September 26, 2024
By Luke Nicastro
Abutting a large military base in Northern Virginia is a small, squat wooden building. The Woodlawn Meetinghouse, as it known, has been the center of a Quaker community for nearly 200 years. It originated as a kind of experiment—in the 1840s, Quaker farmers bought land that once belonged to George Washington, aiming to show that free labor could outcompete slavery even on former plantations.
But over the years, the project sputtered. The Civil War extinguished its raison d’être, agriculture gave way to suburban sprawl, and the government snapped up what acreage remained in the name of national security. Now surrounded on three sides by the Army’s Ft. Belvoir, Woodlawn hosts just a few dozen worshippers, seeking the Inward Light in silence every Sunday (or “First Day,” as their more austere forebears would have called it).
I had lived in the area, including a stint working on Ft. Belvoir itself, for over three decades without noticing this site—a local oblivion that could stand in for Quakerism’s place in American society writ large. Today, most people’s acquaintance with Quakers comes from the breakfast table. The last time the sect made the news, it was as an oblique historical coda to the Park Service’s abortive attempt to topple a William Penn statue. And if one types “Quakers in the United States” into the search bar, the first question Google will suggest is: “Do Quakers still exist?”
It wasn’t always thus. For three centuries, Quakerism, known more formally as the Religious Society of Friends, was a vibrant thread in the tapestry of American identity. Its adherents settled and shaped some of the country’s most storied places: Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, of course, but also Nantucket, Long Island, Providence and Newport, parts of the Tidewater and (a little later) pockets of the Midwest. At their proportional peak around 1700, they accounted for perhaps 15% of British North America’s population; and even as that share shrunk, they exercised an influence beyond their numbers (consider that as many Quakers as Catholics have occupied the Oval Office).
Moreover, the Quaker was a singular and recognizably American type, known to embody an array of almost paradoxical traits: both sober and generous, conservative in habit but egalitarian in perspective, content to worship God in silent contemplation yet energetic enough to organize vast humanitarian projects. “I doubt,” the novelist James Michener could write as late as 1958, “if there is another religion existent whose members are supposed by society at large to behave in a given way… a Quaker is expected by the entire world to act in harmony with Quaker principles.”
What went wrong?
In the Beginning Were the Quakers
Quakerism was born amid the wild intellectual ferment of mid-17th century Britain, that age when, to borrow the title of Christopher Hill’s wonderful history of the period, “the world turned upside down.” Its founding father was George Fox, a fiercely independent, charismatic preacher with a puritanical streak. He and his followers rejected ritual, hierarchy, and formal theology, embracing instead a vague but strongly held theism, a pacifistic and democratic social outlook, and a commitment, above all, to individual conscience. Coupled as these views were with open defiance of 17th century convention—early Friends kept their hats on in the presence of gentlemen, addressed all alike with the informal thee and thou, and refused to swear oaths—they brought down upon their holders savage persecutions.
Alarmed by the situation prevailing in the Old World, wealthy convert William Penn secured for his coreligionists a refuge in the New. From the beginning of their sojourn here, Quaker ideals and practices were closely connected with the development of American civic identity. The proto-constitution Penn drew up for his namesake colony centered self-governance: its preface stated boldly that “any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws, and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.” And the sect’s experiments in toleration shaped colonial thinking on religious liberty, with Pennsylvania offering striking proof of the heretofore theoretical proposition that a society could prosper without an established church.
Quaker influence also carried over into other parts of national life. Their businessmen enjoyed “disproportionate economic success;”their scientists made advances in areas ranging from botany to atomic theory; and their educators set up schools that continue to prosper today. About the only sphere in which they failed to make much of an impression was the arts, which can be explained by a lingering suspicion of such pursuits as frivolous. Even here, Quakerism contributed indirectly, furnishing Herman Melville with those stern owners of the Pequod, Captains Peleg and Bildad—not to mention Ahab himself.
Although Friends cultivated a certain apartness—thees and thous were retained long enough to become anachronisms, as were broad-brimmed hats and plain bonnets—engaging with the world at large was integral to their faith. Nowhere was this clearer than on the issue of slavery. America’s earliest petition for abolition was drawn up by Quakers in 1688, and by the end of the 18th century virtually every Meeting in the country had barred slaveholders from membership. At its founding in 1833, William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society was fully one-third Quaker; the Underground Railroad, too, wended its way through the homes of many Friends.
Yet when open confrontation with the Slave Power finally came, other commitments complicated the picture. As Abraham Lincoln wrote a correspondent in 1864:
Your people—the Friends—have had, and are having, a very great trial. On principle, and faith, opposed to both war and oppression, they can only practically oppose oppression by war. In this hard dilemma, some have chosen one horn, and some the other.
Wrenching as this dilemma may have been, it was precisely the earnestness it showcased, the unwillingness to proffer easy answers or withdraw into a quietist isolation, that formed one of the sect’s most attractive qualities. And it bolstered their reputation—for here was a people that took moral and ethical questions seriously. Indeed, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Qualers were much in demand as mediators, peace-makers, and all-purpose do-gooders. When, for instance, the Grant Administration sought to end the Indian Wars with a ‘Peace Policy’, its first move was to staff the Bureau of Indian Affairs with as many Quakers as could be found.
Nor was this reputation limited to America. Even totalitarian regimes had a grudging respect for these humble humanitarians, who could convince a paranoid Kremlin to let them feed starving Russians and obtain from both sides of the Spanish Civil War permission to relieve civilian suffering. Perhaps the apogee of Quakers' international reputation came in 1947, when the American Friends Service Committee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its “pioneering work in the international peace movement and… humanitarian work carried out without regard for race or nationality.”
Modern Decline
Things began to go sideways in the 1960s. The same wave of secularization that decimated other branches of American Christianity broke upon the Friends, wreaking even greater devastation. For Quakerism, lacking a large membership or centralized governance, had far less cushion to absorb the blow, and the departure of just a few families could doom a Meeting to extinction. The emergence of a counterculture similarly dedicated to peace and love must also have eroded one of the sect’s signal advantages in the marketplace of ideas (the more so since the hippies swapped out Quaker sobriety and simplicity for sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll).
For those who remained, the lack of formalized dogma, though acting as a prophylactic against open schism, also meant that there were no guardrails, no limits beyond which reformers could not go. Channeling the late 20th century zeitgeist, ultraliberal members were therefore able to move the sect into the realm of fuzzy spirituality, with some even rejecting theism outright. As one discomfited Quaker put it in 2013:
We have rejected the Quaker tradition, with its embarrassingly fervent early Friends and old-fashioned religious language, and ended up with a Quakerism that is almost evacuated of religious content, in which our spiritual experience is something 'private' that we cannot share with each other. Consequently we have little to offer to people who are seeking a deeper spiritual reality beyond an accepting 'space' for their own solitary spiritual searchings.
Along with this theological shift came a political one. For much of their history, American Quakers had defied easy partisan characterization, and one could find them on both sides of the aisle. Partly this was because they were able, with some finagling, to carve out places within both liberal and conservative politics for their core commitments on issues like slavery, war, and liberty of conscience. And partly it was because Quakers, as a body, avoided staking positions outside these core issues, leaving individuals free to follow their own inclinations.
Beginning in the ‘60s, however, this diversity of opinion gave way to homogeneity. While the Society of Friends once included such prominent conservatives as Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Whittaker Chambers, today's Quakers are overwhelmingly left-wing. The sect’s lobbying arm, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, now takes explicitly leftist stances on essentially every issue, while Quaker periodicals run pieces denouncing George Fox as a racist and agonizing over the “white supremacy culture” that supposedly plagues their organizations. In fact, for many of today’s members, devotion to trendy political causes has become the most visible manifestation of collective identity, and organized Quakerism, such as it is, has become just another organ of secular progressivism.
These developments have had dire demographic consequences. Membership has been shrinking for decades, and new converts are virtually non-existent. The 2020 U.S. Religion Census counted just under 55,000 Friends—or about as many as in 1700, when the country’s population was less than one-one thousandth its current size. Absent a miracle, American Quakerism will be extinct before the end of the 21st century.
It may be that this trajectory was inevitable; that a faith without creed, ritual, or hierarchy had no chance over the long run. But its decline surely lessens us. Quakers, for much of their history, embodied some of the most admirable aspects of American civilization: independence of mind, moral seriousness, and a fundamental optimism toward the human condition. At their best, they lived the advice Fox offered to their pathbreaking ancestors nearly three and a half centuries ago:
My friends that are gone, and are going over to plant, and make outward plantations in America, keep your own plantations in your hearts, with the spirit and power of God, that your own vines and lilies be not hurt.
Whatever may have happened in the meantime, that counsel is as sound as ever.
Luke Nicastro is a defense analyst who lives in Northern Virginia.
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