Through the Flaming Sword

Social testimonies

The liberal shift away from evangelicalism gained momentum in the 1880s, at least in Great Britain, and crossed a threshold at the Manchester Conference in 1895. But the social consciousness expressed during the Conference lagged a little behind the exploration of liberal theology, spirit, and attitudes—with one exception.

While the noblesse oblige of the “new philanthropy” dominated most of the Conference’s presentations on social action, Samuel Hobson made a bold case for socialism, for sweeping structural changes in the social order. “Our doctrine of the ‘inner light’,” he said, “is but the spiritual manifestation of the socialist doctrine of economic evolution.” (Kennedy, p. 278) Hobson thought of socialism as a secular religion in spirit.

He wasn’t alone. By 1898, he had helped form the Socialist Quaker Society (SQS). London Yearly Meeting wouldn’t give them a room during the 1899 sessions, but 100 Friends attended a meeting elsewhere. Eventually, LYM relented and SQS remained a regular feature of LYM gatherings for a couple of decades.

Thus, “By the turn of the new century modern scientific social reform, as opposed to old-style philanthropy, came into vogue among non-socialist Friends,” a combination of Inward Light theology and “positivist theories of a science of society.” (Kennedy, p. 280)

The socialists were never a large group, nor were they representative, but they were clear in their vision and very vocal. They ended up having an influence on British Quakerism far beyond their numbers and even beyond their existence as the SQS.

Virtually simultaneously, Charles Booth’s 17-volume study of poverty in London was transforming social thinking among British elites. His was the first statistical sociological study in history—the very kind of “positivist science of society” that these young Friends found so attractive. But Booth’s study was too huge, too dense, and too inaccessible to appeal to wider audiences than interested intellectuals.

One of those intellectuals, however, was Seebohm Rowntree, brother of John Wilhelm. He undertook a study similar to Booth’s of his home town of York, where his family’s chocolate factory and the railroad were the only major employers. He interviewed 11,560 families or 46,754 individuals and analyzed their situations. The resulting book, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, published in 1901, became a bestseller and changed the course of British public policy and politics.

It was well organized, well written, and short enough to digest. It proved scientifically that most poor people worked and that they were poor because they didn’t make enough money, not because of their character—that is, too much gambling, drinking, carousing, and sex. I’ve discussed Rowntree’s book and its impact elsewhere in this blog in greater detail than I will here.

My point now is that social consciousness among Friends took a decisive and dramatic turn with the rise of Liberal Quakerism. It turned away from the moralizing exhortation that had characterized evangelical social witness and moved beyond the paternalism of private philanthropy to address social ills as structural and systemic for the first time.

Quakerism was right on the cusp of a new vision of the testimonial life. Liberal Friends felt motivated by what they felt was Christ’s inward light. They were not constrained to the moral issues they found in Scripture, and at the same time, they found support in Scripture for the causes they cared about through a new kind of creative reading that the higher criticism of the Bible had encouraged. And they began to defend their efforts with Rufus Jones’s innovative interpretation of Fox, the belief that everyone possessed that of God within them. They were ready to begin codifying what we now call the testimonies in the way we so often use them today, as principles articulated as guides for behavior, and as continuing revelation in the spirit of Christ.

That impulse awaited only the spark that was ultimately supplied by the Great War. With the onset of war, and especially of conscription, the Society was forced to make a stand regarding the war and to explain it. Though more Friends served in the war than chose the path of conscientious objection, the choices the resistors made galvanized the Society and by the war’s end, the “peace testimony” was not just London Yearly Meeting’s official stand, it had become a defining trait of Quakerism itself.