Quakers

By Peter Furtado

Though there have never been many Quakers, these small numbers belie the sect's tremendous impact, both historical and contemporary. Quakerism has produced an astonishing and disproportionate number of eminent thinkers, scientists, industrialists and businessmen, who are united not only by their success but by their commitment to philanthropy and social justice. Quakers also played an important role in early American history, William Penn even having a state named after him. In this illustrated introduction, Peter Furtado traces the history of Quakerism through the tumultuous period of the Civil War and Restoration, its zealous and unrelenting opposition to the slave trade, and its continued work at the forefront of peacemaking, poverty relief, conflict resolution and charity. He also looks closely at the egalitarian teachings of Quakerism's founder, George Fox, and at how the sect's beliefs have developed since, including their undaunted pacifism and why they have been so successful in business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9780747814184

Book preview

WHO ARE THE QUAKERS?

IF QUAKERS were not strictly pacifist, they could be described as consistently ‘punching above their weight’. A small sect – currently fewer than 20,000 members in the UK and just 100,000 in the US – has produced a disproportionate number of eminent thinkers, scientists and businessmen, as well as radical ideas that go on to be adopted by the mainstream. Among their number can be counted two US presidents (and one First Lady), several Nobel prize-winners, writers, actors and musicians, philanthropists, reformers, campaigners, educators, economists … the list goes on and on.

Quakers have affected daily life in other ways. They are associated with some of the world’s best-known consumer brands, especially for confectionery (Cadbury’s, Rowntree’s and Fry’s), although the jovial Quaker on the familiar oats package is a marketing invention rather than a historical individual. It is true, though, that a Quaker developed the board game Monopoly (as an educational activity to teach the perils of landlordism).

The ‘divine light’, as represented in one of the seventy-seven panels of the Quaker Tapestry, created in the 1980s and ’90s, and now in a museum in Kendal. More than 4,000 men, women and children in fifteen countries had a hand in its creation.

Irving and Dorothy Stowe, two of the founders of the environmental direct-action campaigning group Greenpeace, were greatly influenced by Quakerism. The first voyage on the ship Greenpeace was to stop nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1971.

Quakers have been at the forefront of campaigns for peace and social justice all around the world. Once the leaders of the fight against slavery on three continents, in recent decades they have worked tirelessly with the United Nations and many other international bodies, NGOs and charities seeking to bring an end to the world’s most intractable conflicts, fighting poverty, campaigning against war and helping those whose lives are blighted by violence, whatever its source.

While it is not hard to point to what Quakers do, and the difference they have made to the world, it is much more difficult to pin down what Quakers believe. We can state, simply, what Quakers are: they are members of the Religious Society of Friends, a group that emerged in mid-seventeenth-century England as a fresh and personal expression of the teaching of Christ and the God of the Bible. It was founded by a shoemaker from Leicestershire, George Fox, who preached that every man, woman and child could have a direct experience of ‘God within’ simply by listening – and thus priests, hierarchies, sacraments or rituals all served to obstruct this experience. He also urged people to ‘tremble in the face of the Lord’ – a phrase taken up by a hostile judge in 1650 who jeered at Fox and his followers as ‘Quakers’. The name stuck.

George Fox also refused to impose a hierarchy or formal leadership on his Society, nor was there any kind of creed that a Quaker had to sign up to – with the result that many Quakers no longer see themselves as Christians in the sense of believing in the saving power of the resurrection of Christ. Instead there is a confusing diversity of belief, practice and organisation within Quakerism. In some countries there is a single body that represents most Quakers living there (in Britain this is known as ‘Britain Yearly Meeting’); but elsewhere there may be many such Yearly Meetings, representing geographical, historical or theological diversity: in the United States alone there are more than thirty. As a result, modern Quakers’ beliefs are very varied, as are the various churches – Meetings – around the world. Some Quakers are socially conservative evangelical Christians; others are liberal in politics and plural in belief – with Quaker Jews, Buddhists and Muslims, as well as Quaker theists (universalists) and even Quaker atheists, standing alongside those who recognise the Christian God that Fox taught. Consecrated churches are rejected, and in earlier times Quakers resisted the expectation that they

Reviews for Quakers

[khris · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Lots of contradictory statement and information. Poor grammar and you can tell the author has an agenda