Quakers

• 1. Introduction

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  Quakers are members of the Religious Society of Friends, a movement born in mid-17th-century England that would go on to found banks, abolish slavery, build railways, and win the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1647, a young man named George Fox claimed to have received a revelation while living in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire: that a direct experience of Christ was possible without the aid of ordained clergy. That idea proved incendiary. Within decades, it had spread to North America, challenged colonial governments, and drawn tens of thousands of followers willing to face imprisonment, banishment, and even death. The name Quaker was first applied in mockery. The formal name they chose for themselves was the Society of Friends. What drove ordinary people to risk so much for this movement? What do Quakers actually believe, and why do their practices range from silent hour-long meetings to lively evangelical church services with hymns and sermons? And how did a group of English dissenters produce Barclays bank, Cadbury chocolate, the first steam-powered public railway, and four of the founders of Oxfam?

• 2. The Name and the Man

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  George Fox was brought before two magistrates, Gervase Bennet and Nathaniel Barton, in 1650, charged with religious blasphemy. According to Fox's own autobiography, it was Bennet who first used the word Quaker, because Fox had told them to tremble at the word of the Lord. The term began as a taunt but became widely accepted, even among Friends themselves.

  Before the mockery stuck, Fox and his followers had already been calling themselves by grander names: Children of the Light, Friends of Truth, Saints. These were not acts of vanity but deliberate references to the language of the early Christian church as found in the New Testament.

  Fox's theology was simple and radical in equal measure. He believed that Christ was alive and actively teaching his followers. A direct relationship with God was available to everyone, with no priest or creed required as an intermediary. In 1652, Fox said he had a vision on Pendle Hill in Lancashire in which he saw that God had "a great people to be gathered" in many places. After that vision, he travelled England, the Netherlands, and Barbados to find them.

  A prominent theological text of the Religious Society of Friends is Robert Barclay's A Catechism and Confession of Faith, published in 1673. Barclay also published An Apology for the True Christian Divinity in 1678. Together these works gave the movement its most systematic early theology, grounding the concept of the inward light in doctrinal writing that would outlast the first generation of Friends.

• 3. Persecution and Migration

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  Mary Fisher and Ann Austin arrived in Boston in July 1656, the first Quaker missionaries to reach North America. Massachusetts Bay Colony imprisoned them in harsh conditions for five weeks, burned their books, confiscated most of their property, and banished them as heretics. Their crime was insisting on individual obedience to the inward light.

  English Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged near Boston Common in 1660 for repeatedly defying a Puritan law that banned Quakers from the colony. She was one of four people executed for their faith who became known as the Boston martyrs. A year later, King Charles II forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism.

  Back in England, official persecution had already been codified. The Quaker Act 1662 and the Conventicle Act 1664 targeted dissenters, and enforcement was real. Relief came only with the Declaration of Indulgence in 1687-1688 and the Act of Toleration 1689.

  Despite the repression, Quaker numbers in England and Wales peaked at 60,000 by 1680, roughly 1.15% of the population. Some Friends who had survived the English crackdown migrated to the north-eastern region of North America in the 1660s, looking for economic opportunity and a more tolerant environment. In 1665, Quakers established a meeting in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, and built a meeting house in 1672 that George Fox himself visited that same year.

  Afluent Quaker William Penn founded West Jersey and Pennsylvania in 1676 and 1682 respectively, with Pennsylvania run explicitly under Quaker principles. Penn signed a peace treaty with Tamanend, leader of the Lenape. That peace lasted almost a century, ending with the Penn's Creek Massacre of 1755. In Rhode Island, 36 of the first 100 governors were Quakers.

• 4. Women at the Centre

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  From the earliest days of the movement in the 1650s, Quaker women prophesied and preached publicly. The movement's firm belief in spiritual equality gave women an institutional foothold that was unusual for the period.

  Margaret Fell, wife of Thomas Fell, the vice-chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was one of the most important figures in shaping early Quakerism. Together with George Fox, she developed new conceptions of family and community built around what they called "holy conversation": speech and behaviour reflecting piety, faith, and love. Fell and Fox saw the Quaker mother as essential to developing those qualities in her children and husband.

  An address by Mary Forster accompanied a petition to the Parliament of England, presented on the 20th of May 1659, opposing the oppression of Tithes. Over 7,000 women signed that petition.

  Early women missionaries included Sarah Cheevers, Katharine Evans, Mary Penington, Mary Mollineux, and Barbara Blaugdone. Quaker women published at least 220 texts during the 17th century. Yet not everyone in the movement welcomed this. Fox faced internal resistance when establishing women's meetings, and the Wilkinson-Story split saw a portion of the community leave in protest at those very meetings.

  The conflict was eventually largely resolved, but the tension was real and recurring. With the Hicksite-Orthodox split of 1827-1828, Orthodox women found their spiritual role decreased while Hicksite women retained greater influence. Much later, according to Quakers In The World, the first Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, was instigated by five women closely involved in abolition; all but one were Quakers.

• 5. Splits and Diversification

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  Around the time of the American Revolutionary War, some American Friends broke from the main Society over questions including support for the war, forming groups such as the Free Quakers and the Universal Friends. These were early tremors before the larger fractures of the 19th century.

  The Hicksite-Orthodox split of 1827 grew from both theology and class. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Hicksites tended to be poorer and rural. Orthodox Quakers, wealthier and more urban, wanted to align the Society with mainstream Protestant respectability. Hicksites saw the market economy as corrupting and the Bible as secondary to the inner light. The preaching of Elias Hicks brought the tension to a head in the Great Separation of 1827, creating a parallel system of Yearly Meetings across Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Baltimore.

  In Manchester, Isaac Crewdson published A Beacon to the Society of Friends in 1835, arguing that the inner light was incompatible with salvation through Christ's atonement. That argument cost the Religious Society of Friends Crewdson himself, 48 fellow members of Manchester Meeting, and roughly 250 other British Quakers by 1836-1837. Some joined the Plymouth Brethren.

  British Quaker Joseph John Gurney led Orthodox Friends toward evangelicalism, influencing the growth of what became the Five Years Meeting and then Friends United Meeting. In 1887, Joseph Bevan Braithwaite proposed the Richmond Declaration of Faith as a bulwark against what he called "unsound and dangerous doctrine". The declaration was agreed to by 95 representatives but was unexpectedly rejected by London Yearly Meeting, where a vocal minority including Edward Grubb opposed it. London Yearly Meeting abolished the practice of recording ministers entirely in 1924.

  John Wilbur resisted the evangelical drift and was expelled from his yearly meeting in 1842. He and his supporters formed Conservative Friends Yearly Meeting, whose members saw themselves as the most faithful heirs of Fox's original teaching. A parallel break occurred in Britain in 1865, forming Fritchley General Meeting, which remained distinct from London Yearly Meeting until 1968.

• 6. Commerce, Abolition, and Public Life

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  Abraham Darby I and his family played a central role in the British Industrial Revolution through their innovations in ironmaking. Edward Pease, a Darlington manufacturer and Quaker, was the main promoter of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives. These were not coincidences of biography; they reflected a community described by the BBC as "natural capitalists".

  Quaker-founded institutions included Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, Friends Provident, Allen & Hanburys in pharmaceuticals, Cadbury, Fry's, and Rowntree in chocolate and confectionery, Clarks in footwear, and Huntley & Palmers in biscuits. Voltaire noticed: his Letters on the English, published in 1733, opened with four letters about the Quakers, connecting their faith to the spirit of commerce and religious tolerance in Britain.

  The abolitionist record is equally striking. Nine of the twelve founding members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade were Quakers. Five of those nine had been part of an informal group that presented the first parliamentary petition against the slave trade in 1783. Because Quakers could not serve as Members of Parliament, they relied on Anglican allies such as William Wilberforce and his brother-in-law James Stephen.

  Moses Brown was one of four Rhode Island brothers who in 1764 organised and funded the voyage of the slave ship Sally. Brown later broke from his brothers, converted to Quakerism, and became an abolitionist. During the 19th century, Levi Coffin and Isaac Hopper played major roles in the Underground Railroad. Quaker Laura Smith Haviland established the first Underground Railroad station in Michigan with her husband; Sojourner Truth called Haviland the Superintendent of the Underground Railroad.

  In 1942, the Quaker Edith Pye established a national Famine Relief Committee, which helped energise the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, later known as Oxfam. Irving and Dorothy Stowe co-founded Greenpeace with others in 1971, shortly after becoming Quakers. In 1947, the British Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize for their dedication to peace and the common good.

• 7. Worship, Testimony, and Belief

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  In 2017, there were an estimated 377,557 adult Quakers worldwide. Around 49% lived in Africa; 22% lived in North America. That geographic spread reflects the enormous diversity in how Friends actually worship.

  Only about 11% of Quakers worldwide practice what is called waiting worship or unprogrammed worship: a largely silent gathering with no fixed order of service, where any member who feels moved by the spirit may speak. This is the dominant form in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of the United States. Modern meetings typically last an hour and end when two elders shake hands, a sign of peace that is then shared among those present.

  Around 40% of Quakers belong to the evangelical branch, which holds services with singing, a prepared Bible message, and a pastor, modelled on other Protestant denominations. This form developed in the 19th century during the Second Great Awakening and is dominant in most of Africa and parts of the United States. A further 49% practice programmed or semi-programmed worship, mixing hymns and readings with periods of silence.

  Theological diversity runs just as deep as liturgical diversity. Conservative Friends, known as Wilburites after John Wilbur, reject all outward sacraments and believe that everyday life, including a shared meal, can become a form of communion. Evangelical Friends hold that Jesus Christ is their personal Lord and Saviour and that the Bible is infallible. Liberal Friends, shaped by Rufus Jones and John Wilhelm Rowntree in the early 20th century, emphasise the social gospel, modern biblical criticism, and the inner light in all people. Universalist Friends, a group founded in the late 1970s by John Linton after his time with the Delhi Worship Group, affirm that many paths lead to God. In one study of Britain Yearly Meeting, around 30% of respondents held views described as non-theistic, agnostic, or atheist.

  Across these differences, most yearly meetings organise their ethics around a set of testimonies. In the United Kingdom, the acronym STEPS gathers simplicity, truth, equality, peace, and sustainability. In the United States, SPICES is common: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. These are not rules but descriptions of how Friends attempt to live out their beliefs, grounded in what Isaac Penington wrote in 1670: "It is not enough to hear of Christ, or read of Christ, but this is the thing - to feel him to be my root, my life, and my foundation."