Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, oil on canvass, c. 1834, National Gallery of Art.
It’s hard to think about Pennsylvania without thinking about Quakers. Quakers emerged in Britain after 1650, around the time of the end of the English Civil War. Early Quaker doctrine is based principally on the writings and teachings of George Fox, a self-educated weaver’s son. He would preach for hours to thousands, but I’m sure everybody was on their phones.
Quaker was a derogatory term, like Holy Roller, but the Quakers were good with that, and took to the term. What they called themselves varied, but their official self-identification always seems to be some variation of the Religious Society of Friends. It was the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Service Council that received the 1947 Nobel Prize for Peace on behalf of the Quakers.
By the 1800s, there were about 350,000 Quakers worldwide. In 2021 there are about 350,000 Quakers worldwide. They didn’t do so well on that whole growth thing.
Some central Quaker beliefs haven’t really changed in 370-odd years. They don’t swear oaths, or use hierarchical forms of address. The Queen is not The Queen, but Betty Windsor. They’re pacifists. They accept the spiritual equality of women–well, everybody really. A devout Quaker wears plain clothes out of humility, lives simply, and seeks direct personal religious experience without reliance on ritual. It was one of Fox’s early tenets that each of us can achieve true spiritual conversion without the intercession of clergy.
Early Quakers owned slaves–it is one of the great mysteries to us moderns that Europeans didn’t initially balk at slavery. It was hard times, and even the kindest people were used to common cruelties that would appall us. If you look at crime and death statistics for early Philadelphia, modern Somalia compares favorably. Really.
Their views changed though. By the mid-1700s, the Quakers were early adopters of abolitionism, and emerged among the most influential opponents to slavery, both in America and England. How could anyone own a slave? God’s light shines through us all, and we are all equal because of that inner light.
In 1660, the good people of Massachusetts–early Red Sox fans I reckon–executed four Quaker missionaries in Boston, most infamously Mary Dyer. Quakers were intermittently persecuted in England as well, and both Fox and and his disciple William Penn were imprisoned from time to time. From the outset, that wasn’t the Pennsylvania model. Pennsylvania’s tolerance for Jews and the varieties of Christian sects was certainly a direct result of persecution of Quakers (and a direct precursor of our Constitution’s views towards religious tolerance). Tolerance was such a peculiarly Quaker point of view.
I won’t waste your time with a recitation of how Penn, a Quaker, got hold of Pennsylvania in the 1680s, but some details are interesting. King Charles II named Pennsylvania not after William, but after his father, Admiral Sir William. The younger Penn tried to decline the name out of humility, and the King basically said that’s mighty proud of you. It was one funny dis of a Quaker.
Settlement of Pennsylvania under Penn was not a purely benevolent enterprise, but he spent his inherited fortune on the colony. He intended to recoup costs through land sales, just like any other land developer. Like many another land developer he died land-rich and cash-poor. Always with Penn though, there were other and better motives than mere land sales. Penn took lands from King Charles in settlement of debts, then purchased the same land from the native Lenape because he could not countenance the settlement of Pennsylvania by their exploitation.
Under Penn, Pennsylvania became the most democratic of the colonies, with early governance modeled on Quaker meetings. If the spirit moves you, speak up.
I have written before that I’m at least nominally Christian. I’m not much good at it. As I’ve said, when Jesus came to me by the Sea of Galilee, I’d like as not have begged off to keep fishing for fish. What appeals to me though about the Quakers is their intellectual consistency. Actually it’s the good results achieved from their intellectual consistency that appeals to me. It’s often the case that the worst Christian stuff seems to arise from our consistent pursuit of trivial–or worse, harmful–doctrinal stances. Don’t believe in the equality of women because of St. Paul? I’m certain there’s a sect for that. Do you believe in the impending Apocalypse because you once tried to read Revelations? There are plenty of sects for that. Infant baptism? Adult baptism? The absence of the filioque in the Apostles Creed? There are sects for all of those.
The Quakers engage in the same intense pursuit of doctrinal purity, but they aren’t often side-tracked by the trivial. They operate on a decidedly different plane. We all share the possibility of religious experience, and our spiritual equality demands social equality. I like the benevolence and humility of that. It’s too bad they don’t share the Methodist Hymnal. I could be as indifferent of a Quaker as I am an indifferent Methodist, but I do like to sing a good hymn.
While it’s certainly not the only source, Quaker humility and benevolence seems to lead to many of the elements that are the best things about our democracy. If you think about the Hebrew Bible–the Old Testament for us Christians–in some ways it’s a long discourse on government. If you are a Hebrew, your job is to do what God commands so that, end of the day, your government works and God doesn’t send the Philistines to destroy Shiloh. Sacrifice to Baal, and the Babylonians are a’comin’. Good government is a divine contract with God.
Penn and the Quakers flip that. In governance it’s not the social contract with God but the religious experience of the individual that matters. Maybe it wasn’t conscious, but Penn seems to want his government to reflect the spiritual importance of each individual. As far as I know, it was something new. Penn’s Pennsylvania mostly abolished the death penalty. Penn’s Pennsylvania thought about things like prison reform. Pennsylvania had no common defense until the mid-1700s. Penn’s Pennsylvania gave us a framework for democracy when we finally got around to putting together the Constitution.
In the 1750s, Quakers withdrew from the leadership of the colony. They could not support fighting the French and Indian War, even though the war against Pennsylvania colonists was particularly brutal. They withdrew.
One last observation about the Quakers; Quakers often made great businessmen. Barclay’s Bank, Cadbury Chocolate, Lloyd’s, Bethlehem Steel, all were Quaker enterprises. They brought to their business a reputation of honesty and fair dealing. It was Quaker merchants who first used the price tag, and they were the first not to haggle on price. Quakers set a fair price for goods, let you know what it was, and charged the same price to everyone.
Quaker Oats? Quaker Oats wasn’t Quaker, or wasn’t Quaker any more than Aunt Jemima syrup was a black female-owned enterprise. It was a marketing ploy to trade off the Quaker reputation for honesty and fair-dealing. Their products were pure.
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Meanwhile Monday I didn’t go into work–get it? get it? Anyway I took a day’s vacation to move our poling skiff two hours down the coast, to Port O’Connor. The further south you go on the Texas Coast, the clearer the water. The clearer the water, the better the sight fishing. Galveston, where we’ve had our boat the past five years, is hard water to fish. Because of the outflow of the Mississippi, the water is rarely clear, and it’s hard to find protected water to fish. We have caught some, but we never caught that much.
Actually, that could describe most of our angling.
What we did do in Galveston was keep our boat in the easiest place imaginable, in a dry stack. A dry stack is a giant warehouse for boats, serviced by a giant fork lift. If we wanted the boat out of the dry stack, all we did was send them a text. It would miraculously appear in the water, gassed up and with ice in the Yeti.
Now we not only have to gas the boat ourselves, I have to back the boat down a boat ramp on a trailer to get the boat in the water. There is no longer a giant forklift. These trials may turn me into a Quaker, and certainly I will learn about humility. Or maybe there’s a saint specifically for intercession for backing trailers? I kinda like Pope Francis. It’s too bad he won’t do something about adopting the Methodist Hymnal. Modern Catholic music is the worst.
