The relationship of the Quakers to the American Founding is fascinating. On the one hand, one might conclude the Founders had a strong dislike for them because of their refusal to take up arms. But they didn’t. Hey, many of the most important Founders were Anglicans whose “sect” officially stood for the very propositions against which they rebelled. Irony abounds in the study of religion and the American Founding.
Why might the Founders feel affection for the Quakers? There was a radically decentralized, highly individualistic, anti-creedal, anti-clerical element of the Quakers that resonated with the Whig Zeitgeist. And for those Founders who believed government didn’t need to support “true religion,” the Quakers had that too. As Ben Franklin explains:
If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ and his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never have existed; for I think they were invented, not so much to secure Religion itself, as the Emoluments of it.
When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.
Note Franklin’s letter (October 9, 1780) was to the Arian Richard Price, who because of his Arianism would have flunked those religious tests the two of them complained about. Insofar as I understand the relationship of “Quaker doctrine” to the Trinity, their official doctrine is there is no doctrine.
Quakers of that time tended to believe in the Trinity but had no internal “confession” for it because they had no creeds. If the Spirit instructed the believer the Trinity existed, that was sufficient. If not, that was okay as well. The individual believer, exercising his privilege as a Priest would decide for himself.
The Nonconformist religions are my favorite counterexample to assertions that religion is always and ever a tool of the Powers That Be. I am not a Quaker, I’ve never so much as gone to a single meeting. But I kind of love them anyway.Report
Their oatmeal is pretty good, too.Report
I prefer the steel cut stuff from Ireland a bit more though….Report
I think that the people who argue that religion is the opium of the masses/tools of the powers that be would argue that even non-conformist religions are so because they distract people from the real source of their poverty, misery, and struggles by their focus on the inner light, salvation, freedom from the wheel of reincarnation rather than this world. Plus, all religions are wrong regardless of whether they are official state religions or not.Report
Well, the abolitionist movement had very deep roots in the Second Great Awakening, and the religious life of many in the NE. I don’t think you could say that they were “distracted” from social problems by their faith. Likewise, the early founders of feminism had deep religious roots.Report
Yes, like Dr. J said, the Quakers explicitly were about social justice before that thing was even a thing, and explicitly against state religion. It’s the one thing they won on; every other battle of the founding era was won by by either northern merchant plutocrats or southern slave owners.
edit: heck it’s hard to even describe Quakers as ‘organized religion’ and one the main reasons they’re not around so much anymore.Report
There are dozens of us! . . . Dozens!!Report
First of all, this quote always makes me laugh whenever and wherever it is employed.
Secondly, I knew one Quaker IRL….but that was way back in college…Report
I owe the Quakers more than life itself.Report
The Nonconformist religions are my favorite counterexample to assertions that religion is always and ever a tool of the Powers That Be.
The Puritans who ruled the Massachusetts Bay colony with an iron hand and persecuted, among others, Quakers were Nonconformists.Report