Quakers & Capitalism – The Double-culture Period (1695–1895)
January 13, 2011 § Leave a comment
Quakers & Capitalism – The Double-culture Period (1695–1895)
Introduction
The Restoration of Charles II and the persecutions ended a period of radical Quaker engagement with virtually all the institutions of English society. But the Lamb’s War focused particularly on religious institutions and not so much on those governing commerce. Capitalism had yet to emerge in any meaningful way. The primary engine for wealth creation was still the land. As trades people and yeoman farmers (that is, agricultural producers who owned their own land), early Quakers were not at the bottom of this food chain, but they started out more or less frozen in their places, without much visible prospect for change. But change was all around them and Friends adapted with remarkable resilience.
By the end of what I am calling the first transition period in the economic history of Friends, they had not only survived an economic harrowing, but had actually thrived, and not just in spite of it but, in some ways, paradoxically, because of it. They were thrust into uniquely challenging economic circumstances and they turned their tribulations into opportunities. But they responded to these challenges with an oddly bipolar cultural alignment.
On the one hand, they built walls around themselves. Take plain speech and plain dress, as only one front on which Friends retreated from the Lamb’s War. Originally these cultural forms embodied early Friends’ testimony to equality in the spirit before the Lord, which they found in scripture and which they confirmed in their hearts. In what I am calling the “double culture” period, these practices became cultural identifiers that told the rest of the world, “We stand apart.” This happened quite quickly, before even the first generation of leaders had passed away. Margaret Fell expressed her concerns about the shift in one of her later epistles. Similarly, in one area after another, Friends withdrew from the world around them.
All but one. They left one wide gate in their wall against the world. This gate opened into a new country, one that was sparsely peopled, nearly devoid of institutions, of infrastructure, of rules and conventions, a virgin landscape waiting to be developed—an economy based not on land and its produce but on technology and industrial production, an economy in which wealth was created by private (or corporate) ownership of capital goods, by investment determined by private decision rather than by state control, and by prices, production and distribution of goods determined mainly in a free market, that is, in a market relatively free from government regulation. In a word—capitalism.
As I have rather arbitrarily defined it, the first transition period stretched between the Restoration in 1661 to 1695, when Parliament passed the Quakers Act of 1695, which allowed Quakers to substitute an affirmation where the law required an oath, except when giving evidence in a criminal case, serving on a jury, or holding an office of profit from the Crown.* (The new affirmation read: “I, A. B., do declare in the presence of Almighty God, the Witness of the truth of what I say.”). One might close the period of persecutions with the passage of the Toleration Act in 1689, which granted freedom of worship to Nonconformists of the Church of England, Protestant dissenters like Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists (it deliberately excluded Roman Catholics and Unitarians, however). The Toleration Act did significantly ease the state’s assault on Friends, especially the financial burden, though local compliance was somewhat erratic for a long time and Friends continued to pay fines for failure to pay tithes into the 19th century. So the Toleration Act closed the door, more or less, on the persecutions. But the Quakers Act opened the door to more or less unhindered economic life, because of the importance of law in the conduct of business. Without the Quakers Act, Quaker business might have remained a much smaller, more self-contained endeavor. With the right of affirmation, however, Friends were free to fully participate in the new contractarian social order that was a necessary precondition for the rise of capitalism. They used this freedom to build an all-new economy.
This was an extraordinary achievement: despite huge financial losses during the period of the persecutions, Friends ended up rich. Really rich. By the beginning of the second period of Quaker economic history, fourteen Quaker families enjoyed revenues over £100,000. And this was only the start of something big—there followed two hundred years of thriving economic life characterized by incredible wealth-building and by a perennial stream of significant contributions to emerging capitalism, industrialization, technological innovation, social reform and philanthropic work.
Quakers became a people with a double culture. Their economic culture could not have been more engaged with the world. Their social-religious culture could hardly have been less engaged. Even as late as the 1860s, a woman might be raised to adulthood in a well-to-do Quaker family in Baltimore without ever coming into contact with nonQuakers. When Quakers call the 18th and 19th centuries the “quietist period,” we mean the religious culture and we forget the economic culture.
Yet, these two cultures were intimately related. This was one people, after all. Individual Quakers, their families and meetings, lived these two cultures as one life. They fused the two cultures without apparent contradiction and with phenomenal success.
How did they do this? What sociological factors fed their material success and economic engagement with the world and denied them social and religious engagement? These are complex social dynamics and I’m not a sociologist. But I think I see three general areas in which Quaker culture encouraged creative, successful economic engagement in the world—with phenomenal financial results—out of the spiritual values that drew them inward toward each other and toward their Inner Teacher and away from the wider world.
- Quaker character. The first area is the fortuitous ways Quaker culture helped shape Quaker character so as to make Friends successful business people. One aspect of this Quaker character was an ethos Friends shared with their radical Puritan forbears and contemporaries, which they exemplified with extraordinary energy. We’ve already touched on how the Protestant ethic gave birth to the capitalist spirit, a la Max Weber, and here I want to elaborate on two of Weber’s key ideas as they apply to Friends: “worldly asceticism” and “rational asceticism.” Furthermore, Quakers expressed this ethos in distinctive ways and even encoded some aspects of the Quaker character in their testimonial life. Quakers became famous for a set of character traits that served to guide their behavior in business and to build a reputation that nurtured their success.
- Quaker practice. Quakers also adopted corporate practices that fostered economic and financial success. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of corporate Quaker practice in building their personal fortunes. Quakers did not—could not—build their fortunes by themselves.
- Sublimation. All the energy (and money) that Quaker character and culture repressed had to go somewhere. Thus, when Quaker character, with the indispensable support of Quaker culture, tackled a worldly problem, it tended to generate amazing creativity and innovation, a freedom of modes of thinking that was paradoxically opposite to the gradually solidifying (and ultimately ossifying) modes of religious thinking that took hold in Quaker culture. It would barely stretch the truth of the matter to say that Quakers were the wellspring from which gushed many of the main streams of industrial capitalist development, even as their own well of spiritual vitality gradually went dry.
Download a pdf file of this post.
* The Act also allowed legal proceedings to be taken against Quakers before a Justice of the Peace for refusing to pay tithes if it did not exceed £10. The Act would have expired in seven years but, in 1702, Parliament extended it for another eleven years by the Affirmation by Quakers Act 1701 and then made it permanent in 1715.
Quakers & Capitalism – Persecution & Gospel Order (1661-1695)
January 4, 2011 § 2 Comments
I have published the next segment of my work on the history of Quakers and capitalism, available as a pdf file through a link on the page to the left: Quakers & Capitalism–The Book. The title is “Transition (1661-1695): Persecution & Gospel Order.” I’ll be loading it soon on the wiki QuakerCapitalism, as well.
The last posting in this series described how early Friends anticipated the radical transformation of the social order as a natural outcome of the Lamb’s War. This was a war of words and signs, rather than of outward weapons. The call to arms was a vivid experience of Christ’s presence and teaching, rather than a revolutionary ideology of social change. Although they challenged the social and economic status quo with their practices of hat honor and plain speech, they did not seek to remake the social order per se, but sought rather to be faithful to the Seed within them, to the Word who led them forth. In fact, they failed to develop a coherent testimony on social and economic institutions even as they absorbed the period’s most radical movements for economic reform, the Levellers and the Diggers.
This first brief burst of apocalyptic fervor faltered for a moment in 1656, when James Naylor reenacted Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in the streets of Bristol and was tried and convicted of blasphemy. Then came the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, the return of the monarchy, and the collapse of the Puritan experiment in a haltingly theocratic republicanism. This begins a period of transition in which the external forces of persecution combined with forces of moderation within Quakerism, embodied in what George Fox called “gospel order,” to significantly transform Quaker culture and, especially, Quaker engagement with the outside world. Friends emerged from this crucible completely changed. The heat of persecution and the pressure of internal discipline had made of them a new and more durable alloy—albeit at a cost. At the same time, they played a key role in remaking Britain’s political economic culture, opening the way for the emergence of capitalism. Thus began an intimate relationship of mutual influence between Quakers and capitalism that would totally remake the social order after all.
By the way I can’t recommend Doug Gwyn’s book The Covenant Crucified enough. He brilliantly describes the forces at work in this period and their consequences and I’ve borrowed much of what I’ve written from his landmark contribution to Quaker history.
Seebohm Rowntree on NPR’s Marketplace
December 23, 2010 § 2 Comments
On Tuesday, December 21, American Public Media’s daily financial news radio magazine Marketplace featured a piece on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871-1954), a member of one of Britain’s three great chocolatier families. I feature this extraordinary man quite prominently in my book on Quakers and Capitalism and was tremendously excited to hear him profiled on this program. I highly recommend listening to it and/or reading the transcript of the story. Here is the link.
Rowntree exemplifies and was a major force behind momentous changes in both Quaker culture and in social, political and economic policy, especially in the UK. His book, published in 1901, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, literally changed the world, a little bit. And yet, as with John Bellers, whom I’ve mentioned in an earlier post about our economic history amnesia, Seebohm Rowntree is virtually unknown to Friends, at least here in the US. Poverty is available from Google Books for free as a download here.
Poverty launched Rowntree on an exceedingly prolific writing career; Amazon lists 26 books. (Here’s a link to Seebohm Rowntree – A Bibliography.) He resurveyed York in two follow-up studies to Poverty. Four main themes dominate his work: He returned again and again to the problem of unemployment and he wrote several books on housing. He wrote about the Christian and the Quaker responses to social problems. And he wrote several books trying to humanize business and industrial relations. He also applied for a patent in chocolate manufacturing.
This extraordinary man deserves our thankful remembrance for the following landmark achievements:
- Groundbreaking work—understanding poverty. Poverty is the second attempt in history to use a sociological survey (and statistical analysis) to understand a social problem (poverty) and to shape a meaningful policy response. The story on Marketplace claims that it’s the first, but this in incorrect. Rowntree based his own research on the methods first used in London by the early sociologist Charles Booth, who interviewed tens of thousands of people in London’s slums and wrote a massive, 17-volume report in the years between 1889 and 1893. (The new social science of sociology was just then being developed by a handful of thinkers.) Booth’s study was, however, too huge, too dense with statistics, and too ploddingly written for many people to actually read. Rowntree saw how important it was, as did some other intellectuals in London, and he decided to do something about it. He used the same survey methods in his own hometown of York (interviewing more than 11,000 people), where there were only two industries—the Rowntree chocolate factories, and the railroad. Where Booth’s work was unreadable, Rowntree’s book was short and compellingly argued, with just the right balance of facts, figures, and exposition. It became a huge best seller.
- Defining the “poverty line”. Rowntree is widely credited for inventing the idea of the “poverty line,” an income level below which a person or a family can no longer provide for the basics of food, clothing and shelter. I believe, however, that again we can thank Charles Booth for this innovation. However, Rowntree put it on the map and I believe he revised Booth’s calculations to make them reflect reality a little more accurately, though most economists today agree that it still needs to be redefined. The current formula for the poverty line (at least in America) comes originally from an American economist from the 1930s named Mollie Orshansky, who based her own work on Rowntree’s. The idea really caught on with the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Once a ‘scientific’ way to define poverty had been established, Rowntree (and before him Booth) came to a revolutionary and truly startling conclusion:
- Groundbreaking conclusion—the poor are poor through no fault of their own. Rowntree’s research proved that poverty was not primarily the result of personal moral failing, but was rather a systemic, structural problem endemic in the capitalist system itself. It proved that the vast majority of the poor actually worked, worked hard, too hard; they just didn’t make enough money to survive—their wages were too low. It was not indolence, drink, gambling, sex (too many kids), and general wantonness that had cast them into poverty, as most people believed until then, though these factors often made things worse. The real problem for the poor was not at its root moral; it was structural—it was low wages. The poor wanted to work, they did, in fact work. It just wasn’t enough to lift them up out of poverty.
- Groundbreaking paradigm—social science and technocratic solutions. This helped to usher in the modern social scientific approach to understanding and treating social problems. Poverty showed that scientific methods yielded results that you could not arrive at using moral philosophy, and it helped to pinpoint where and what the problems really were. This did not put an end to moralizing, as we well know. Conservatives, especially, have continued to cite moral failure as the cause of social ills up to the present day. Now, however, they must also downplay, discredit, bypass and obstruct scientific arguments that clearly point to structural evils in the system. Rowntree’s book ushered in an age of warring paradigms in social policy. One of them was rooted in 19th century evangelical theology and the political economics it had nurtured, focused on individuals, their choices and their ‘freedom’ from government intervention. The other paradigm was rooted in science and focused on communities, on systemic causes and solutions to social problems, and on the roles that only government was in a position to play in addressing these issues.
- Groundbreaking policy—the birth of the welfare system. The book led directly to the modern welfare state in England and, by extension, everywhere else in Europe and North America. Someone recommended it to Winston Churchill, then a young Conservative Member of Parliament, who could not get it out of his consciousness, calling it “a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end.” He wrote and spoke about it all the time, and ultimately joined the Liberal government that formed in 1906. Lloyd George became Rowntree’s friend and would brandish Poverty as he spoke to large crowds all over Great Britain campaigning for the New Liberalism that he, Churchill and others were inaugurating. In 1911, Parliament passed the National Insurance Act, providing state-funded insurance for unemployment, sickness and old age. The modern welfare state had been born and Poverty: A Study in Town Life had provided much of the prevailing argument for this earth-shaking advance in human welfare.
- The end of the ‘double culture’ period and the reengagement of Quakers. Seebohm Rowntree was part of the generation of modernist Friends that remade Quaker culture around the turn of the 20th century. They included his cousin John Wilhelm Rowntree, Rufus Jones and a number of others who had been energized by the Richmond Conference in 1887 and the Manchester Conference in 1891. They were the internal force for change within the Society of Friends that met the external forces that helped shape what I call the second great transition period in Quaker history, moving us from the double culture of religious and social withdrawal, on the one hand, combined paradoxically, on the other hand, with energetic engagement with the worlds of business, industry and commerce. They pulled us out of our isolation and insulation until both our feet were planted in the modern world.
- Quakers discover capitalism as a system. Seebohm Rowntree’s landmark book and methods opened Quaker eyes to capitalism as a system. Until then, Quaker testimonial life had regarded the ‘social order’ as a matter for individual attention; that is, on the one hand, as a matter for the discipline of personal behavior, of “right walking” over the world, while on the other hand, individual Friends and Friends’ meetings had focused their efforts to address social ills like poverty on individuals. Recall Elizabeth Fry’s work in Newgate Prison raising up the educational and moral levels of inmates. With Poverty, Friends became aware for the first time of structural evil, of the way that systems caused suffering. This new awareness took a long time mature. It got major reinforcement, at least in the UK, during the Great War, when London Yearly Meeting convened a Committee on War and the Social Order charged with trying to determine what underlying causes had led to the war and with proposing ways to act that would prevent such a cataclysm from happening again. The resulting Eight Principles of a Just Social Order stirred intense debate in the 1918 sessions of London Yearly Meeting, because the Committee had essentially blamed capitalism. The Principles carried over into the first Friends World Conference held in London in 1920. (We’ll revisit this fascinating moment in Quaker history in a future post.) Nevertheless, it was not until the 1960s that systemic thinking really began to shape Quaker testimonies in any meaningful way: Right Sharing of World Resources addressed global trade policy; AFSC turned increasingly from service to the suffering toward advocacy on behalf of the oppressed; and the War in Vietnam vividly illuminated the power and role of the “military industrial complex” in our economic life. The war also brought Marxism back to life; Marx and Engels had understood that capitalism as a system oppressed the working class way back in the middle of the 19th century. But Quakers never really warmed to Marxism, even though Das Kapital mentioned their own John Bellers by name, and even though a small, very active group of socialist Friends did emerge in the same period in which Rowntree was doing his work late in the 1800s.
After writing Poverty, Seebohm Rowntree continued to bring innovative thinking to industrial relations, social welfare and management. He became a true liberal. Nevertheless, he was himself a transitional figure. Liberal and forward-thinking as he was, he still held on to some of his paternalistic past. For instance, though he saw clearly that a labor movement was essential to economic reform on behalf of the working poor, he resisted the organization of unions in his own business. He took it personally. He also adjusted his company’s wage system to guarantee a ‘living wage,’ a wage above the poverty line that he had himself defined. But he also established a rigorous system of quarterly employee review designed to ensure that his workers were performing well enough to deserve it. Under-performing employees were counseled, reassigned, and/or dismissed.
For all these monumental contributions to the cause of a more just and compassionate political economy, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree is one of my heroes. He also is one of the unsung heroes in the history of Friends. And so I have become one of his modern champions.
Quakers & Capitalism – the 1650s
December 17, 2010 § 2 Comments
Over the next few weeks, I plan to roll out much of what I’ve written already on the history of Friends and capitalism on two parallel tracks. On the one hand, I’ll be loading documents into the wiki, QuakerCapitalism (see my introductory post here), where Friends who are interested can become members and help to build the resource. (If you want to become a member, send me an email.)
However, because many more Friends may be interested in reading this material without working on the wiki, I plan to publish the same sections as pdf files. These I will publish to the back end of my professional website (stevendavison.com), with links to the files appearing only here in Through the Flaming Sword.
So far, two files are available from this blog, but only one on the wiki. On the wiki, I’ve omitted the introduction to the book as originally conceived, because it needed its own introduction. The files are:
Quakers & Capitalism – Introduction
Quakers & Capitalism – The 1650s: The Lamb’s War and the Social Order
Note also that I’ve created a new page for Through the Flaming Sword that will feature an ongoing list of links to these files, organized in one place: Quakers & Capitalism—The Book. This page appears in the navigation column to the left.
Please feel free to share this material, but please also respect my copyright. One of these days, I will probably want to publish this writing in some way, depending on how the wiki experiment goes. If we end up collaboratively building a more or less complete resource on Quakers and Capitalism through the wiki, then we’ll have to decide how to publish collectively. If the wiki project doesn’t take off, then I’ll be finishing the book on my own and looking for a publisher. In the meantime, I invite your comments on the sections published here.
Quakers & capitalism—a schematic historial outline
December 10, 2010 § 1 Comment
Here, finally, is the schematic or thematic outline that I’ve been using to organize my thinking about Quaker economic history. It’s sort of an annotated table of contents for the book I’ve been writing, and a proposal for how to organize the wiki on Quakers and Capitalism. I invite Friends to comment on it, and to contribute whatever they might know about our economic history during these various periods. I will try to get this and other material up on the wiki itself in the next couple of weeks.
I separate the history of Quakers and capitalism into three more or less distinct periods characterized by radical reversals in Quaker engagement with the world and especially, in how the religious ethos of the Quaker community found expression through outward engagement with the worlds of business, commerce and industry. Between these major periods in Quaker economic history lie periods of transition lasting about a generation, in which external forces driving changes in the wider economy and in the economic life of Friends have collided with internal forces driving change within Quaker culture. The middle period, from roughly 1700 to roughly 1900, was puntuated by a less radical transition in which evangelicalism eo-emerged with the new social science of political economy around 1800. Here is a brief overview of this historical scheme:
1 The 1650s: The Lamb’s War and the Social Order
The newly emerging movement of the Children of Truth preached and lived a vision of a radically reconstructed economy as a natural outgrowth of the Lamb’s War on behalf of Christ’s active return, though the economic dimensions of the anticipated renewal of the world remained only partially and vaguely articulated. As Doug Gwyn has described in The Apocalypse of the Word and A Covenant Crucified, Friends in the 1650s expected the ensuing second coming of Christ to make all things new, including the social-economic order. The religious vision of the Lamb’s War subsumed the more narrow vision of a redeemed ‘economics’ (the term ‘economics’ had not even emerged yet as a signifier of a distinct sphere of human activity). Some contemporary movements—notably, the Levellers and especially the Diggers—were very articulate on what we now call economics, and, as history (or God) would have it, the Children of Truth absorbed many of their members and leaders when they were disbanded, but did not absorb much of their political economic thinking.
Major transition: persecution and gospel order (1661 – 1695)
A transition period began with the Restoration (1661) and the ensuing persecutions and culminated with the Tolerance Act and the first Advices and Queries in the 1690s. The transition is characterized by the paradox of intense economic persecution of the Children of Truth, on the one hand, and their remarkable financial success, on the other. The external force of persecution met the internal imposition of gospel order. In this crucible, Friends completely restructured their community and its response to the outward world. As described in Doug Gwyn’s The Covenant Crucified, Friends cut a deal with the powers that be: you leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone; we will abandon our apocalyptic push for a remade world order and practice our religion as a private affair if you will practice a measure of religious tolerance. Friends withdrew from the world in virtually every sphere—except when it came to commerce and industry. With this sphere they engaged with incredible energy and intelligence. In this arena, they were, in fact, poised to remake the world order, after all, and they emerged from this transition period as one of the wealthiest communities on the planet. All these forces helped to shape the genius of John Bellers, the first important ‘political economist’ among Friends, who tried to lead his community into a deeper engagement with the structure and consequences of emerging capitalism, but Friends refused to respond.
2 The 18th and 19th Centuries: The ‘Double Culture’ Period
By the turn of the 18th century, these conflicting forces of thriving economic life in the face of active economic persecution had forged a singularly cohesive people, especially in their economic structures and relations, with a peculiar, schizoid cultural character. A long period of cultural dualism ensued, in which Friends withdrew from the world socially, politically and religiously while at the same time, they aggressively engaged the world in commerce and industry, the sciences and applied arts. With an effectiveness and intensity that attracted the world’s admiration, Friends made essential contributions to the newly emerging capitalist culture. It’s hard to exaggerate Quaker influence on industrial capitalism; certainly, the industrial revolution would have taken place without Friends—but it didn’t. In almost every area—finance, technological advances, the development of physical infrastructure, the creation or revitalization of essential industries, the invention of new modes of social organization—in all these areas, many of the key developments took form initially in Quaker hands. At the same time, Friends were responding to the downside of what they and their industrial contemporaries had wrought. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Quaker business people experimented with internal reforms that would improve the lot of their workers.
Minor transition: evangelicalism and political economy (1795 – 1829)
A second minor transition period began with the emergence of the Christian evangelical movement at the turn of the 19th century and the co-emergence of the discipline of ‘political economy’ in the work of moral philosophers strongly influenced by their evangelical faith. One of the first and most famous was Thomas Malthus of ‘Malthusian theory’ fame, an evangelical minister and early influential economic theorist. By the time of the Hicksite separations in 1828-29, evangelical thinking dominated discourse in both religious and economic policy circles.
3 The 19th Century—Fragmentation and Partial Reengagement
Evangelicalism and the intellectual discipline of ‘political economy’ co-evolved as the century progressed into the Victorian period. Evangelical theology dominated both economic thinking and policy and Quaker culture deep into the 19th century. Joseph John Gurney and his relationship with the political economist Thomas Chalmers illustrate the ties between these new ‘ideologies’ and how Quaker attitudes toward poverty and the economy were shaped by evangelicalism. In Great Britain, Friends continued to hold themselves apart from surrounding society until the mid-19th century, while they continued to amass their fortunes. While the juggernaut of industrialization in England continued to build vast Quaker fortunes, evangelicalism gradually called them out of their quietism and helped to renew Quaker engagement with social issues and to nurture benevolent ministry to the poor through a culture of philanthropy coupled with moralistic paternalism. Quakers took the lead in establishing paternalistic philanthropy as the signature response to capitalism’s excesses in the Victorian period. However, evangelicalism actually inhibited meaningful engagement with the causes of poverty and the effective management of an increasingly complex macro-economy. Meanwhile in America, the 19th century separations fragmented American Quakerism, where economic life had always been more diverse than in Great Britain, making the economic history of American Friends much more complicated than in England.
Major transition: corporate capitalism and liberal Quakerism (1891 – 1920)
A third transition period began with the Richmond Conference in Richmond, Indiana (1887) and the Manchester Conference in England (1891), which signaled the rise of a new liberal spirit in Quakerism. The great external forces of the period were the full legalization of the limited liability corporation, which gave rise to corporate capitalism, and World War I. Just as the transition to a radically new form of organization—the corporation—was gaining momentum, the Great War reinvigorated industrial production. At the same time, Friends faced persecution for their religious beliefs for the first time in two hundred years for conscientious objection to the war. By the end of the War and this transition period, Friends in England, at least, had reengaged with the world, had shifted decisively from an evangelical to a liberal culture, and, simultaneously, the great Quaker fortunes had begun their long decline, as one Quaker company after another went public. Seebohm Rowntree and Herbert Hoover exemplify two kinds of economic policy during this period. Rowntree helped launch and shepherd the welfare state in England at the beginning of this transition, even while he found it hard to abandon his own paternalistic instincts in his own chocolate business. Hoover combined the new technocratic vision of public management, which he applied with miraculous success to the incredible suffering caused by the Great War, with the vestiges of the evangelical ethos, which he applied with catastrophic results to the suffering caused by the Depression.
4 20th Century—Liberal Reengagement
The liberalization of Quaker culture at the turn of the 20th century brought reengagement with basic social issues. In fits and starts, Friends, at least in the liberal branches of the movement, focused more and more on the structure of the economy and systemic oppression, breaking with their two-hundred-year-old tradition of leaving ‘the system’ more or less alone. British Quaker demographics shifted throughout the century, sliding from the upper and upper middle classes to the middle middle class. The picture is more complex in America, but in general, English-speaking Quakers were increasingly employed in the ‘secular church’ of education, health and human services and were people of modest means. This led to a broad abandonment of leadership roles in the wider economic culture and greater willingness to consider institutional reforms of capitalism itself. Committees organized around concerns like peace and social justice emerge as the primary vehicle for this Quaker engagement, replacing the traditional culture of Quaker ministry. Only one of the widely recognized committees organized around a concern focuses specifically on economic issues (Right Sharing of World Resources) and Quaker meetings have articulated a specifically economic testimony only in the last decades of the century, if they have done so at all.
Quakers and Capitalism – announcing a wiki
December 4, 2010 § 8 Comments
One of the reasons I started this blog was that I have done a great deal of research and writing toward a book on Quakers and Capitalism, but I’ve still got a lot of work to do, and I don’t really want to wait to share some of the fruits of this work until I publish (assuming I can find a publisher); that would just take too long. Also, I am not a trained historian, nor do I have access to very many primary sources; I have been reading secondary sources and digesting and synthesizing what I learn. Taken together, these facts mean that I am liable to make mistakes in my analysis and to miss important information. Finally, one of my primary goals with the book is to stimulate a deeper and more sustained conversation about our economic testimony than we have had to date, and I don’t want to wait with that, either.
As we have seen so dramatically in the past couple of years, the economic system is now at a crucial point of (potential) transformation, and I believe that the economic problems we face desperately need a stronger moral voice than they are getting right now. One of my points with my own work in this area is that, as with prison reform, Friends stand in a unique relationship of responsibility for the capitalist system: just as we played a key role in the development of the modern penitentiary, so Quakers have done more than any other community to give capitalism, at least industrial capitalism, its shape and early momentum. Now that it’s running amok, I feel we have a special responsibility to address its problems.
So—with the blog, I am hoping to attract the expertise of others in this area, both as a supplement and a corrective, and to get this conversation going. Already, this has been a great success. Many Friends seem interested in the topic and some have already added valuable information. For instance, I am indebted to Isabel Penraeth for her comments on hat honor.
I have felt for a while that the way to proceed might actually be to try to write the book collaboratively on a wiki. So I’ve started one: http://quakercapitalism.wikispaces.com.
There are some problems, though. Wikispaces is not an open platform like Wikipedia. You can’t just go to the URL, log in and start writing. Participants have to be invited. You will have noticed, if you clicked on the link above, that the site is protected and there’s a Sign In link in the upper right hand corner, too. So if you wanted to contribute, you would have to let me know and then I would invite you and set you up with a login. I haven’t done this with anybody yet.
Also, it’s going to take some practice, I suspect, to learn how to use it. I’ve only begun to load the material I have written, so there’s still some work to do up front. Finally, I have been writing for a while now, and in a personal voice appropriate for a privately authored book, but not so appropriate for a collaborative effort like this. If I had known from the beginning that I was going to moderate a wiki, I would have started writing in a more neutral voice. Well, I’ve gone way too far to rewrite it all, so I invite contributors to use their own voice when writing, if they wish, and we will see what this stone soup turns into. If the project works out, the result will be colorful, at the least.
So this is an invitation to an experiment. I hope that some of my readers, especially those with knowledge of our history, will be interested in joining me in fleshing out our economic history. By “economic history,” I mean a history of Quaker economic fortunes and also a history of Quaker contributions to economics and to the structure and history of capitalism as a system. I mean to go beyond just a history of Quaker attitudes toward money.
I hope, also, that you will notify other Friends who might be interested. For instance, I know Larry Ingle a little bit (we were at Pendle Hill together in 1991), but not well enough to find him and invite him personally; but maybe some of you do. Also, Hugh Barbour has commented once; Hugh, I hope you would be willing to contribute also, if you’re still watching this blog’s progress. If any of you are interested, please email me at steven.davison@verizon.net. If you don’t feel like tackling a new platform and technology but want to contribute, I invite you to send me Word documents and I’ll publish them. I promise to keep track of contributors and their offerings and to report periodically, so as to honor and record copyright and attribution.
I’ve done most of my own research on our history up to about 1900 and that is as far as I’ve taken my writing, so it’s on the twentieth century that I’m weakest. Thus, some Friends will actually have first-hand experience of some of the history I most want to develop. For instance, was anybody there in Guilford at the Friends World Conference in 1967 when Young Friends introduced the idea of Right Sharing of World Resources? I’d love to cover that in detail. Any experts on A. J. Muste? Kenneth Boulding? Does anybody have copies of some of the pamphlets published by London Yearly Meeting’s Committee on Industry and the Social Order in the 1930s?
In my next post, I plan to publish the schematic outline I’ve developed for organizing the original book, so you can see how I’ve been thinking and identify where your own contributions might come in.
It’s going to take me some time to finish loading my own work into the wiki. There’s a lot, and I have to figure out how to organize it. Also, I have to master the style sheet and probably then publish a guide to style for contributors. Using the Wikispaces style tools will allow us to keep an updated and accurate table of contents, and without that, I’m afraid the project will soon fall into chaos.
So please contact me if you would like to participate and please spread the word. I think this might be the first such project for Friends and it will surely be a bit bumpy, but exciting, as well.
Hat honor and Quaker women
November 29, 2010 § 8 Comments
I have been editing the section of my book on Quakers and Capitalism dealing with hat honor and plain speech and was reminded of some questions about Quaker history that perhaps my readers can answer.
In all the discussions I’ve read of hat honor, I have never read a discussion of the corresponding obligations encumbent upon women. Does anyone know anything about this?
We know that a man was obliged to doff his hat to someone of higher rank and presumably, one could tell someone’s social class by his dress, specifically, I think, the style of his hat. My first questions are, can anyone confirm that hat style signified social rank, and does anyone know more about which hat styles went with which rank? Finally, as regards men’s hat styles, was the distinctive style of the Quaker hat modeled on any of the hat styles prevalent at the time, so that it would have suggested a Friend’s rank, or was it specifically designed to avoid this kind of association?
And what about women? Did bonnet style also signify rank? Since they could not doff their bonnets, were women obliged to curtsy before people of senior rank? Traditionally, I believe, women also curtsied to men and even boys as people of senior rank, at least when they were of the same rank or higher. Were women obliged to curtsy even to men of lower rank? Did female Quakers refuse to curtsy to men, or to anyone, regardless of rank?
Does anyone know of any first-hand accounts of female “hat honor,” however it was expressed, or of the forms that the inevitable social outrage took?
Membership
November 27, 2010 § 14 Comments
I started to respond to a post by Micah Bales on membership and it kept getting longer and longer, so I decided to move it to my blog. But I hope Friends will visit Micah’s blog, where he asks some great questions, and several Friends have thoughtfully responded.
I think membership is one of the key issues in Quakerism today. All the complaints we may have about our meetings come down to how we conduct our clearness process for membership, because each person we admit to membership helps to shape the culture of the meeting a little more, and each clearness process defines an initial set of assumptions about the boundaries between meeting and member.
Friends no longer think of membership as a ‘covenantal’ relationship in which they expect their fellow members and the meeting to get directly involved in their spiritual development in an active culture of eldership. They once did. So eldership and discipline, in both their positive and corrective applications, have become four letter words and the meeting has no leverage, no foundation to stand on when it’s needed. More importantly, though, by assuming a passive relationship between member and meeting the meeting has lost its first chance to be really helpful in its new member’s spiritual life: each will now wait until the other makes a move.
Friends tend to fear turning people away by asking for too much from people seeking membership, so they are lucky when they actually get something from them. Meanwhile, sociological studies of religious communities universally conclude that the communities that ask the most are the most vibrant and grow the most. Many people seeking religious community apparently want us to engage them, after all.
The steady shift away from liberal Quakerism’s traditional Christian and biblical identity and even occasional difficulties with hostility toward Christian or biblical vocal ministry and teaching in first day school, for instance, are a direct result of un-clearness about membership clearness. I am an anti-shining example myself. I told my committee that I was anti-Christian and a bit rabid and they took me in anyway (thank God). Sure enough, I started hassling Christians and blocked the Bible in first day school. We get a lot of refugees like me. My meeting got lucky; I woke up to my bad behavior on my own (after a few years and a few woundings of the innocent) and, though I still am not a Christian, and I still have my complaints about Christianity, I am now the guy who consistently insists that Quakers are a Christian community until we decide otherwise, that people like me are guests in the house of Christ and should act like guests, and I have become the local expert on the Bible. It turns out that this is one of my gifts.
Here’s what I think should have happened in my clearness committee: Okay, Steve, we welcome you, but we recognize that you come to us with some baggage, so we’re going to ask you two things: first, you have to be responsible with that anger and those ideas. We ask you not to hurt people with them. Second, we want to work with you to see if we can help you calm down. Will you be willing to work with us? (I would have said yes; just hearing someone say these things would have done a lot, in fact, to wake me up). Then great. Welcome. We’ll let you know soon who we would like you to meet with in what we call a clearness committee to hear about what your concerns are.
Thus, I believe clearness committees for membership should add the following to the tasks they set for themselves when they meet with applying attenders:
- They should actively seek to find out if the applicant is hostile to Christian and biblical tradition, to “God talk”, to the testimonies. If so, they should ask for permission to work with them about these issues, once they become members, and remind them of their responsibility for the openness of worship and the feelings of others. I am not talking about a theological litmus test; I am talking about taking responsibility for the spirit of worship and the care of the members that wounded people might threaten.
- They should ask how much the applicant is willing to allow the meeting to engage with them in their ministry, especially vocal ministry: ask them to read one of the good pamphlets about meeting for worship, at the very least. Try to find some way to open a two-way conversation about vocal ministry, mindful that most folks take a while to get over their original reticence about speaking in meeting, so you don’t want to scare them off, either. But they should know that you are available for support and encouragement.
- Membership clearness committees should begin the process of discerning the applicant’s potential gifts of the spirit: what do they bring to the meeting, what forms of involvement in the meeting would give them an outlet for these gifts, how can the meeting help them fulfill the urge we believe all people have to serve God? This could be done in a later meeting to a greater depth, but the clearness committee should at least make it clear that this is the primary thing the meeting has to offer them as members: help in fulfilling themselves spiritually.
Without that, it’s not clear why someone would want to become a member, and, as we all know, many people attend for years without joining. I think this is the answer to the question, what will change, what will I get out of being a member, besides being assigned to a committee? We will help you discover and develop and express the gifts you have been given. This is the great distinctive breakthrough of Quaker spirituality: that we know that everyone has gifts, everyone is/can be called to God’s service, that we offer weekly opportunities for using those gifts in meeting for worship, that, in almost no other religious community are all members (potential) ministers—and that few joys can compare with the fulfillment of those gifts in service. Membership embodies the formal agreement between member and meeting to work together on awakening and developing and using our spiritual gifts.
Of course, this assumes that the meeting has the resources to sustain a vital culture of eldership—seasoned Friends with the gift of eldership, who know our traditions of ministry, who can sense where someone’s gifts lie, what someone is interested in, and then suggest a book, or somehow guide them toward some form of exploration and expression that will bring their gifts to full fruit. It also assumes that committees for worship and ministry and/or pastoral care have the will to be proactive and ask members and attenders how they can help, and that they have the resources to be of help, once they have a member’s permission to get involved.
To further this role of the meeting as spiritual nurturer, I think we should add a new practice to our conduct of clearness committees for membership. I think we should automatically convene a second clearness committee for discernment of gifts, to be conducted some time after membership, to build on the momentum, to equip new members with whatever will help them contribute to meeting life, and to find out how the meeting can begin to contribute to their spiritual growth. Clearness for membership should open a door into mutual engagement in the life of the Spirit. Membership itself should eventually give more to the member than they could ever give to the meeting—the joy of spiritual awakening and fulfillment.
We can do the same for attenders, of course. In fact, this is the way to encourage membership. But the key difference, I suggest, is that the relationship between attender and meeting is, sort of by definition, passive. The meeting makes spiritual nurture available, of course. The attender takes it or leaves it. And the meeting waits for the attender to apply. But membership means the attender now wants the meeting to actively work with them on their journey. It is ‘covenantal’. The attender asks the meeting to be proactive, to get involved. It is an invitation to active mutual engagement, and it includes the invitation to discipline. We all get into spiritual trouble, sometimes; being a member means you know you won’t be left to out to dry. Someone has promised to help you get back on track, if they can. And all along, they will be helping you find the way God has in mind for you.
Thanksgiving
November 25, 2010 § Leave a comment
In the early 1980s, I had a lot of contact with the First Nations of Turtle Island, especially Mohawks and other folks from the traditional Iroquois. They opened every gathering with a prayer of thanksgiving. The prayer was always an extemporaneous rambling affair that was never the same, but always covered the same ground, in varying degrees of detail. Once it lasted nearly three quarters of an hour. Everything those people did was grounded in thanksgiving. It was the dominant emotion in their gatherings, the dominant idea in their thought, the first and last thing they did as individuals and as a community.
I have always felt that this is the greatest weakness of the Christian tradition, that it gives only lip service to thanksgiving. There is no holy day dedicated to it, it plays no central role in church services, Christian scriptures do not emphasize it. Jesus gave thanks before breaking bread so we do usually give thanks before eating; that’s good. But if it were not for the secular holiday of Thanksgiving in America, when would we stop and say thanks to God as a people for what we have? And, of course, Thanksgiving is uniquely American—what about the rest of Christendom?
The dominant emotion in traditional Christian gatherings is triumphalism, the conquest of Satan, death and sin through Christ. We don’t even think of this central tenet of Christian faith in terms of thanks. Church music tends to be triumphalist, Christmas music especially (“Glory to the newborn King”). This triumphalism nurtures a completely different kind of collective behavior than the humility that comes from thanksgiving. Triumphalism is almost inherently male in its orientation, it celebrates conflict and victory, it naturally tends to condone if not encourage hierarchy, dominance and even force.
The dominant idea in Christian thought is sin and salvation. Again, this engenders really different corporate behavior than the idea of gifts and thanksgiving. Thanksgiving tends to foster gift-giving, sharing and feasting. Native American events are really big on food and dancing. And, at least among the traditional Iroquois, which is one of the few real matriarchies in the world, it is oriented toward the Mother, Mother Earth, and providence.
Jesus himself was big on providence. He proclaimed the Jubilee in Luke chapter four and the Jubilee did four things: it cancelled all debts, it set free all debt slaves, it returned families to their ancestral landholdings, if they had lost them to foreclosure, and it required utter reliance on God’s providence, by requiring not just one but two years of fallow for your fields. This demanded that the community plan ahead, lay food aside, and maintain social forms that guaranteed mutual support when provisions got thin.
Of course, Israel apparently never actually practiced the Jubilee, until Jesus came along. But his followers did. The difference was that they were virtually all of them landless and therefore had no fields to set aside. But they practiced the Jubilee—utter dependence on God for providence: “Do not worry about what you will eat”. And God delivered: the feeding of the thousands being the most famous examples.
My point is that Jesus understood thanksgiving and practiced it. Why has the church built in his name abandoned it?
‘That of God’ – what next?
November 20, 2010 § 23 Comments
This certainly has been a lively discussion and I really appreciate all the comments that Friends have contributed. After looking back a little at Fox, Benson and the history of the phrase ‘that of God’ in Quaker tradition, I want to look forward now and ask what our commitment to Truth requires of us in the light of this history?
We seem to be in general agreement that many (most?) liberal Friends and meetings do not know the history of the phrase’s evolution, do not understand what Fox meant by it, mean something by it themselves that is far removed from its original meaning and use it in ways that Fox did not, and that this modern usage has become pervasive, if not nearly universal. I would add that it has supplanted much of the rest of our tradition, so that now virtually the only thing many Friends are able to say about Quakers is that they believe that there is that of God in every person. This is especially true when explaining the origins of our testimonies. Many Friends have also expressed some frustration with this state of affairs.
I have felt called to a ministry regarding our use of the phrase for years, a concern that moving this phrase into the very center of our witness life and corporate identity, combined with our general ignorance of—and distortion of—its meaning and history, violates the testimony of integrity.
I want to be clear, though, that I am not saying that the now-dominant understanding of “that of God” as some kind of divine spark or share in God’s (what? – nature? substance? mind? love?) is wrong or untrue. I have no experience of such a divine spark myself and, though I once rather enthusiastically embraced this kind of metaphysical ideology in the form of Vedanta, which I learned as a yoga student, I don’t embrace it any more. Furthermore, it now looks like Fox may have held such an idea himself, albeit in a very mutant form—that Lewis Benson is right as far as he goes, but either didn’t know the excised sources that point toward a mutant form of Neo-Platonism, or he read them differently. I am eagerly pursuing research on this. My point is not that the liberal use of the phrase is necessarily wrong, but that we have not paid attention to what we’re doing as a community, and that we should. So I’m asking questions.
The first question, it seems to me, is: Is the modern liberal understanding of “that of God” as a kind of quasi-gnostic or Neo-Platonic “divine spark” true or not? Never mind what George Fox said: what canst we say? Just because Fox wouldn’t agree with us doesn’t mean it’s wrong or untrue. But he could explain himself. He did so very forcefully all the time, and twice in court against charges of blasphemy. So let us also testify to the truth of this new light we claim to have.
We should start with experience. What in our experience leads us to believe in a divine spark, a share of God’s substance, or whatever we call it? (And what do we call it?) Also: where else can we point besides our own experience to support and clarify our stand, the way that Fox could point to Romans and other passages in Scripture to support his?
In my experience, liberal Friends who hold to this new light never quote Scripture, except for some reference to being made in the image of God, from Genesis 1. Some have quoted the Gospel of Thomas. And, of course, people quote Fox, almost always the pastoral letter he included in his Journal (Nickalls, p. 263). So liberal Friends have some work to do, I think, in the light of the testimony of integrity, in terms of both reflecting on our experience and connecting it to the rest of our tradition. I see three tasks ahead of us:
First, we have to own our ignorance and mishandling of the phrase, and correct it. We have to teach ourselves what we’ve forgotten and adjust how we talk.
Then, we have some discernment to do: Is this new light on “that of God” really what we believe? Is this a true example of continuing revelation? More on this later. If we decide it is, then we have to decide how we want to treat our more ancient traditions, which we seem willing to abandon, or at least forget. I myself feel responsible for our tradition, in terms of knowing what it is and being able to pass it on; but I don’t feel particularly responsible to our tradition, meaning that I am willing to lay it down, as early Friends did theirs, when it is clear that God is leading us in a new direction.
Finally, again assuming that we decide we do believe in a divine spark in everyone, we have some theology to do—God forbid. And more importantly, some reflection upon our own experience. How do we experience the divine spark as individuals? What does that experience mean to us? How do we experience “that of God” as a community, corporately, in worship? How does that corporate experience shape our witness, our outreach, our self-understanding, our traditions, our discernment, our worship, our spiritual nurture of each other?
If we are going to redefine our tradition, resting the whole thing on this one slim pillar, as we are doing more and more, then we need to start fleshing the new tradition out, the way Fox and other early Friends elaborated their ideas and experience when they broke so radically with their traditions.
I am not being sarcastic. I am not posing rhetorical questions. I am calling upon us to own our experience and belief in continuing, direct revelation from God and test this new leading the way our forebears did theirs.
I can’t contribute much to this project myself beyond asking questions. I have no direct experience of “that of God” as a divine spark. Humans seem all too human to me. Moreover, just striving to be fully human seems like an honorable, laudable goal to me. I don’t see what believing I was quasi-divine would get me, what essential problems or questions it would answer. But lots of Friends seem to feel otherwise. They should get to work.
Meanwhile, until we honestly engage in the discernment that would establish this ‘new’ (it’s a hundred years old already) meaning as a central tenet of Quaker faith and practice, our tradition is that we continue to believe and practice what we’ve always believed and practiced. We can’t ignore the tremendous momentum this trend in our usage already has. But we can’t just take it for granted, either. It’s not right to back into it blindly, as we have done, and then call it a fait accompli.
In other words, we need to expand the sort of dialog we’ve been having here to include our publishing organs, our conference center programs, our religious education programs at all levels of meeting life, and eventually, our meetings for business discernment, and finally, to revisions of our books of discipline.
In the meantime, also, those of us who are annoyed by this trend in liberal Quakerism should watch our attitude. In this thread, we’ve seen some preaching up of sin and some preaching down of Friends who they feel don’t get it. I’ve been there and done that myself. This shift in Quaker thought does some harm to our traditions, I would agree, but I don’t think it harms real people. On the contrary, it seems very appealing to a lot of people. We could end up hurting people in the process of defending a tradition, the way that some opponents of gay marriage are doing. We can trust our processes of discernment, can’t we, if we just use them? Of course, we would have to use them correctly—but that’s another thread.
Through the Flaming Sword 