Quakers & Capitalism: A Brief Recap

It’s been a while since I published an essay in the Quakers and Capitalism series, in which I’ve been digesting a book in progress, a sketchy and rather schematic history of the influence that Friends and capitalism have had on each other. Because of the piecemeal nature of blog posting, I have found myself losing track of my progress and of the arc of the whole; I imagine my readers may have, too. Also, I had fallen behind in creating pdf files of these postings. Thus, before I go on, I’ve decided to offer a brief (well, medium-sized) recap of the project so far.

I have also finished and reorganized the pdf files for each ‘chapter’ in the book. The summary below has links to the respective files and they are also listed as links on the page labeled Quakers & Capitalism—The Book, accessible from the navigation column to the left of the posts. Reading those pdf files in order will give you the main thread of the book. Note that there are several appendices. I’m not satisfied with their style and formatting—I think they’re ugly, in fact, though properly Quaker plain, I suppose—but I did not want to delay while I experiment with style.

I have divided this history of Quakers and capitalism into three main periods: the 1650s, 1700 to 1900, and the 20^th century. These are separated by major periods of transition, periods lasting roughly a generation in which external forces collide with forces within Quakerism to transform both capitalist culture and Quaker culture in a symbiotic relationship. During these periods of transition, Quaker fortunes and their relationship with the world around them completely change. Here’s the sketchy outline, with links to their respective essays:

• Introduction — Introducing John Bellers as perhaps the second most well-known Quaker in history, a man of extraordinary talent and intelligence who had a tremendous impact on Western culture, yet is almost completely unknown among his own Quaker community. Why? Introducing the idea of cultural amnesia regarding economics among Friends, the almost utter lack of meaningful economic testimony (until very recently, at least), notwithstanding our almost indispensable role in creating and developing the capitalist system, and the need for a ministry of teaching and prophetic examination of Quaker economic history.

Quakers & Capitalism — Introduction

• The 1650s — Early Friends (who were mostly yeoman farmers and small trades people) assail the world order with revolutionary fervor in the Lamb’s War, challenging some aspects of economic life, notably in the practices of plain speech and refusing hat honor, but somewhat indirectly, as their focus was essentially religious and aimed primarily at the church. Friends absorb the leaders and members of both the Diggers and the Levellers, more radical egalitarian social movements, but do not absorb their ideas.

Quakers & Capitalism — The 1650s

• First major transition (1661 – 1695) — Externally, the persecutions, and internally, the establishment of gospel order, completely transform Quaker culture and Quaker economics. After the Restoration, the state tries to stamp the movement out and seizes vast amounts of Quaker treasure over roughly thirty years. Friends respond to these external pressures by reorganizing—or perhaps organizing would be a better description—instituting structures and processes for internal discipline. Notwithstanding the intense economic assault, however, Friends emerge from this period as a class of wealthy merchants poised to create not quite single-handedly the first truly new platform for creating wealth since the invention of agriculture: industrial capitalism. This extraordinary feat—not just thriving in the face of economic oppression, but ending up in a position to change the world, after all—was a cultural miracle.

First Transition: Persecution and Gospel Order

• 1700 – 1900: The Double-culture Period
• The 18^th century — During the 18^th century and on into the 19^th century, Quakers make many of the indispensable technological innovations upon which industrial capitalism depends, including coke smelting, cast steel, and the railroad. They build many of the key industries, establish many of the most important companies, build its financial infrastructure, develop new modes of organization, and pioneer humane treatment of workers. At the same time that they are engaging the world of business, industry and commerce with incredible energy and invention, they are withdrawing from engagement with the world in virtually every other area of life. Friends maintain this double culture for two hundred years. In England, they become fabulously wealthy; in America, they do pretty well.
• John Bellers and Quaker responses to Industrial capitalism — Already by 1700, the new industrial economy was creating a new class of the poor: industrial workers, people who had left the land or their village to work in the new urban factories. One extraordinary Friend, John Bellers, saw the problem and proposed a solution: Colledges of Industry. In several pamphlets over 25 years, he brought his ideas to Friends and to Parliament. Both declined to act on them. He made many other significant contributions to Western civilization, as well, only to be virtually forgotten by his own people for two hundred years.

Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period

Quakers & Capitalism — Quaker Contributions to Industrial Capitalism

• Minor transition (1800 – 1828) — Two new ideologies, or domains of western thought, are born as fraternal twins around 1800— evangelical theology and the new ‘science’ of political economy. Thomas Malthus, in particular, was both an evangelical minister and one of the first progenitors of political economy; in his work, the two are fused into one approach to wealth and poverty. Evangelical political economy dominates economic policy in competition with classical economics; Malthus, the evangelical minister, and David Ricardo the investor, (and married to a Quaker, though a Jew converted to Unitarianism himself), embody this rivalry in the early 1800s, though they are personal friends. Joseph John Gurney and Thomas Chalmers make the most influential connection between evangelical Friends and evangelical political economy; these hugely influential figures also are friends.
• The 19th century — Quakers fragment under the influence of evangelicalism and some evangelical Friends partially reengage with economic/social issues, notably becoming leaders in the philanthropical movement that is the signature response to capitalism’s collateral damage in the Victorian period.

Quakers & Capitalism — Evangelicalism and Political Economy

• Major transition (1895 – 1920) — A number of external forces combine with new trends in Quakerism to end the double-culture period and usher in the spirit of liberal engagement with the world that characterizes much of Quaker culture in the 20^th century. Quakers had cut a deal with the powers that be: leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone. Now the deal was off.

Second major transition: The Corporation, the Great War, Liberalism and the Social Order

This last transition period is a complex one and deserves a little more treatment. For one thing, the fragmentation of Quaker culture in the 1800s means that the forces unleashed at the turn of the century affect different communities differently. You can’t really tell just one story, as I have been trying to do so far. And these forces are so many and so complex that it’s hard to treat them properly in a format like a blog. But here goes:

• The rise of corporate capitalism — The laws governing the limited liability corporation are finally settled definitively in the 1890s in both America and Britain and the modern corporation is born—a business owned by shareholders rather than private families and so big as to require management. Over time, this innovation deconstructs the great Quaker fortunes in Great Britain.
• The emergence of the social sciences, including the science of economics — New kinds of thinking are brought to bear on social problems. The Quaker Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree of the Rowntree chocolate dynasty plays a central role in proving scientifically that the poor are not poor because of poor character but because of structural inequities in capitalism itself. In England, the rise of New Liberalism gives birth to a new political party and inaugurates the welfare state, in which, for the first time, government tries to protect the citizenry from capitalism’s downside.
• Classical economics takes the field — Classical economic theory eclipses evangelical political economy, which was already in decline. However, the spirit of evangelical political economy—the blame for poverty on character (sin), the reliance on private and faith-based solutions for social ills, and the dread of government intervention—lies dormant.
• The rise of liberalism — The Richmond Conference in America in 1887 and the Manchester Conference in England in 1895 mark the beginning of ‘liberal’ Quakerism, in which ‘liberal’ ideas, especially the scientific study of the Bible, transform and galvanize British Friends and the Hicksite branch of American Quakerism. FGC and FUM (then Five Years Meeting) are born. Rufus Jones introduces a new historiography of Quakerism in which the faith is recast as “mystical” and Fox’s phrase “that of God in everyone” is understood anew as a kind of neo-Platonic divine spark; it becomes over time the central tenet of liberal Quakerism.
• The Great War — For the first time in two hundred years, Friends are persecuted for their convictions of conscience. This helps to decisively pull Quakers, especially young adult Friends, back into engagement with the world. AFSC is born.
• The rise of ‘social concerns’ — London Yearly Meeting explores the relationship between war and the social order and, in 1918, approves the Foundations of a True Social Order, a decisive departure from the hands-off attitude toward the social order maintained during the double-culture period and a fairly radical indictment of capitalism as one of the factors leading to the Great War. The document and the debate are carried forward into the first Friends World Conference in 1920 in London. Quaker culture enters the modern era.

I’ve not yet written one of these transition essays, on the rise of liberalism. I have a lot of new notes from recent research that I need to digest first. And I’ve only just begun to research the economic history of Friends during the twentieth century. In a subsequent entry, I do want to outline the subjects and the people who I think figure prominently in 20^th century Quakerism, and I invite any readers who know any of these subjects or people in some depth to contribute. It’s going to take me a while, a long while, to finish this project alone. I welcome collaboration.

Yearly meetings, monthly meetings and gospel order

In a recent post on Earlham School of Religion’s blog, Valerie Hurwitz, Director of Recruitment and Admissions, invited thoughts about ways forward for Indiana Yearly Meeting in its recent struggle with the course of its eldership of West Richmond Meeting, which had approved a welcoming and affirming minute dedicating the meeting to apply the same standards to all persons regardless of “race, religious affiliation, age, socio-economic status, nationality, ethnic background, gender, sexual orientation or mental/physical ability.” Sexual orientation was the sticking point, for it runs counter to the yearly meeting’s minutes condemning homosexuality as a sin.

Bill Samuels commented on that post that “the key question may be, What is God’s purpose for Indiana YM?” I commented, as well, agreeing in part to Bill’s comment that, behind hot-point questions like homosexuality lie meta-questions like the ‘purpose’ of the yearly meeting. Another of these ‘meta-questions’ that lie behind this particular controversy is how you define and practice your culture of eldership. I wrote in my comment about how the yearly meeting might approach its role as elder of the monthly meeting in gospel order.

It turned out that Earlham’s comment text box has a character limit that prevented me from posting my entire comment. So I am posting a revised version of my original full post here because I think the problem of corporate discipline in gospel order deserves more searching attention than we often give it. By ‘corporate discipline’ I mean how yearly meetings discipline monthly meetings in gospel order.

 

How does a yearly meeting exercise eldership over a monthly meeting?

Eldership has two sides, that of nurture and that of discipline. In its role as elder, any meeting has a responsibility to nurture its members and their gifts and a responsibility to protect the meeting’s worship and fellowship from behavior that threatens either one. For the monthly meeting, this is difficult because you are face to face with each other, week in and week out, and it’s personal, even intimate. You really have to know your members to nurture their ministry and spiritual life. And discipline is difficult because real people can be hurt. We’re talking about real relationships between people. Difficult as it may be, though, it’s still rather direct and, in a way, straightforward in a monthly meeting. It is immediately obvious when the worship or the fellowship is suffering, and how, though our culture of deference and silence sometimes confuse things.

Things are more abstract for the yearly meeting. The members are meetings, not individuals. Nurturing their spiritual life is of a different order than nurturing individuals, requiring different tools and gifts. The yearly meeting’s ‘worship’ is perforce limited to the body’s worship when in session, or it’s viewed in the abstract. The yearly meeting’s ‘fellowship’, beyond the fellowship of Friends in session, is a fellowship of meetings, which we also must treat in the abstract. Given the abstract nature of corporate worship and fellowship in the context of the yearly meeting, how do you perceive threat to either one in the actions of a monthly meeting? And how do you practice discipline?

Suppose we use the monthly meeting’s eldership of individuals as an analogy. Then, a monthly meeting’s decision is somewhat analogous to an individual’s vocal ministry in meeting for worship.

A monthly meeting’s behavior, when minuted, as West Richmond Friends’ decision has been, represents ‘vocal ministry’ within the larger body. Presumably, that decision has been tested corporately in the light of Christ’s spirit (that’s what their minute says), much as, in theory, an individual’s prophetic vocal ministry in meeting for worship is assumed to have been prompted by the Holy Spirit. We would, on this analogy, start by assuming that West Richmond’s ministry is Spirit-led. If we perceive a threat in this behavior to either the yearly meeting’s worship or its fellowship (I think we’re talking about worship here), we are really questioning whether the decision is Spirit-led. We are then called to exercise a corporate gift of the spirit—the gift of discerning spirits—to determine whether the meeting’s prophetic ministry is of God, or (I suppose) of Satan.

How does the yearly meeting exercise the gift of discerning spirits in such a case? Do you interview those who were present at the meeting when the minute was discussed and approved, to try to determine whether the meeting really was gathered in the Spirit? Do you simply assume that a meeting that reaches a decision contrary to the testimony given the yearly meeting in the past (in this case, minutes condemning homosexuality) must of necessity have been out of the Spirit? Do you assume that the yearly meeting’s past testimonies do not need testing anew? If you acknowledge that a monthly meeting’s decision might be prophetic witness, how do you test that witness in discernment?

Josh Brown once wrote a great little essay defining the things Friends use to test a new leading. If I remember correctly, there were four: Scripture, tradition, common sense or reason, and the discernment of the body gathered in the Spirit. I would add a fifth: the testimony of experience, the testimony of the lives of those Friends (or meetings) who are already living in the light of the new testimony: what are their fruits?

For many Friends, of course, their interpretation of biblical testimony stands as the ultimate touchstone for discernment, so that ministry contrary to that interpretation can reliably be deemed out of the Life and contrary to Truth without further ado. (I say ‘interpretation’ because that is, of course, all we are ever working with, even when we interpret Scripture in the spirit in which it was given forth. Friends have, of course, famously reinterpreted Scripture in some cases contrary to the wider Christian tradition, laying down the outward forms of baptism and the Eucharist, inviting women to participate fully in the meeting’s ministry, and abandoning Scripture’s apparent sanction of slavery.)

Finally, our tradition once was to use Matthew 18:15-20 as a guide for bringing gospel order to individuals thought to be walking disorderly. Does this simple but elegant 3-step model still work for us, and, if so, can it not be applied corporately to the discipline of a meeting? This would at least provide a framework for action that might help prevent some hurt and disorder in the course of the discipline. (It’s worth reminding ourselves that, in Matthew’s presentation, once a decision for expulsion had been made, the expelled party was to be “as tax collectors and sinners” to the saints—that is, they are the people on whom your own evangelism focuses most intensely, just as Jesus focused on tax collectors and sinners with special attention himself. They are not pariahs to be cut off and shunned, but lost sheep to be wooed back into the fold. If they then reject your gospel, perhaps you would then leave town, shaking their dust off your feet.)

So meta-tasks involved in a process of corporate discerning of spirits regarding a monthly meeting’s prophetic ministry seem to me to be:

1. Try to determine, if possible, whether the meeting was in the Life when it made its decision, taking seriously it’s own claim to that effect.
2. Clarify whether testimony given the yearly meeting in the past should ever be tested anew.
3. Clarify what touchstones you would use to test a new leading that seems contrary to previous testimony, and clarify their relative importance.
4. Once you are clear about these questions, test the testimony of the meeting as potential prophetic witness. That is, exercise the gift of discerning spirits regarding the decision, rather than putting the meeting’s defiance of the yearly meeting on trial.
5. Once your discerning has named the spirit behind the meeting’s decision, apply (if necessary) gospel order according to Christ’s teaching in Matthew 18.