History of Quakers

Quaker history

Like many Christian groups, Quakers never intended to form a new denomination. Their founder, George Fox, was trying to take belief and believers back to the original and pure form of Christianity.

Fox was born in July 1624 in Leicestershire, England, and died in 1691, when his movement had 50,000 followers.

As Fox grew up, he was puzzled by the inconsistency between what Christians believed and how they behaved. He became a religious activist at the age of 19 and was imprisoned eight times for preaching views that annoyed the religious and political establishment of his time.

Fox and social issues

Fox got into political trouble because he believed that there was something “of God in every person.”

This was a revolutionary attack on all discrimination based on social class, wealth, race, and gender, and it had worrying implications for the social structure of his time.

The political establishment did not take this lying down. Quakers’ refusal to take oaths and to take off their hats before a magistrate, and their insistence on holding banned religious meetings in public led to 6,000 Quakers being imprisoned between 1662 and 1670.

Fox and religious issues

Fox’s aim was to inspire people to hear and obey God’s voice and become a community “renewed up again in God’s image” by living the principles of their faith.

Fox believed that everyone should try to encounter God directly and to experience the Kingdom of Heaven as a present, living reality. He objected to the hierarchical structure and the rituals of the churches of his time, and rejected the idea that the Bible was always right.

But Fox went even further. He argued that God himself did not want churches. Churches were either unnecessary to get to God or an obstruction (Fox often referred to churches unkindly as “steeple-houses”). Since believers should have a direct relationship with God, no one (priests, for example) and nothing (like sacraments) should come in between.

Not surprisingly, these views infuriated the mainstream churches, and Quakers were persecuted in Britain on a large scale until 1689.

USA

Quaker missionaries arrived in the USA in 1656. They were persecuted at first, and four were executed.

However, the movement appealed to many Americans and grew in strength, most famously in Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1681 by William Penn as a community based on the principles of pacifism and religious tolerance.

Quakers and slavery

The origins of Christian abolitionism can be traced to the late 17th Century and the Quakers. Several of their founders, including George Fox and Benjamin Lay, encouraged fellow congregants to stop owning slaves.

By 1696, Quakers in Pennsylvania officially declared their opposition to the importation of enslaved Africans into North America. Along with the Anglican Granville Sharp, Quakers established the first recognized anti-slavery movement in Britain in 1787.