British Quakerism, 1860-1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community (review)

Thomas Kennedy's history of British Quakerism is a model historical monograph. Deeply rooted in primary research, it uses the narrative form to answer an important question: why was twentieth-century Quakerism so different from nineteenth-century Quakerism? In the early twentieth century, British Quakers broke out of their Victorian quietist and evangelical shell, and became a socially engaged body of obdurate, outspoken outsiders, many of them middle-class professionals, with a religiously sanctioned and broadly left- wing view of how the people of Britain should conduct their affairs at home and abroad.

Kennedy refers throughout the book to parallel developments in American Quakerism. In both countries Quakers had become withdrawn and isolated by the mid- nineteenth century, and practiced a religiously determined lifestyle that set them apart sharply from their neighbors, especially in rural areas. In both countries, there was a marked generational gap in the late nineteenth century. Most young Quakers left the denomination; many of them were expelled for marrying outsiders. Those who remained cared enormously about, yet reacted strongly against, the insular world in which they had grown up. In both countries, they succeeded in putting into place fundamental innovations that transformed the denomination.

Young Quakers in both countries were concerned with nothing less than the survival of the denomination, which they saw quite rightly as under threat from declining membership and a lack of engagement with the modern world. Kennedy is interested in the way that this generational revolt took a theologically liberal form in Britain. He traces the ways in which young liberals gradually took control of key positions within the highly bureaucratized denomination, and how they skillfully used the historic rhetoric of Quakerism in the service of theological liberalism.

American Quakerism had already experienced a major division over theological issues, the extremely bitter Hicksite schism of 1827, which left the denomination divided between orthodox and liberal factions. American orthodox Quakerism, especially in the prestigious Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, remained an uneasy amalgam of English-style evangelicalism and old-fashioned, Christocentric quietism. When the generational revolt came in the late nineteenth century, mainly in the Midwest and on the frontier, it took the form of an even more aggressive evangelicalism. Young orthodox Quakers insisted that spiritual regeneration and denominational survival depended on adopting the latest techniques adapted from the world of evangelical revivalism: temperance societies, Sunday schools, altar calls, sermons, programmed worship, and paid ministers. The result was yet another schism in American Quakerism in which young evangelical activists persuaded the majority of orthodox Quakers to adopt innovations that were seen as modern in their day. A paid ministry and programmed worship services became accepted mechanisms of church growth. Spiritual renewal in American orthodox Quakerism meant evangelical renewal.

In Britain young Quakers put forward a more gradualist program, taking control of key positions in the denominational bureaucracy, and negotiating relentlessly, but often uneasily, with their own biological and spiritual parents who were gradually displaced. Family connections defined Quakerism to an extraordinary degree, and theological and bureaucratic fights often occurred within households as well as within denominational meetings. The young Rowntrees and Littleboys and Braithwaites identified the salvation of the denomination, not with evangelical techniques, but with a marriage of modern ideas and a liberal theology rooted in a historical emphasis on the Inward Light of God. Central to their position was the peace testimony, the historic Quaker objection to participation in war, which came to be the litmus test of true Quakerism even before the advent of the First World War.

Like other distinctive Quaker teachings, the peace testimony has always been controversial within Quakerism itself. Whenever war breaks out, a substantial number of Quakers discover that they are pacifists only in peacetime. As the denomination struggled over its response to the First World War, the defining test of Quaker spirituality for the young liberals...