Quakers

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The Quakers, formally the Religious Society of Friends, are a Christian movement that arose in the upheaval of mid-seventeenth-century England on a single radical claim: that the living God speaks directly within every human being, and that this inner light needs no priest, no creed, and no sacrament to reach it. The name began as mockery — tradition traces it to a magistrate who, after Fox bade him tremble at the word of the Lord, jeered back that it was Fox and his followers who were the quakers — and the Friends, in time, kept it.

The movement crystallized around George Fox, an itinerant preacher who in the 1650s gathered scattered seekers across northern England into a recognizable body. The English Civil War had broken the authority of the established church, and into that opening came a wave of radical groups; the Friends outlasted nearly all of them. What set them apart was not a doctrine so much as a practice. They held that worship meant waiting together in silence until someone was moved to speak, that any person so moved — woman or man, learned or not — might minister, and that the forms of ordinary deference were a kind of falsehood. They refused oaths, declined to remove their hats before magistrates, addressed everyone with the plain “thee,” and would not take up arms. For these refusals thousands were jailed in the movement’s first decades, and the conviction hardened into the peace testimony that has marked them since.

Friends understood the inner light as the same Christ attested in scripture, encountered now and from within rather than read about from without — a position their critics found dangerously close to setting private experience above the Bible, and which Friends themselves spent generations refining. William Penn carried the movement into government when he founded Pennsylvania as a haven for it; the library holds his No Cross, No Crown, written from prison. A century on, the American Friend John Woolman made the Society one of the first religious bodies to turn decisively against slavery, and his Journal became a classic of the plain conscience at work.

The Society is small — never more than a few hundred thousand worldwide — yet its weight in the history of reform is out of all proportion to its numbers: in the campaigns against slavery, in prison and asylum reform, in pacifism. Later Friends divided over how literally to read the original Christianity, and meetings today range from the evangelical to the all but secular, united less by shared belief than by the silence and the testimonies that organize a life: simplicity, peace, integrity, equality.

The Quakers are sometimes grouped with the era’s mystics for that insistence on unmediated inner knowing, and the resemblance to older currents of contemplative Christianity is real. It runs only so far. Where mystics often sought a private ascent, the Friends pressed their inward light outward into plain dress, plain speech, and the long unglamorous work of public conscience — the experience verified, in their understanding, by what it made a person do.

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

→ Related: Christian Science · Emmanuel Swedenborg · Gnosis