematic theology; Penn’s No Cross, No Crown and Penington’s Works the devotional core; Margaret Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified (1666) the first sustained scriptural defense of women’s ministry. The modern critical historiography is led by H. Larry Ingle’s First Among Friends (1994), Moore’s The Light in Their Consciences (2000), and the Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (2013) edited by Dandelion and Stephen Angell, now the standard reference. (For these and the cited editions, see the research note below.)

The doctrine among its neighbors

The Quaker claim places it at the meeting point of several older currents and several later ones. The conviction that the divine is known by an inward, saving illumination available to all is a doctrine of gnosis in the broad sense — knowledge by direct acquaintance rather than instruction — though Friends drew it from Christ and Scripture, not from any gnostic genealogy. The teaching that the Light governs and provides for each soul touches the ground of divine providence: a God who superintends not only the order of the world but the inward course of every person who will attend. And the long history of inward, anti-credal, experience-first religion gave Quakerism near neighbors among later movements that likewise located authority inside the person rather than in an institution — the Swedenborgian New Church, Spiritualism, Christian Science. These are neighbors and not descendants; the resemblance is one of structure, the privileging of inward over outward authority, not of lineage.

A caution belongs here, because the Quaker name invites a false cousin. The “Friends” of the Religious Society are not the medieval Gottesfreunde, the Friends of God of the Rhineland — Tauler, Suso, and their network — who are a distinct fourteenth-century phenomenon. The shared word is a coincidence of translation, not a thread of descent.

The shorter companion account of the movement is gathered under Quakers.

What has held across the splits is the original intuition that revelation is continuing and inward — that the decisive religious event is not assent to a creed but attention to a light already present. Friends have generally declined to fix that intuition in a settled theology, preferring the discipline of the gathered silence to the formula. The movement remains small. Its weight has always lain elsewhere — in a manner of meeting, and in what its members did when they rose from it.

→ In the library: Penn — No Cross, No Crown (1682) · The Journal of John Woolman (1774)

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