The Rise of Liberal Quakerism—A Short History
May 22, 2018 § 5 Comments
Introduction
The history of liberal Quakerism’s emergence is fascinating to me and consequential, I believe, for an understanding of Quakerism today. I’ve been reading books that touch on this history in one way or another, expecting that I would eventually start blogging about what I’ve found.
As part of my research for my book on Quakers and Capitalism, I have been reading Thomas C. Kennedy’s British Quakerism, 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community, an excellent book that I highly recommend. Having just finished Kennedy’s book, I feel I’m ready for this blog series.
1860–1920 (and more particularly, 1895–1920, beginning with the Manchester Conference and ending with the World Conference of All-Friends) is the period in which liberal Quakerism arose and it’s one of the theses of my book that it brought with it a new spirit of engagement with the social order, which had languished for two hundred years since the persecutions ended the Lamb’s War in the late 17th century. “Social order” is the term British Friends used around the turn of the twentieth century to indicate the economic order—capitalism—which was at the time changing very fast and very radically, and also, more broadly, the social institutions in the wider society that impinged on or related to the economic order.
Since Kennedy’s book is so hard to find (I found one copy for sale at $125; the copy I’m reading happened to be in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s library), I thought I would write a few posts encapsulating the book’s contents as a resource for my readers who might be interested but can’t get a copy. When I’m done, I will bring all the posts together into one pdf file.
So this is the introduction. In the next post, I’ll begin this “book report”.
Through the Flaming Sword 
[…] Britain Yearly Meeting started formulating a new kind of Quakerism. Here’s his explanatory introduction and here is part […]
Thanks, looking forward to these posts. I may be jumping the gun a little bit here, but, following on what I think Bill Samuel is getting at, is it not an overstatement to say that Friends engagement with the social order had “languished” since C17? What about anti-slavery in C18? Seems like you might be drawing on a Jonesian narrative of quietism as exclusively inward looking.
Thanks, Jay. See my reply to Bill below.
In the 19th century, wasn’t British Quaker involvement in the social order led by evangelicals? They worked and established meetings in poor areas (but their converts couldn’t be full members due to the non-evangelical higher class Friends who insisted they could only join if a special, second class, form of membership was established for them), and were active in many causes – abolition of slavery, prison reform, mental health reform, animal welfare, etc., etc. Many of their non-evangelical compatriots looked askance at this. But in the end, the social reform institutions they started were taken over by liberals, and some still exist.
Yes, British Friends did engage during the 19th century, so the way I put it is a little misleading. Friends were of course prominent in the anti-slavery movement and active in the other reform efforts you mention and they were key drivers of the philanthropic movement that emerged in that century and became the signature channel for Victorian piety in the middle and upper classes. And they formed what they called Adult Schools for workers.
But their efforts were strongly shaped by their evangelical theology. It was focused on individuals and its tools were moral exhortation and the gospel of salvation in Christ. Social ills were the result of sin and so the cure was delivery from sin. Elizabeth Fry, for instance, taught women in Newgate Prison to read using the Bible and gave impassioned sermons from the dock to those about to depart for prison in Australia. But she did not challenge the system that put those women in prison in the first place.
What changed with the rise of liberalism was a new focus on systemic causes and solutions for social ills. In the 1890s, notably with Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Study in Town Life, Friends started studying and, for the first time since the 1650s, challenging the social order itself. And, more importantly vis a vis evangelicalism, they abandoned evangelizing individuals as insufficient to change society or to make an effective difference in social problems, or even in the social conditions of individuals.
Rowntree’s book proved scientifically that poor people were not poor because of their character—because they drank too much, gambled too much, were lazy, and had too much sex (that is, too many kids)—but because their employers weren’t paying them enough. It didn’t matter how moral or sinful workers were; they were going to be poor anyway.
A Socialist Quaker Society was formed in 1898 and while always a small minority of London Yearly Meeting, this group had an outsized influence on Quaker thought and action into the twentieth century. With this new liberal movement, groups within the Society, and to a certain extent the whole yearly meeting, became overtly “political” in their relationship to the social order. The Great War made the shift permanent and established the peace testimony as we know it today as the cornerstone for other social witness testimonies.