Who are Friends (Quakers)?
Historical Background
English Revolution....; From Radical Movement to Prosperous, Disciplined Sect; Friends Since 1800; Friends Today; History of Trenton Friends Meetinghouse; Peace Testimony
The English Revolution, Radicalism, and Quaker Origins
The Religious Society of Friends originated in mid-seventeenth-century England, immediately following the English Revolution of the 1640s. It was a time of tremendous political, social, and religious agitation. Parliament had overthrown the rule of King Charles I and eventually executed him in 1649. The role of bishop in the Church of England was abolished in favor of governance by congregation and religious tolerance. Traditional restraints on popular behavior had therefore greatly diminished, resulting in a effervescence of strikingly new cultural and religious movements. There were Levellers and Diggers, Ranters and Seekers. But Friends were by far the most enduring.
In the earliest days of the 1640s and 1650s, Friends were political and religious radicals. They regularly denounced the country's ruling class for its gluttony, corruption, and arrogance: "O ye great men and rich men of the earth! Weep and howl for your misery that is coming." Friends villified "vicars...and parsons and curates" for oppressing their parisioners; indeed, they denounced all clergy who worked for pay as "hirelings," whose salary necessarily corrupted their relationships with both God and their fellow Christians. Friends' theology centered around the beliefs--radical in their time--that: 1) the bible is not the Word of God, 2) all people have the the spirit of Christ, 3) Christ shall not return to judge all peoples. And they brazenly broadcast all their radical ideas in a highly offensive manner: they interrupted church services to denounce the proceedings as the work of the devil, and they held large outdoor services at which they criticized the local clergy.
Their behavior also deliberately rejected the assumptions that upheld England's traditional hierarchical society: they refused to doff their hats to their social superiors, or to refer to them by the formal "you," instead of the informal "thou." Since Christ's grace is freely available to all, regardless of social standing, they reasoned, then people should treat each as equals, as well. They worshipped in a highly emotional style, involving body as well as mind and voice, for which they earned the epithet "Quakers," by their upper-class adversaries. Not surprisingly, their earliest supporters came principly from the poorer classes in England, who made up the overwhelming majority of the population. With a dozen or more highly charismatic preachers in the vanguard, Friends grew explosively in the 1650s, peaking at perhaps one-tenth of the adult English population. The sect also spread throughout the British Isles, to Holland and Germany on the continent, and to England's early colonies.
The English Restoration of 1660: From Radical Movement to Prosperous, Disciplined Sect
But is was not to last. By the end of the 1650s, the upper classes had recovered their power and recalled Charles II to the throne in 1660. This "Restoration" presented the Quaker movement with a bitter choice: either give up the political aspects of their radicalism, tone down their behavior, and embrace pacifism as a defensive measure, or face eradication by the re-armed forces of an intolerant established order, which had begun arrest Quakers by the thousands. The Friends' leadership chose the former. Unlike other radical sects, they had already begun to establish modest disciplinary measures for curbing their members' most politically radical and personally scandalous behavior. The Restoration greatly accelerated this trend. The leadership turned from criticizing their social superiors to upbraiding the wayward within their own ranks. Under their lead organizer, George Fox, they developed a hierarchical structure of monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, corresponding to ever-larger geographical units, partly for the purpose of instilling discipline in a formerly loose and even chaotic movement. Though unpopular among many Friends--thousands left in a series of schisms--the new measures allowed the sect to survive, albeit in rather different form. The Toleration Act of 1689 ended actual persecution of the Quakers, but came to late to alter this drastically inward turn. Once a vibrant, almost revolutionary, evangelical movement, Friends became almost the complete opposite, a quietistic sect.
Friends quickly became known for three main traits: 1) the rejection of war, 2) the personal integrity of their members, 3) "plain" ways of dressing and generally behaving, and 4) rapidly rising economic well-being. Ever since, all but the fourth have remained essential to Quakerism.
The Quakers objection to war was originally adopted largely in reference to civil disorders. In the 1650s and 1660s, they came to oppose involvement in England's civil strife largely as a matter of policy, hoping to calm the political waters, as well as save own their necks by demonstrating their harmlessness to authorities. Increasingly, however, Friends came to reject armed conflict in all forms. both domestic and international, adopting what is called the "peace testimony."
In adopting standards of personal integrity, Friends rejected not only the sexual and other personal laxness that became briefly widespread in the aftermath of the English Revolution; they also demanded typically "Protestant" values of hard work, dedication to "calling," and honesty in business. Indeed, as Friends became increasingly a people apart in Anglo-American society, they pressed these values to extreme logical conclusions. Quakers developed a deserved reputation for not just personal sobriety, but also great seriousness in demeanor. From the idea of truthfulness in business, they were among the first to embrace the modern notion that prices should be published and adhered to, instead of haggled over. Finally, a general belief in thrifty living evolved into a demand that Meeting members dress and otherwise behave in unostenatious ways. Eventually, "Quaker grey" clothing evolved into a near-uniform of Friends' appearance (not abandoned until after World War II), setting them apart visually from the societies in which they lived. Friends' belief in a life without frills eventually came to be called the "testimony of simplicity." As serious, hard-working men and women who disdained wasting money on fancy luxuries, Friends not surprisingly became increasingly prosperous economically. As they migrated throughout the Atlantic world, in the late 1600s and 1700s, Friends developed large and lucrative mercantile network based on the enormous trust they could place in each other.
Though they remained a small minority of total British and American population, their wealth, values and reputation gave them a disproportionate influence within their worlds. They were remarkably successful in advocating reforms and new cultural mores that would have seemed radical and even visionary to their contemporaries. Friends teaching about the presence of the spirit of Christ in all people resulted in strong ethical testimonies. They were perhaps the first Christian sect to support female ministers, and were decidedly the first group within western civilization to articulate unconditional opposition to slavery and to war. Quakers supported religious and political liberty. They virtually invented prisons and asylums as supposedly more humane methods for treating criminals and the mentally ill. Finally, later in their history, in the late 1800s, they began applying the notion of the imperative of humane treatment toward animals, war victims, and others in distress. Though their reform plans were often not immediately successful, Quakers' unflagging, cheerful persistence ultimately almost always led to their eventual adoption.
Though Friends have evolved enormously since the end of the 1700s, the basic traits described above have remained remarkably unchanged. Their intricate post-1800 history is much too complicated to be related here, but only summarized. Friends in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States, were influenced most strongly by the growing democratization of society and the emergence of evangelical Protestantism as the country's strongest religious impulse. Both influences helped produced a series of schisms within Quaker polity, as Friends argued over questions of elite control of their denomination and the need to break from their sectarian shell by embracing evangelical methods of worship, such as a programmed (instead of traditionally silent) worship, a regular and even paid clergy, and the use of prepared music.
By the early Twentieth Century, Friends had formed into four separate denominations. Anchored in the U.S. midwest, Friends United Meeting (FUM), with its programmed Meetings and moderate flavor, most closely resembles mainstream Protestantism. With a large missionary offshoot in Kenya, it is the largest Quaker denomination. From the 1930s through the 1960s, unhappy over perceived growing liberalism within the FUM, many individual Friends and several yearly meetings seceded to eventually form two additional denominations: Association of Evangelical Friends and Evangelical Friends Alliance. They are strongest in the western U.S. and predominate in Latin America. Finally, the Friends General Conference (FGC) emerged as a loosely organized collection of Yearly Meetings that continued faithfully the original Quaker worship format of speaking from silence, while becoming increasingly theologically and politically liberal.
Trenton Meeting of Friends belongs to FGC, as part of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. FGC members tend to live wherever one finds liberal, middle-class communities: in Great Britain, the east and west coasts (especially the former) of the U.S., as well as in American metropolitan areas and university towns. As late as the 1930s, the yearly meetings of FGC remained highly sectarian in their ways: they still wore traditional "Quaker grey" clothing, used "thee" and "thou," more generally, continuied to live in a world apart from the larger societies in which they existed. But after World War II, the denomination began to shed its peculiarities, as thousands of new families joined. Having been raised in the enormously varied society of mainstream America, these Friends by "convincement" instead of "birthright," increasingly declined to absorb traditional Quaker ways. Today, in outward appearance and everyday behavior, U.S. Friends are no more distinctive than their fellow Americans. Their support of peace and justice, however, place their political opinions generally on the left-ward wing of the American political spectrum.
Trenton Monthly Meeting belongs to Burlington Quarterly Meeting, which is part of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
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