Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania

Chapter 1. Quakerism’s English Roots

c h a p te r 1 Quakerism’s English Roots the popular account of the origin of the Society of Friends is a familiar tale. This story centers on George Fox. A visionary prodigy, Fox had pursued a spiritual calling since childhood, searching out other religious ‘‘seekers’’ and mystical kindred spirits. After much spiritual travail, Fox underwent a particularly dramatic conversion that brought him into a state of perfection, as Adam and Eve had been before their expulsion from Eden. Upon receiving God, Fox wrote: Now I was come up in a spirit through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new; and the creation gave unto me another smell than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, innocency, and righteousness; being renewed into the image of God by Christ Jesus.1 Almost singlehandedly, the story goes, Fox began the sect known alternately as the Friends of God (their preferred self-designation), or the Quakers, a pejorative title accorded it by critics. Sweeping through England and its Atlantic possessions, this spiritual movement challenged contemporary mores in several realms. Friends rejected worldly vices and vanities, they renounced war and violence, they attacked hierarchical forms of worship, and they recognized men and women as spiritual equals theologically and ecclesiastically; all of these positions emerged rather organically from the mystical theology Fox and his followers espoused. While respectable Quaker historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries said little about Fox’s more extravagant acts—such as early claims to be a son of God or to have raised the dead—they 16 chapter 1 were quick to credit him and his spiritual descendents with pioneering accomplishments in the women’s rights, antislavery, and pacifist movements and in industrial and technological development.2 Fox’s dramatic spiritual journey epitomizes, from this perspective, the revolution underpinning many of these transformations. Driven by Fox’s singlehanded efforts, the Quaker movement, in this familiar tale, has been a major force in the development of Anglo-American society. In this sense, traditional accounts of Quakerism’s founding bear a marked resemblance to the ways in which historians have often memorialized Pennsylvania. This narrative, however compelling to the Society’s hagiographers, misses the mark on points that are critical to understanding the development of Quakerism prior to its arrival in North America. It elevates Fox’s importance at the expense of other Quaker leaders.3 This story also ignores the fact that Friends fought bitterly over questions of pacifism, spiritual individualism , and the role of women within the movement. Several major schisms rocked the Meeting during the movement’s first three decades, belying the notion that Quakers always agreed on what we now see as the core elements of their faith and practice. Most of all, this hagiographic portrayal removes Quakerism from the cultural, religious, and political climate in which it emerged; its emphasis on the centrality of individual conscience within the Society of Friends, embodied by Fox’s personal story, misses the fundamentally social dimensions of Quaker practices. The Society of Friends was only one of many dissenting groups formed in the 1640s and 1650s; early Quaker leaders knew well that the movement’s success depended on its ability to develop a coherent religious identity among Friends, a project that required the creation of strict boundaries between those within and without the sect. Efforts to enforce spiritual conformity tempered spiritual individualism within the Society from its inception. The process through which early Quakers instilled a sense of common purpose and identity within the movement would profoundly shape Friends’ colonial efforts in Pennsylvania. Quakerism was founded in a tumultuous religious environment that bore more than a family resemblance to the New World Friends would face in America; Quakers in each instance faced the problem of creating a novel religious and cultural identity in a rapidly transforming social landscape. Fox and other leading Friends struggled to maintain a delicate balance as they guided a spiritual movement that incorporated elements from other groups while asserting its revolutionary character. The result was a hybrid faith that trumpeted its own uniqueness. The strategies Quakerism’s English Roots 17 Fox and other leaders developed to manage the inherent tension between hybridity and uniqueness within their spiritual movement would later prove useful to American Friends struggling to create a creole religious identity across the Atlantic. In other words, English Friends had to...