One Historian’s Reflections on Philosopher Jeffrey Dudiak’s Search for the “Meaning of Quaker History”

Let me put my thesis right up front: Jeffrey Dudiak is mistaken when he tries to limit history to God integrally guiding the actions of human beings when they make decisions and act on them. History instead involves active humans. Dudiak’s position may be acceptable for ministry in a meeting for worship; it is not for the historian. For this historian, modern and Quaker, an historian’s task—I was about to insert the adjective “sole,” but I won’t go that far—is to uncover the what and the context by diligent research and permit partisans like both George Foxes, Younger and Older, to comment on the why.

That’s what Fox the Younger was doing in the pamphlet Dudiak holds up as his standard of Quaker history. Fox had a distinctly partisan and Quaker view of what happened in the nearly 20 previous years of history he covered and he tried to convince King Charles II to avoid its mistakes. Fox may have been right, and each person is free to choose, after examining the evidence, to follow him, as Dudiak has done. But it is not the only possible view of why these divisive events—a bitter, fratricidal civil war, the king’s execution, among others—occurred. Nor is it necessarily the most accurate one. You may be sure that Charles, son of his beheaded father, was not convinced by the evidence Fox offered; that goes without my saying, though I can not speak for our Canadian Friend.

Our philosopher draws most if not all his examples from the history of early Friends, an area in which I have some expertise, and I stand by the sections he quotes from my biography of the First Friend, but I want to draw from my most recent publication about which I addressed you last year in this venue, a study of Richard Nixon and his religion, formally rooted in Quakerism. That book, for those of you with full wallets who want to acquire it, is Nixon’s First Cover-up: The Religious Life of a Quaker President; it should reveal what an historian’s task is—to concentrate on getting the facts and context of a previous era, the what, as accurate as humanly possible. In it I believe I produced Quaker history, both of a subjective genitive and objective genitive nature, if this humble historian understands what those phrases, both new to me, mean. I do not believe, however, that those who are Quaker historians have a peculiar, particularly Quakerly, way of viewing past events.

Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, elected to the House of Representatives twice, the Senate once, and the vice-presidency and presidency twice. A member of the Religious Society of Friends, he maintained his affiliation with East Whittier, California, Friends Church all his life, and he never tried to hide his status as a Friend, even if he was notably reticent and silent about the contours, implications, and meaning that his faith had for him. His cover-up was successful enough that his most recent biographer, Evan Thomas, avers flatly, Nixon “belonged to no organized church.” (Being Nixon, p. 336) (Too, Thomas errs in making Ben Franklin “the most famous Quaker of them all.” [p. 12])

Now, my book details facts and context such as these—the “what” of history—but it leaves the “why” to those who look at them and want to draw out their meaning. Unlike Fox the Younger, Dudiak’s chosen Quaker historian—more accurately Fox the polemicist—I do not believe that God was acting through Nixon’s decisions to bring about the ends that resulted. Richard Nixon never gave up his membership in East Whittier Friends Church, he determined what to write in 12 essays on his religious life when he was a college senior, echoing what he guessed his instructor wanted, he decided to enlist in the Navy in 1942 rather than be drafted as a “grunt,” he created the...