Quakers & Capitalism — Transition into Modern Liberalism
May 12, 2011 § Leave a comment
In this series on Quakers & Capitalism, I have divided Quaker economic history into three major periods separated by times of transition that lasted roughly a generation, during which external forces have combined with internal trends within Quakerism to completely transform the community’s culture and its economic life. During the first transition, from roughly 1661 to 1695, the persecutions combined with the establishment of gospel order to turn the movement away from its radical apocalyptic engagement with the social, political and religious institutions of the day into a culture that was paradoxically dualistic: quietist and peculiar, insular and withdrawn from virtually every area of social converse—but one: Quakers were intensely engaged in the worlds of industry, commerce and the practical arts and sciences. They entered this transition as mostly independent farmers and small trades people. They emerged as a people almost wholly engaged in commerce, poised to literally change the world, after all, by ushering in an all-new system for creating wealth—industrial capitalism. Not quite single-handedly, but not far from it, either.
The double-culture period lasted two hundred years, though 19th century evangelicalism weakened the intense dualism that had marked the 18th century, drawing Friends out of their isolation to a degree and helping to inspire paternalistic philanthropic attempts to ameliorate the suffering of the poor.
The first transition period had rather clearly defined boundaries, marked by the passage of new legislation designed to crush the dissenting sects, beginning in 1661, and by their repeal, concluding fairly decisively in 1695, and by George Fox’s efforts to establish gospel order among Friends upon his release from prison in 1661 and by his death in 1691. The second transition period is a little less clearly defined. I have chosen 1895 as the starting point and 1920 as the end.
Externally, 1895 saw the passage in Great Britain of the final legislation legalizing the limited liability corporation. This new technology would completely transform, not just capitalism, but Quakerism, as well.
Other forces emerged about the same time that created a fertile environment for dramatic change within the Society:
- the origins of the what would soon become the Labour Party in Great Britain;
- the rise in America of Progressivism as an alternative response to industrialization besides the conservatism and socialism and anarchism of the day;
- the rise in America of Pentecostalism, often dated to 1901, and of the Social Gospel movement, which had a relationship with the Progressive Party much like today’s Christian right does with the Republican party; and
- the articulation for the first time of Catholic social teaching, beginning with Pope Leo III’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in 1891.
All of these movements were to a degree responses to the downside of industrial capitalism, whose awesome wealth-generating capacity had outgrown society’s ability to control its excesses and its ability to protect its victims.
Then came the Great War, a cataclysm that, in Europe, anyway, would reroute virtually all social energies, decimate an entire generation of men, and transform the zeitgeist of the West.
The war also brought to a climax a new zeitgeist in Quakerism that had begun in 1895 in Britain, with the Manchester Conference, and in 1887 in America, with the Richmond Conference. The conferences marked a turning point in the course of evangelicalism among Friends and, for many Friends, a decisive move toward liberalism. Friends General Conference formed in 1900, Three Years Meeting (later Friends United Meeting) formed in 1902. In 1893, Rufus Jones became the editor of Friends’ Review (later, The American Friend), and began a lifelong effort to reunite divided Friends and modernize Quakerism. In 1897, Jones met John Wilhelm Rowntree, a kindred spirit who had played a major role in the Manchester Conference and the summer school movement that came out of it. A generation of young very gifted Friends began leading Quakers into the modern era and toward a level engagement with the world around them that had not existed since the 1650s.
Then, again for the first time in 250 years, Friends faced persecution for their faith, for conscientious objection to the war. After more than a decade of liberalization and increasing involvement with social problems and institutions, this experience finally closed the door on Quaker withdrawal from the world. The American Friends Service Committee was born in 1917. In 1918, London Yearly Meeting heard and discussed the report of its Committee on War and the Social Order, charged with analyzing the causes of the war and proposing responses. The resulting Eight Principles of a Just Social Order became a major theme of the first Friends World Conference, held in London in 1920.
In the meantime, Quaker economics also entered a new era. In a future post, we’ll start examining this major transition in our economic history with a look at Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and his landmark book, Poverty: A Study in Town Life.
Pacifism Goes Mainstream
May 7, 2011 § 1 Comment
The current issue of Harper’s Magazine has a long and excellent article on Pacifism titled “Why I’m a Pacifist: The dangerous myth of the Good War” by Nicholson Baker. He focuses particularly on World War II as the permier example of a “good war” and Nazism as the kind of evil that must be stopped, even at the high cost of many human lives. He especially is convinced that early negotiation with Hitler could have saved many of the Jews killed in the Holocaust, as the Third Reich had repeatedly referred to them hostages and only ramped up the killing immediately after the US entered the war.
Very worth hunting down in a good newsstand.
‘Experiment with Light’ — a spiritual movement in British Quakerism
May 2, 2011 § 18 Comments
In The Quaker Condition: The Sociology of a Liberal Religion, edited by Pink Dandelion and Peter Collins, Helen Meads has a chapter on a spiritual movement among British Friends that I found intriguing and surprising (“’Experiment with Light’: Radical Spiritual Wing of British Quakerism”, pages 217-232). Surprising because I’d never heard of it, intriguing because I thought it might really appeal to a lot of American liberal Friends. Experiment with Light has a website, www.experiment-with-light.org.uk, and I offer links to some other resources below.
Experiment with Light is a structured format for experiencing the Light and for sharing that experience with others in small groups that Rex Ambler started in 1996. The process is based on Ambler’s analysis of early Friends’ writings, in which he felt he had identified common steps in their experience of the Light and specifically, on a meditation process described in one of George Fox’s early publications (1653; see book description below). ‘Experimenters’ meet in ‘Light Groups’ for forty minutes of guided meditation, the meditation consisting of six steps interspersed with periods of silence, usually guided by a tape or CD recording (there’s also an online streaming version), but sometimes read aloud. There seem to be several versions of meditations to choose from: Meditation on the individual, Meditation on the world, and two Fox-based versions. After the meditation, there follows a period of silence for personal reflection and then a period of sharing. As with worship sharing, participants keep the sharing of others confidential.
Meads says that many Experimenters report having quite profound and often life-changing experiences during these sessions, that, for many, it deepens their spiritual lives in an ongoing way, both in meeting for worship and in their daily practice. It also creates strong bonds between the participants in a Light Group, and a sense of wider community with participants in other Light Groups.
According to Meads, Experiment with Light has also generated some tension within meetings. Friends sometimes turn to these Light Groups because of frustration with the lack of spiritual depth in their meeting or their meeting for worship, an attitude that their Light Group experience often reinforces—or awakens, if they had not felt that way before. Most Light Groups have been organized outside the formal structures of their meetings and the strong sense of spiritual sharing within the Light Group seems also to sometimes reinforce a sense of distance from the meeting.
For their part, meetings sometimes have resisted or resented the formation of Light Groups and often do not understand the impulse to start such a group or what goes on in them. While sharing your experience within the Light Group is an integral part of the Experiment with Light process, Experimenters often find it difficult to share their experiences outside the Light Group and meet with difficulties when they do, so the Experimenters and their group can seem secretive and opaque to outsiders, according to Meads. Furthermore, non-Experimenters have sometimes felt an implicit criticism in the Experimenters’ enthusiasm for their Groups and their experience and in the Experimenters’ conviction that what they are doing and experiencing is true or core Quakerism. The movement has chosen not to become a Listed Informal Group of Britain Yearly Meeting and usually organizes outside the formal structures of local meetings (only two Light Groups have done so, out of roughly one hundred formed so far), so there’s no formal way for meetings to engage with their local Light Group and, often, no sense of responsibility for them.
As I said, I am surprised that I have not heard of this movement; I’m not sure whether I’m just less well-informed than I thought I was or that the lines of communication between British and American Friends are just less efficient than I thought. Also, I’m surprised that no Light Groups seem to have formed in the U.S., especially since the basic resources are easily available online. Finally, I wonder whether liberal American Quaker meetings will provide fertile soil for Experiment with Light, and if Light Groups migrate here, will this cause problems in the US as it has in the UK? Do any of my readers have first hand experience with Experiment with Light? I would like to better understand this movement and its impact on British Quakerism and on local meetings in BYM, and to know of its progress in the U.S., if any Light Groups have formed here already.
If you are interested in knowing more, here are some resources:
Experiment with Light website: http://www.experiment-with-light.org.uk/.
Books about Experiment with Light:
Seeing, Hearing, Knowing: reflections on Experiment with Light, John Lampen editor. Chapters on “the origins of Experiment with Light, the experiences of some Light Groups, reflections on questions and difficulties that have arisen, and chapters linking the practice to worship, prayer, discernment, the psychology of ‘Focusing’, political action, and possible future developments.” Available from the Quaker Center Bookshop in England, £ 7. Quotes are from the Quaker Center blurb on the book.
Light to live by: an exploration in Quaker spirituality, by Rex Ambler. An explication of Experiment with Light, describing Ambler’s personal story behind the work and discussing the specific source in a 1653 publication of George Fox where Ambler claims to have found a clearly described meditation process. This book is available from FGC bookstore ($11.00), where it’s listed as a “Bestseller”, along with a couple of other books by Ambler: http://www.quakerbooks.org/RexAmbler.
The Question of Christianity
April 27, 2011 § 12 Comments
A digest and commentary on a sociological study of the question in Britain by Kate Mellor
I have been reading The Quaker Condition: The Sociology of a Liberal Religion edited by Pink Dandelion and Peter Collins, a collection of essays that seek to provide a sociological profile of British Quakerism with often quite personal reflections on the sociology of religion in general and the role of sociology and sociologists among Friends in particular. This is a fascinating book with some important and often surprising insights into liberal Quakerism, at least as it’s practiced by British Friends.
It’s often said and assumed, I think, that British Quakerism is farther down the trajectory toward universalism and liberalism than even liberal Quakerism in America. I’ve not spent enough time there to be able to comment on that from personal experience, but the modest amount of British Quaker books I’ve read suggest that this might be true. I have found the work of Ben Pink Dandelion (1) and Alastair Heron (2) especially valuable in understanding British Quakerism.
I want to digest several of the chapters in this book in later posts, to give American Friends, especially, easier access to its content, and I want to start with Kate Mellor’s startling essay on whether British Friends are Christian (pages 70-87). Two previous sociological surveys addressed this question, the first by Dandelion in 1996, and then by Rosie Rutherford in 2003. Each seemed to conclude that British Quakerism had lost its Christian identity and this seemed to confirm the anecdotal evidence of contributions to The Friend over the past several decades and, especially, the conclusion of Alastair Heron in his 1995 book, Quakers in History: a century of change 1895-1995. Mellor’s results, however, contradict the findings of Dandelion and Rutherford rather dramatically, in some ways. And yet, it seems to me that the accepted characterization of liberal Quakerism (at least in the UK) as post-Christian still holds.
Mellor conducted her survey in three stages in 2005 and 2006. She began with 80 members and attenders of Poole Meeting, then sent her questionnaire to the other Preparative Meetings in the Bournemouth and Swanage Monthly Meeting (a Preparative Meeting is one of several meetings that meet for worship weekly but send their business up to a Monthly Meeting), and then to 1006 Friends in the Yearly Meeting. I’ve made a pdf file of her table of responses to her questionnaire.
Mellor finds that 90% of British Friends believe in God, 80% consider themselves Christian, 97% find Jesus’ ethical teachings meaningful, 91% find his spiritual teachings meaningful, and 91% use his teachings or example to guide their own lives. In Dandelion’s study, 50.7% answered that they “would describe” themselves as Christian from among a set of options; in Rutherford’s sample, 45.5% answered that they “think of themselves as Christian”. The difference, Mellor proposes, is the way in which the question was posed; in particular, she allowed respondents to define “Christian” however they liked, whereas Dandelion and Rutherford used their own definitions. Dandelion used belief in Jesus as unique to define Christian, and this definition was not disclosed to his participants.
When allowed to define ‘Christian’ in their own terms, a very healthy majority of British Friends said they were. On the other hand, almost exactly the same percentage (79% versus 80%) said they did not believe in the Atonement. 66% did not generally use the title Christ, 58% did not believe Jesus was or is the Son of God, 54% claimed to be Universalist, and, perhaps most astoundingly, 82% claimed to be Agnostic and 89% followed some other faith. At the same time, 74% said Fox’s famous declaration that “There is one, even Jesus Christ, who can speak to they condition” ‘rang true for them’ and 79% would describe Quakerism as a Christian faith.
This is really a mixed—I would say even contradictory—picture. It’s fair to say that British Friends self-identity as Christian, but they have radically redefined what that means. They seem unwilling to let go of their Christian tradition while they have at the same time largely abandoned that tradition as it has traditionally defined itself.
To my mind, a set of very crucial questions are missing from her study, and from the others, too—questions about religious experience as opposed to belief. I might phrase them this way: Have you experienced Jesus Christ as a meaningful or transformative presence in your life? Is Jesus Christ the center of your religious life? Do you conduct your religious life in the context of relationship with Jesus? Have your formative religious or spiritual experiences taken place in the context of Christian (or for that matter, Quaker) tradition?
The Christianity of British Friends, as revealed in Mellor’s study, seems to me to be a matter of positive feeling for Jesus’ teachings and a desire for continuity of tradition and identity at the surface. But the fact that almost 90% follow some other faith seems to suggest that very few British Friends actually practice Christianity as their religion.
I would love to see a similar study conducted among American Friends that included questions about experience, in addition to questions about belief.
(1) A Sociological Analysis of the Theology of Quakers: the silent revolution, 1996; The Creation of Quaker Theory: insider perspectives, 2004; The Liturgies of Quakerism, 2005.
(2) Caring, Conviction and Commitment: dilemmas of Quaker membership today, 1992; Quakers in Britain: a century of change 1895-1995, 1995.
Being ‘relevant’ and the sociology of religion — and Quakerism
April 7, 2011 § 8 Comments
I have just finished reading Norman Gottwald’s massive, groundbreaking sociological analysis of the religion and culture of early Israel (that is, before the monarchy), The Tribes of Yahweh. The breadth of his scholarship is awesome, the depth of his insight truly remarkable. The book expands and deepens George Mendenhall’s thesis in The Tenth Generation that early, pre-monarchic Israel emerged as a liberation movement sparked by the Exodus community but burning to full flame among various marginalized, subservient communities within the statist, hierarchical social structure of ancient Canaan under Egyptian imperial domination—that Yahwism was a liberation movement catalyzed by a uniquely egalitarian religious impulse to create a uniquely egalitarian social system in the midst of oppressive hierarchical societies. Its priests were peers of the people, not lords, and the practice of the religion strengthened social cooperation and sharing rather than siphoning wealth from lower classes, as did the religions of the rest of ancient Palestine and Mesopotamia. That the tribes of Yahweh were united in a confederation of peers without the economic colonization or hierarchical domination that characterized the societies around them. And that, for two hundred years, this amazing movement held its own against the imperialist forces from whom they had successfully extricated themselves.
This thesis of revolution from within rather than the traditional understanding of ancient Israel as an invasion from the desert has not completely won the day, but Gottwald has successfully deconstructed the facile assumptions that supported the old model and the debate continues (The Tribes of Yahweh was written in 1979). The real contribution of the book however (according to him, anyway), is its sociological analysis of biblical religion, the thorough way in which it connects religion to society, recognizing that religious symbols and practice are completely interdependent with the social systems in which they are embedded and with the processes of social change that they help to shape and by which they are themselves influenced. In fact, Gottwald goes farther than that: he claims that religion is purely a product of social system forces. The book challenges the notion that revelation or transcendental, “supernatural” experience play any role in the formation of religion. In a sense, he’s saying that Yahweh as a god is unique because Israel was unique, rather than the other way round, which has been the premise of biblical theology in the past.
I disagree with him. I’ve had transcendental, “supernatural” experiences myself, and been in communities, including among Friends, where these experiences have helped to shape the social structure and dynamics. So I know he’s wrong in his absolutist claim that social forces alone produce religions, not the other way around. I guess he hasn’t had such experiences. But he is right in that biblical theology has idealized religious phenomena and treated religion as somehow above and beyond the social systems in which it is embedded, and ignored the truly interactive character of religion and social dynamics.
The last few paragraphs of his book discuss what this means for religion today. The prose is a bit dense, but that does not blunt his passion or his provocative challenge to be relevant. I kept thinking of modern Quakerism as I read it and decided to share it. I also kept thinking of Ben Pink Dandelion’s book A Sociological Analysis of the Theology of Quakers. Dandelion’s book is a PhD thesis and even more dense than Gottwald’s, but similarly groundbreaking. It’s also extremely expensive and not well known among American Friends. So I have always thought to try to offer in this blog a succinct digest of his conclusions. He’s made this easier by publishing his own summary as a chapter in The Quaker Condition: The Sociology of a Liberal Religion, which he co-edited with Peter Collins. In fact, all the essays in this book deserve wider reading. It’s clear from reading Dandelion’s work and the essays in The Quaker Condition that the social forces around us are remaking modern liberal Quakerism in profound ways and that we need to understand these forces and our own trajectory if we want to remain ‘relevant.’ I want to explore these ideas in future posts. Meanwhile, here’s that quote from Gottwald:
Early Israelite Yahwism is an intriguing case study in the relation of religion to social change. In the short run, Yahwism seems to have been a socially “progressive” force, serving to reinforce the retribalizing endeavors of lower classes in Canaan. In the long run, however, as we examine the course of Yahwism through biblical times and on into Judaism and Christianity, it appears to have shifted more and more into a socially “reactionary” force, its progressive impetus draining off into sectarian sub-groups or drifting along in uncritical and poorly articulated moods and tendencies in the main social body, but only now and then, as in the prophetic movement, erupting with sustained critical power.
If my line of reasoning about the relation of biblical theology and biblical sociology is correct, the most important contribution of a sociological analysis of early Israel to contemporary religious thought and practice is to close the door firmly and irrevocably on the idealist and supernaturalist illusions still permeating and bedeviling our religious outlook. Yahweh and “his” people Israel must be demystified, deromanticized, dedogmatized and deidolized. Only as we carry through this sociological demythologization of Yahwistic faith, and of its Jewish and Christian derivatives, will those of us who have been formed and nurtured by those curiously ambiguous Jewish and Christian symbols be able to align heart and head, to combine theory and practice. Cogent symbols of historico-social transcendence for the future must illuminate, amid the supersession of social forms through time, the critical intersection between lawful social process and human freedom. It is at that intersection, more or less auspicious from moment to moment, where missed and realized opportunities continually emerge for ever larger numbers of us to struggle toward meeting our genuine human needs and actualizing our repressed human potentialities.
Symbol systems claiming to be based on “biblical faith” will be judged by whether they actually clarify the range and contours of exercisable freedom within the context of the unfolding social process. Symbol systems that blur the intersection of social process and human freedom—by talking fuzzy nonsense, by isolating us in our private souls, by positing “unseen” worlds to compensate for the actual world we fear to see, by conditioning us to compete for many small favors instead of cooperating for a few big gains, by cultivating mood and sentiment in place of vision and passion, by instilling resignation in the name of sweetness and sacrifice, by persuading us to accept the humanly unacceptable and to desist from changing what is manifestly changeable, by confirming our fixations to the past and our venturelessness toward the future, by decrying power while feasting on its benefits—all such symbol systems, however venerable and psychically convenient, are bad dreams to be awakened from, cloying relics to be cast away, cruel fetters to be struck off. They are, in a word, the Canaanite idols that Israel smashed when it smashed the Canaanite kings.
Increasingly we humans are thrown together in a process that both narrows and heightens our freedom. Transformation of our social relations and of our ideas are accelerating in tandem with the quickening pace of techno-environmental and techno-economic transformations. Our “higher” cultural accomplishments, religion among them, are swept along in the transformed and transforming social process. In this rapidly complexifying and maturing sociocultural transitional period, all forms of religious faith and practice that fail to grasp and to act upon their connection with and dependence upon the cultural-material evolution of humankind are doomed to irrationality and irrelevance, whatever diversionary consolation they offer at the moment. Forms of religion capable of grasping and acting on that connection and dependence have something to contribute to the next stages in the long struggle for human liberation; and in commitment to that project, they will have something to learn, or to relearn, from the social religion of liberated Israel.
Quakers & Capitalism — The Decline of Evangelical Political Economy
March 30, 2011 § 1 Comment
In 1832 and 1834, the debate in Britain over how to deal with industrial urban poverty took a decisive turn in the New Poor Law, whose policies and ethos more or less dominated Victorian poor relief for the rest of the century. The New Poor Law denied any able-bodied person money or help unless they lived in a workhouse and worked. It mandated that workhouses be built in every parish and living conditions were deliberately designed to be worse than conditions outside the workhouse in order to discourage people from seeking aid. Eligibility requirements were set very high.
The laws were a decisive triumph for evangelical political economy, codifying the mostly predetermined conclusions of the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws 1832, two of whose four members were staunchly evangelical (Bishop John Bird Sumner and its economist, Nassau William Senior). They reflected a weird convergence of Thomas Malthus’s population theory and evangelical moral philosophy, David Ricardo’s classical economic theory of wages, and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. Sumner saw Malthus’s theory of geometric population growth and its threat to national security as part of the Divine Plan and agreed that, by removing some of the poor’s suffering, the old assessment system tended to remove the incentive for moral improvement. The law therefore embraced suffering as a deterrent to the moral vices believed to cause poverty and as an incentive to repentance. It also embraced Benthan’s utilitarian faith in the free market system to provide the “greatest good for the greatest number,” in terms of wages, and also his assumption that people choose pleasant options over unpleasant ones, and would therefore choose to work rather than to live in the workhouse, if conditions in workhouses were bad enough.
Around mid-century, however, evangelical thinking began to lose its hold on the discipline of political economy and on the distinctive middle class piety that it had fostered in British society, though it remained a dominant force in Quakerism (both British and American), especially among the Society’s leadership, until almost the end of the century. The causes of this decline of evangelical influence on economics were its failures on several fronts:
- As economic theory, it failed to keep up with the more effective economic tools of classical economics, as represented especially by the genius of John Stuart Mill, who mastered the entire field by the age of 13, in 1819, but only wrote his masterpiece, Principles of Political Economy, in 1848.
- As public policy, it failed to deal effectively with the intensifying problems of industrial capitalism and eventually gave way to organized philanthropy in the private sector and more liberal policies in British government.
- As moral philosophy, it collapsed in the face of a terrible social and moral calamity—the Irish famine of 1845-1852..
Political economy matures.
Political economy cut its teeth on a series of economic crises in Great Britain. The first major collapse, in 1825-26, was comparable in its severity to the crash of 1929. This was the depression that so exercised J.J. Gurney, which we mentioned in an earlier post.
Evangelical political economists seized on this devastating and totally unexpected event as an example of divine retribution. One radical journalist (William Cobbett) remarked: “Will the Quakers and Unitarians now venture to deny that there is a God?” meaning a retributive, evangelical God. Cobbett’s remark leads us to believe that most Quakers were not prepared to see the crash as divine retribution; even Gurney seems to have thought it more a test than a judgment.
More shocks followed the crash of ‘25, however, with severe recessions occurring in 1837, 1847-8, 1857 and 1866. The sheer regularity of these events called for a more rational explanation than divine wrath in response to greedy speculation and over-investment leading to bubble formation and collapse. The evangelical Malthus had first defined—and predicted—economic collapses, but he ascribed it to middle-class avarice outpacing the natural limits of consumer demand, over-extending itself in debt, and collapsing in bankruptcy. However, as the understanding of business cycles advanced with real experience, the moral argument for recessions began to lose its weight. Morality still figured, of course—there was no denying the role of greed—but the mechanism was revealed as a mechanism, increasingly understood as independent of causal moral factors that could be cured with moral condemnation.
The return of organized giving.
As the industrial revolution became an industrial regime, neither personalized individual, voluntary giving nor the state’s New Poor Laws were up to the job of taking care of the poor, whose ranks were swelling and whose plight was worsening, and not just in the cities but also in the countryside, where the ‘new economy’ was shaking down the old land-based, agrarian rentier economy. Organized giving came back with a moral vengeance in mid-century in Great Britain, becoming a badge of moral probity for the middle and upper classes (think A Christmas Carol, published in 1843) and a requirement for social esteem in the mid-Victorian period. Friends provided tremendous leadership by example in the rise of philanthropy, becoming the signature examples of how and why it should be done.
Moral philosophy.
The great Irish famine proved something of a turning point in the fortunes of evangelical political economics. As a set of ideas, evangelical political economy dominated public intellectual discourse and the minds of key government actors and policy makers through much of the first half of the 19th century and society as a whole in England adopted its moral tone. This consciousness and the policy of strictly limiting governmental intervention on behalf of the poor shaped the early British response to the Irish famine in the beginning. As the crisis intensified, so did the rhetoric of divine visitation. Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British administrator of relief to the Irish, limited his government’s efforts because “the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. . . a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence [designed to reveal] the deep and inveterate root of social evil.” The public works that had been organized were deliberately structured so as to produce no profit, leaving starving men to pay their own expenses while doing pure make work. Then, for a time, all relief was suspended. Meanwhile, the costs of the Poor Law fell on local landlords, who simply evicted their tenants in response, and the Law denied anyone with at least a quarter of an acre of land any relief; it also forced tenants to forfeit their land to their landlord if they couldn’t produce enough to pay rent and taxes. Nearly 200,000 people were driven off the land in 1849-50.
Eventually, however, the suffering became so visibly overwhelming (perhaps a million people died and another million migrated) that it prompted a backlash of moral revulsion against the moralizers. As both human and national sympathies were awakened in England, so was a sense of outrage at the cold-hearted blamers, who were all pointing in different directions at a bewildering multitude of sins that seemed hardly up to the job of justifying such violent wrath from the Almighty. And it became clear that the government had to act much more forcefully.
More importantly, the laissez-faire policies that the British government applied to the problem, from an explicitly evangelical worldview, made things worse. Even Chalmers, who died not long after, admitted that this crisis was an exception and called for intervention. In the face of this moral failure compounded by policy failure, and lacking Chalmers, its guiding light, evangelical political economics fell swiftly from favor.
Quakers, to their credit, were famously heroic in their response to the Irish crisis. They were present in Ireland already in numbers large enough to form a yearly meeting and had already been ministering to the poor of Ireland for generations. They laid no blame, gave abundantly from their hearts and their purses, made no conditions, abided no corruption in the administration of their relief, and they were fair.
One more factor turned the tide against evangelical political economy in mid-19th century—in a word, optimism. Evangelical political economy was, in its essence, pessimistic because the human battle against sin was a losing battle. One looked to the cross for victory, not to markets, the government or social programs. Eventually, those whose hopes rose on the new economy chose the optimism of the classical economists over the ineffectual moralizations of the evangelicals.
Science was taking off, and so was its brother, technology—solving problems, improving living conditions, promising and delivering on a new idea: progress. The Origin of the Species gave progressives the theory of social evolution, a framework for understanding progress. Quantum mechanics seemed to deepen the old Newtonian laws of physical determination with a new language of energy. Dr. John Snow proved that the horrible cholera epidemic of 1854 in London had scientifically definable causes, where the terrible cholera epidemic of 1830 had prompted the same kind of evangelical moralizing that had labeled the crash of ’25 a divine visitation.
In the late 1850s, two other events helped to redirect economics and Quaker culture during the second half of the century. In the economic sphere, the Limited Liability Act of 1855 allowed limited liability to companies of more than 25 members. This made large amounts of personal financial capital available to build large-scale industrial companies without needing charters from Parliament. The United States had always been more friendly to the idea of limited liability and it gained momentum from Jacksonian populism in 1830s, which saw it as a mark of economic democracy. However, since corporate charters were regulated by the states, laws clarifying limited liability moved forward in a more haphazard fashion than in the UK, but by mid-century, the practice of limiting liability for shareholders was widespread.
Meanwhile, in 1859, John Stephenson Rowntree, then just 24, submitted Quakerism Past and Present as an essay for a prize offered to the Friend who could most effectively address the problem of Quaker decline. Within a year, London Yearly Meeting began revising its discipline along the lines he had suggested, ending, among other things, the practice of disowning members for marrying out of meeting and a host of other infractions. British Quakers were finally emerging from their quietist shell.
The New Poor Law stayed on the books for decades, however, and the basic assumption that the poor were responsible for their own plight remained unshaken until the Quaker Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree published his landmark book, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, in 1901.
Evangelicalism in America.
Things were somewhat different in America. Here, the evangelical movement lagged behind that of Great Britain in terms of when it really took hold. Moreover, Friends in America had never become the huge economic force that they had in England and had always been much more diverse in their economic pursuits and status. Many American Friends were still farmers through the 19th century and many were small business tradespeople. Philadelphia had its very rich Quakers and many of them turned evangelical, but the main current of evangelicalism flowed west among Friends of much more modest means. Also, because social welfare was the responsibility of the states, national public policy toward poor relief did not really take shape until the New Deal.
This diversity has made it much more difficult for me to follow all these trails to outline the history of Quakers and capitalism in the U.S. This is one of the areas in which I would hope other Quaker historians might fill in the gaps.
The next transition
In the next post, we will look at the second major period of transition in Quaker economic history, which began with the great conferences in Richmond, Indiana, and Manchester, England, in the early 1890s, and ended with World War I and the Conference of All Friends in 1920. In economics, Seebohm Rowntree’s book ushered in a new understanding of the causes of poverty and the structure of capitalism, and the last and decisive step was taken in legalizing the limited liability corporation, a technology that was destined to deconstruct the great Quaker fortunes of the past two hundred years.
Quakers & Capitalism—Friends and evangelical political economics
March 16, 2011 § 3 Comments
Joseph John Gurney and Thomas Chalmers
England has had three legal systems for taking care of the poor since Queen Elizabeth I reformed the punitive Tudor system, which was breaking down in the face of the decline of monasticism and the wider medieval social structure. Her reforms (1597 and 1601) created a national poor law system for England and Wales that used the parish as the administrative structure and supplied funds through a compulsory land tax levied at the parish level. It put people who couldn’t work into poorhouses, subsidized the labor of the able-bodied poor, put vagrants in a House of Correction, and arranged apprenticeships for pauper children. The British colonists brought this system with them to North America.
The assessment system itself began to break down in the face of industrialization, which drew large numbers of rural poor into the cities to work in the new factories, straining the urban parishes with heavy taxes and overwhelming responsibilities. By the time of the depression of 1825, which I mentioned in the previous post, the assessment system was ramping up to meet the growing demand and spreading on the heals of increased poverty to areas like Scotland, while its shortcomings were becoming more and more unacceptable. Thomas Malthus, the extremely influential evangelical minister and early political economist, had published his landmark work An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 and had added five more editions by 1825. David Ricardo, the classical economist, published his hugely influential Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, having been inspired to enter the field after reading Malthus.
The debate about how to care for the poor and reduce or eliminate poverty was on. Pressure was mounting to act and the nation was becoming ready to embrace radical reform. Many looked to greater state intervention because local resources were so inadequate, and many agreed that a national system was required to help smooth out the vagaries of local organization. Evangelical political economists like Malthus resisted this trend, however, believing that aid to the poor only encouraged the very sins that had made them poor in the first place—laziness, vices like gambling and drink, and sex—having more kids than they could support. They also felt that mandatory taxes and a state-sponsored distribution system undermined the moral character and opportunities of the rich. They insisted that the spiritual needs of the giver—that is, themselves—were at least as important as those of the receivers—the poor. Each act of charity, to be a genuine act of conscience, had to be voluntary, spontaneous and discriminating. You had to be involved for benefit to accrue. The real obligation was to God, not to the poor. Institutionalizing charity denied the rich the blessing they might receive and denied the poor the opportunity for the kind of personal contact that could ignite a conversion.
Into this exciting environment came the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, a brilliant, charismatic, innovative and energetic man who’d become a zealous evangelical after a personal conversion experience. Of his character, the Wikipedia entry says this: “He was transparent in character, chivalrous, kindly, firm, eloquent and sagacious; his purity of motive and unselfishness commanded absolute confidence; he had originality and initiative in dealing with new and difficult circumstances, and great aptitude for business details.”
Like Malthus and his other evangelical peers, Chalmers believed that poverty resulted from flawed moral character and that private voluntary charity was the solution. Already famous in Great Britain for his theological writings, he solidified his reputation as a political economist by testing his ideas in the field in what amounted to an early 19th century faith-based initiative. When the Scotsman took over the very poor parish of St. John in Glasgow in 1819 after four years at another church, the British system of compulsory tax assessment for the poor was gaining ground in Scotland. Chalmers believed that this approach actually made things worse and proposed a voluntary approach involving radically reorganizing the parish and applying a rigorous program of family visitation, counseling and monitoring to enforce moral rectitude. In four years, he reduced annual pauper relief in the parish from ₤1,400 to ₤280. The astounding success of his program greatly impressed the rest of the political and political economic elites, especially when they looked at the numbers rather than the huge organizational effort involved. Chalmers himself burned out from the work load and, in 1823, having ‘made the numbers,’ left his extremely demanding life running this operation and accepted a chair in moral philosophy at St. Andrews. This was the seventh academic offer made to him in his eight years in Glasgow. His lectures and writings influenced political economic thinking and policy for the next 25 years and beyond.
Where do Friends fit in all this? So far, my researches have found little to indicate specifically what Quakers, and especially, evangelical Quakers, thought of evangelical political economy. It seems that Friends shared their moral-economic worldview to a large extent, but not its harshness of tone or cold-heartedness in practice. Wealthy Friends were morally paternalistic themselves and they shared with these evangelical thinkers a commitment to personal and spontaneous giving. And I know that Chalmers became friends with the Gurneys and other Quakers, whom he called “the most serviceable philanthropists we met with.” [The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865, Boyd Hilton, p. 59. This book is the source for much of my thinking in this area and is a great resource.] Gurney and his sister Elizabeth Fry accompanied Chalmers when he testified before a Select Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland in 1830, presumably because they shared his views. Evangelical Friends also shared these men’s extreme nervousness about their own spiritual health and the moral dangers of wealth. J.J. Gurney claimed that the most “salutary chastisements” he had received from God had “arisen out of being . . . a ‘monied man,’” [Hilton, p. 116 n.3, quoting Gurney’s journal] and, as I said in the previous post, he reported “feeling the Lord to be near to us” during the severe economic crisis of 1825, expressing the belief that market collapses could be times of visitation.
The clearest evidence that Chalmers and his ideological brethren spoke to the evangelical Quaker condition that I’ve found is a book published in 1853 by Joseph John Gurney titled Chalmeriana, or, Colloquies with Dr. Chalmers (available from Google Books). Gurney speaks very glowingly of Chalmers in this little book, praising his modesty and religious humility, the earnestness of his faith, his stellar character as a man, the effectiveness of his poverty program, and, especially, the intellectual power and moral force of his extraordinary mind. They clearly had a deep regard for each other.
I think it’s fair to say that at least they shared many of the essentials of evangelical faith and its general implications for economic practice. And I don’t think it goes too far to say that Gurney represents in large degree his evangelical Quaker peers in these matters.
One crucial area of difference does peek through, however. Chalmers is preoccupied with judgment and with justice as the primary attribute of God, and he was a self-avowed predeterminist. Gurney gives equal weight to God’s goodness. Chalmers looks at the cross and the Atonement and sees God’s judgment.. Gurney sees a divine gift of love. In one section of the book, the two men are discussing the work of several other writers on the moral attributes of God. Chalmers is warning against reducing God’s character to the single quality of benevolence when justice (that is, judgment) is (to Chalmers) obviously more important. Gurney, though, argues: “Surely, that [the atonement of Christ; emphasis is Gurney’s] is where justice and benevolence meet; where God has displayed at once his abhorrence of sin and his mercy to the sinner.” In the dialog Gurney records, Chalmers veers away from Gurney’s point without responding to it.
To generalize, though acutely conscious of sin and of the sinner’s desperate need for Atonement, evangelical Friends remained more optimistic, more open to God’s goodness. Precisely in the Atonement did they see God’s goodness most clearly demonstrated. This, I think, made evangelical Friends much less willing to leave people in their suffering as the necessary road to contrition and conversion, and made them much more willing to minister to sufferers in their need. The work of Elizabeth Fry, J. J. Gurney’s sister, is instructive here. Once awakened from her life as a rich, unreligious, even frivolous (in her own eyes) ingénue, she ends up in the Newgate prison wards trying to help real people. Her tools are the classic evangelical ones: literacy, moral exhortation and the Bible. But her hands are dirty and her heart is burning with care.
Non-evangelical Friends, on the other hand, in their quietist passivity, had not the motivation of the missionary to get them into the world with the same fervor. Their inwardness tended to keep them out of philanthropy and movements for social reform. At the other extreme, super-evangelicals, especially leaders in America of the pre-millennialist holiness movement that emerged in the 1870s and ‘80s from the evangelical awakening of mid-century, these Friends saw relief work as the devil’s work and abandoned the poor to the wrath of God’s judgment. According to Professor Hamm in The Transformation of American Quakerism, this point of view was quite influential among American evangelical leaders for quite some time, though Friends in the benches tended to be more moderate in their theology and compassionate in their views.
Evangelical political economics dominated discourse and policy in England into the middle of the 19th century. By then, several factors had began to erode its influence over policy, with the horrible Irish famine as a crucial turning point. We will turn to this history in the next post. But the moral philosophy of evangelical political economic thinking has never disappeared and has periodically regained the allegiance of some politicians in America, as we well know. In the hands of Herbert Hoover (a Quaker), Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, this moral economic philosophy has played a major role in American public policy.
Quakers & Capitalism — Evangelical Political Economy
March 9, 2011 § 2 Comments
How evangelicalism shaped 19th century Quaker economics – Part 1
In 1825, Great Britain entered an economic depression comparable in severity to the crash of 1929 in America. Hundreds of firms went bankrupt and the Bank of England itself came close. The collapse came out of the blue. Thomas Robert Malthus, of ‘Malthusian theory’ fame, an evangelical cleric and pioneer economist, had predicted cyclical collapses, but no one had seen this one coming. Theories about its causes and ideas for its cure buzzed in the parlors of the business and intellectual elites and occupied the journalists and pamphleteers.
In his journal, Joseph John Gurney recorded “feeling the Lord to be near to us” during that time. (Descended from Hugh de Gournay, one of the Norman nobleman who came to England with William the Conqueror, his family had started with huge land grants from William in Norwich and Suffolk. They founded the Bank of Norwich in 1770, which was for a time the second largest bank in England after the Bank of England. Around 1809, the family bought a large billbrokering business, a firm that either lends money or finds lenders for borrowers; for forty years, Overend, Gurney and Company was the largest broker of loans in the world. In 1896, Gurney’s Bank merged with Backhouse’s Bank and Barclays Bank of London and several other Quaker provincial banks to form what is now Barclays Bank.)
The two schools of political economy current at the time—classical and evangelical—approached these cyclical downturns differently, in terms of how they analyzed their causes, how they would manage the system in times of crisis, and how they treated those who suffered from their fallout. In 1825, evangelical thinkers dominated this economic discourse.
Gurney himself believed, along with his evangelical peers, in a providential God who watched human events and sometimes intervened according to a divine plan. Like them, mindful of judgment, he watched out for temptation and hoped for atonement. The financial crisis of 1825-26 was surely a moral test; but mostly it was seen as a judgment against those who had already surrendered to avarice and ambition. Gurney no doubt experienced God’s nearness as, first, the searing heat of financial losses, which naturally turned him inward to reflect on his own moral character; and then, when his fortune ultimately survived, as the cool refreshing draught of escape from ruin and at least partial reassurance of his moral uprightness. His fortune was saved; he was saved. Many of his fellow capitalists were not.
For moderate evangelicals like Gurney, God’s providence was systemic: both nature and markets ran according to God’s plan for the world’s government and for human judgment, but not every little event was an act of specific divine intervention. Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand”—the natural tendency of markets to efficiently set prices on their own, without government interference—this was actually the invisible hand of God at work. The fact that the actions of individuals powered the mechanisms of the market and gave it direction made the system an inherently moral one. Market policy therefore required a moral philosophy and this evangelical philosophy required not only that you leave God’s mechanisms alone but also that you leave individuals to choose their actions and suffer their judgment.
Such a moral philosophy naturally encouraged moral speculation, especially when bad things happened: cholera epidemics and market downturns pointed toward sins as causes, so the evangelical economists would search for the culprit sins behind these events. As the system tended to be general in its chastising effects, hurting lots of people and society in general, so the more moderate evangelical political economists tended to be somewhat general in their attributions of moral cause and they tended to differ when they got down to specifics.
More radical evangelicals believed, however, that God micro-managed the system, intervening directly and with specific purpose in virtually all events. Thus, they saw every outbreak of cholera or market downturn as a deliberate visitation for some specific sin(s) and this emboldened them to get serious and specific with their condemnations and exhortations.
All evangelical political economists agreed, though, that, squirming under God’s plan, and always defying its purposes, lurked human sin. Every human problem had its ultimate root in sin. Social ills, like poverty and economic recessions, personal problems, like poverty and bankruptcy—you could trace them all back to sin, not just sinfulness in general, but often a particular act, trait or policy. Sin and its consequences for the immortal soul gave evangelical political economists a sense of emotional urgency that heated the discourse up far more than the rational theories of the classical economists.
The sins behind economic downturns were clear: greed, primarily, ambition, and pride. Bull markets encouraged borrowing and speculation. Encouraged by their winnings, investors got overextended. Then, when everyone realizes that they are sitting on a bubble, panic ensues, people start calling in their notes, and the system collapses. Chastised for a time, businessmen (sic) recommit themselves to prudence. But then they forget the pain, greed plants its seeds again, and the cycle starts over.
The sins behind poverty were also clear: improvidence and licentious habits—laziness, gambling, drinking, wantonness of all kinds—and, of course, sex. Sex led to overpopulation among the working classes, which led to poverty.
The cure for both poverty and what we now call the business cycle was moral tuition. The cure for economic depressions was collective repentance and a nation that hewed more closely to God’s law. The cure for poverty was personal repentance and strengthened moral character. The evangelical worldview rejected most practical approaches to poverty relief and turned instead to moral paternalism. Poor relief was actually cruel in its consequences because it encouraged idleness, and suffering was actually salutary, because it led to repentance. Far better to suppress vice and encourage industry, economy and discipline. Their material charity thus tended toward things like good clothing that could support self-respect, rather than grants of money. And, of course, Bibles, plus enough education to enable the poor to read their Bibles. One thinks immediately of Elizabeth Fry, Gurney’s sister, ministering to the inmates of Newgate Prison.
In the next post, we’ll return to Gurney and his friendship with the greatest evangelical political economist of the age, Thomas Chalmers, as a window into the distinctive evangelical mutation in the Quaker double culture of religious withdrawal and economic engagement—how it drew Friends back into the world of social and political action in crucial ways without seriously threatening the distinctives of Quaker culture.
Quakers & Capitalism — The Evangelical Transition
March 3, 2011 § 7 Comments
In this series of posts and in my book on Quakers and Capitalism, I have divided Quaker economic history into three major periods defined by the ways that Friends engaged with the world around them. These major historical periods were separated by major periods of transition, in which external forces and internal forces collided to produce a new Quaker alignment. In the first transition period, brought on by the persecutions in England in the last decades of the 17th century, the external pressures of persecution and the internal imposition of gospel order closed a period of intense apocalyptic engagement with the world and opened a period of cultural dualism, in which Friends withdrew from the world socially, politically and religiously, but channeled incredible energy outward into the world of business, commerce and finance.
Over the course of the 18th century, Friends played key roles in creating modern capitalism and the industrial revolution in England and they continued to build the new economy throughout the 19th century. The turn of the 20th century brought a second major transition, in which the rise of corporate capitalism, liberal thought and new persecutions during the First World War collided with a liberalizing movement within Quakerism. The result was a decisive turn outward, away from quietist withdrawal and into much more vigorous and creative engagement with the world and its problems, including the social fallout and political responses to capitalism’s darkside.
Right in the middle of the double-culture period, however, around 1800, Friends went through a minor period of transition brought on by the rise into cultural prominence of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism opened a door in the wall that Friends had built around themselves and allowed them to reengage with the world in certain ways without giving up their distinctive and even insular culture. More importantly with respect to a study of Quakers and capitalism, the new evangelicalism emerged and co-evolved with the new ‘science’ of economics, though the term ‘economics’ only came into use a hundred years later. Then it was called ‘political economy,’ and focused on the ways that production and consumption were organized in nation states. The first political economists, including its putative ‘father,’ Adam Smith, held chairs in moral philosophy. The first professor of political economy in England was Thomas Malthus (1805).
Malthus was an evangelical minister. Like other evangelical political economists of the time, Malthus’s moral theology shaped his economic theory and this combination gave rise to a second major school of economic thinking that stood in some opposition to the ‘classical’ school first defined by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (published in 1776). Together, these two schools shaped the issues and discourse that defined early modern economic thinking and this dynamic dialog found embodiment in two extraordinary men: Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus and Ricardo were friends but friendly rivals intellectually, and their publishing duel helped define the field of political economy as it matured.
Ricardo was the second great classical economist, after Adam Smith. He was born Jewish and had emigrated to England with his family from Holland. But then he eloped with a Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson, and his family disowned him. He made a fortune in the stock market and ‘retired’ to write at the age of 43. He converted to Unitarianism.
(One of these days, I plan to research Ricardo more thoroughly, hoping to clarify his relationship with his wife’s family and her meeting and with Quakerism in general. Was she herself disowned for marrying out of meeting? Why did he become a Uniterian instead of a Quaker? What affect, if any, did his new religious identity and his exposure to Quakerism have on his economic thinking? If political economy was, in that time, essentially moral philosophy, and if theology was shaping the work of his primary intellectual correspondent, and he himself had undergone some kind of religious transformation, how could these factors not have helped to inform his own ideas?)
No Friends, evangelical or otherwise, contributed significantly to this new discipline of political economy until the second major transition around 1900, and evangelicalism did not alter substantially the momentum or direction of Quaker wealth-building. But it did help to shape the way that Friends approached poverty and other negative consequences of capitalist expansion during the 19th century. And Joseph John Gurney, the great evangelical Friend of his time, was a close associate and a deep admirer of one of the preeminent evangelical political economists of the age, Thomas Chalmers (1740-1847).
Evangelical political economy dominated economic policy and politics in Great Britain throughout the first half of the 19th century and its moral philosophical approach to social problems has returned to favor periodically ever since. In subsequent posts, I want to
- talk about Chalmers and explore his relationship with Gurney as a window into how evangelical thought helped to shape social and political responses to the structural violence of capitalism;
- look at how evangelical Quakerism adopted and adapted this moral philosophy;
- examine the rise and fall and periodic resurgence of evangelical political economy and the role of some Friends in that history; and
- look briefly at the different course that these issues took in America, where Friends had always been more diverse, not just theologically, but also in terms of social class, social and political geography, economic development, and relative influence over social policy.
Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Fulfillment
February 22, 2011 § 10 Comments
How does a covenantal community focused on debt relief and ministry to the poor work?
I said in the earlier posts in this series that, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God by declaring a Jubilee, a general redemption of debt and of debt slaves. How did he plan to make good on his claim to be fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy? Jesus himself raises this question in the course of the story, but he doesn’t answer it. Luke shows us how the first disciples implemented the economics of redemption in the common-wealth of God in Acts, chapters two and four. Presumably they did so according to Jesus’ teachings. There are hints elsewhere in the gospels, notably in the story of Zacchaeus and of Mary and Martha, that Jesus had already begun to organize his household churches along the lines described in detail in Acts. In Acts four and five, Luke actually gives us two case studies of how this was supposed to work, one positive and one negative. In the positive case, Barnabas “sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostle’s feet” (Acts 4:37).
The negative case study (Acts 5:1-12) is an astounding story much overlooked by everybody, I suspect because it’s so bizarre. Ananias and his wife Sapphira, like Barnabas, sell a piece of property, but instead of bringing all the proceeds to the apostles, they agree to secretly withhold half the proceeds. They naturally, I think, fear that they’ve joined a cult whose future looks pretty shaky—their leader has already been executed, their present leaders have already spent time in jail, the secret police are hunting them down. We can speculate that Ananias and Sapphira are hedging their bets, leaving themselves an exit strategy.
Peter knows what’s going on and challenges Ananias. Ananias denies the fraud, and then Peter says he’s lied to God and the man drops dead. Young men wrap him up, carry him out and bury him. Later, Sapphira shows up and Peter challenges her to own up to the subterfuge, but she lies too, and she drops dead. She’s buried next to her husband.
What’s happening here? What’s their crime? Was the punishment really death? Did Peter utter a death-curse? Did God really strike them dead? And what is Luke trying to tell us with this incredible story?
I believe this story encodes the first excommunication in Jesus’ community, defining both the rationale for taking action and the process for expulsion. We know the Essenes excommunicated members by performing a burial ceremony, and even today, some very conservative Jews will say that relatives who have married Gentiles are “dead to me”. This rests on the passage in Deuteronomy that famously says, “choose life”—a theology of life in the covenant and death outside the covenant (Deuteronomy 30:11-20). The first few chapters of both of Luke’s books are full of Essene influence; especially relevant in this context is the mass conversion on Pentecost recounted in Acts 2, which was also the holy day used by the Essenes to admit new members and expel unwanted members. Especially suspicious as a detail in the story is the note that the young men wrapped up Ananias’s body and then carried him out for burial—did they really prepare the body for the grave right there in the midst of the day’s ritualized distribution of money to the poor? Or was this part of the ritualized ceremony for expulsion, which would have been a public event?
So why were Ananias and Sapphira excommunicated? For filing false financial statements. More specifically, for “putting the Spirit of the Lord to the test” (Acts 5:9) by undermining the community’s commitment to care for the poor. That is, for defying the Spirit of the Lord that had anointed Jesus as the Christ, whom the Father had sent to bring good news to the poor.
So, to answer our question about how our meetings would function if we tried to follow Jesus’ intention with the good news, we would first seek to find out who among us suffers under a crushing burden of debt and who among us possesses surplus wealth that could be used to relieve this suffering. This would probably mean that financial disclosure would be an obligation of membership, for this would be the most transparent way to know who has need and who has resources. And we would set up a system for distributing the welfare.
Several of Paul’s “gifts of the spirit” (ministry, giving, leading, and showing compassion—Romans 12:6-8) seem to represent various offices in the welfare distribution system that he had set up in his churches, each one inspired by the same Spirit that Ananias and Sapphira had defied. These offices are only hinted at in the gospels and Acts, specifically, Acts 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” all of which took place, if I’m not mistaken, at the time of the day’s main meal. “Fellowship” here is the Greek word koine, which means sharing, the sharing of food and money as well as each other’s presence.
Can you imagine organizing your meeting around these principles?
Such a radical covenant of governance, in which discipleship meant this kind of disclosure and discipline, would need to stand on a sure and clear foundation of authority. For Jesus himself and his followers—and for the early Friends—that authority was the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the Christ. Where would today’s liberal, mostly post-Christian meetings turn to for a foundation of authority that could carry such a weight? More importantly, perhaps, why would liberal meetings organize themselves this way, having mostly abandoned the teachings of Jesus as authoritative? Without the authority of the gospel, without the example of the first disciples, a meeting would realign itself toward the poor in this way only if deeply moved by the Holy Spirit—as, indeed, the first Christians were. But this is no less true for mostly Christian meetings. Would they be willing to recover the economic heart of the Christ’s teachings? Would they be any more willing to reorganize their meetings around the good news for the poor?
I propose that the gospel message of Jesus the Christ does, in fact, offer us a powerful place to start in experiencing, articulating and proclaiming a revitalized testimony on economics. But would such a testimony languish at the doorstep of action?
Here the traditional faith and practice of the Quaker testimonies comes into play. The testimonies are not, properly speaking, social action positions to which we are encouraged to subscribe as Friends. They are in theory the natural and even inevitable expressions of movements of the Spirit within and among us. The ‘written testimonies’ are the shadow and not the substance of a testimonial life, empty forms without power, until and unless the spirit of God anoints us. Once we are in-spired with compassion for the poor, the actual words of the testimony and the concrete actions of the testimonial life will follow. Without the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the good news for the poor is just a notion, an intriguing radical ideology, a matter for study and discussion.
When it comes to the poor, I myself hold only a shadow in my hands. I am the rich young man who walked away (Luke 18). I could not live in such a meeting, for a bunch of reasons. I have not surrendered authority over my life to Jesus the Christ (though he hasn’t yet come to claim it).
We believe—I believe, having experienced it myself—that each of us is called to direct inspiration by God, and that the meeting as a community is also so called, and that God is always trying to reveal to us new truth and lead us into renewed life (and by ‘God’ here I mean the Mystery Reality behind our experience of being inspired and led, however that experience manifests). This much I can do: try to open myself to God’s inspiration and revelation and guidance. Try to be faithful to the call when I hear it.
I have answered several calls; I have tried to remain faithful to them. One of them has led me to spend decades studying Jesus’ economic teachings, to write a book about them, to become something of an authority on them. Yet I’ve never let them overwhelm my own desires. I have never truly sought the fellowship of the Spirit in the sharing of wealth and the ministry to the poor. I am Ananias. I guess I am running from the shadow of the cross.
Through the Flaming Sword 