Transformation of American Quakerism

The Next Steps Taskforce started in September 2007 by examining principles from Friends documents and the Bible. I invite you to read and think about the excerpt about Friends in the Americas during the 19th century. This was a time of rapid change in Friends churches as these paragraphs show. I am intrigued by how quickly these changes were made. We used this as a backdrop as to what God might be leading us in the 21st century.

Mark Ankeny

The Transformation of American Quakerism Orthodox Friends, 1800-1907

The Westfield of the 1840s and 1850s was a place of women in dove-colored “plain” bonnets and men in broad-brimmed beaver hats and drab shadbelly coats cut in peculiar styles. The inhabitants spoke of “thee” and “thine”; theirs was the language of seventeenth-century England. Their favorite reading was the diaries of deceased Friends. They worshipped in an utterly plain, barnlike building they called a meetinghouse. There the men and women sat separately, with the elders and “weighty” Friends facing them at the front, the silence broken by an impromptu discourse believed to be uttered under the direction of the Holy Spirit. “Testimonies” ruled their lives—testimonies against slavery, fighting, “light and profane” literature, “worldly diversions,” “music, a “hireling ministry”—in sum, against “the world.” Their lives were proscribed by “the discipline,” a “thin, dreary volume” that regulated every aspect of a good Friend’s existence, form the width of the hat brim to the height of the tombstone. Every regulation was enforced by three overseers, “holy bigots” whom Baldwin described as a strange cross between medieval inquisitors and modern detectives.

In the summer of 1861 a Union army officer training recruits in Richmond, Indiana, decided to indulge his curiosity by attending a Quaker meeting. For half an hour the nearly one thousand people present sat in silence “so still that you could hear the heart beat…the men with their hats on, and eyes on the floor, the women with their hands locked in each other…and eyes closed like they were asleep.” Then, as the army man reported to his wife, an old woman “popped up” and spoke for five minutes, followed by another woman for half an hour, then by still another Friend for about ten minutes. Soon afterward the two old men at the front shook hands and left their seats, ending the meeting. There were no familiar landmarks for the officer—no pulpit or pastor, no organ or hymns. It was a “sort” of religion, he concluded, so different from the rest of Protestantism that he could scarcely comprehend it.

Late in the summer of 1875 a Methodist minister decided to indulge his professional curiosity by attending the annual gathering of Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends in Richmond. Unlike his military brother fourteen years before, the Methodist minister felt completely at home. The devotional meeting opened with the singing of a familiar hymn. Then the presiding preacher called for testimonies. Within ninety minutes nearly three hundred people had spoken. Then an altar call was issued, and soon seekers after conversion and sanctification crowded around several mourners’ benches. To the Methodist it had a familiar feeling. “It resembled one of our best love feasts at a National Camp Meeting [more] than anything else to which I could liken it,” he told the leading interdenominational holiness journal.”

The Friends that Baldwin found when he returned in 1910…worshiped not in a meetinghouse but in a steepled church, that his Babbit-like guide informed him, for “style and comfort” rivaled any in the state. An organ for music and a pulpit filled by a sleek and elegant minister had replaced the grim old denizens of the facing benches. The plain language was a memory associated with long-dead grandparents; gone too were the shadbelly coats and plain bonnets. No one saw “the use of such any longer.” The Quakers of Westfield were no longer separate from the world—they had become part of it.

Hamm, Thomas D. The Transformation of American Quakerism Orthodox Friends, 1800-1907. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988.