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And by our other patrons and those who want no reward.
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The music in this episode is:
Welcome to the Show by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4614-welcome-to-the-show License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
NewsSting by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4124-newssting License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ditty Pong by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4676-ditty-pong License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Disco Sting by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3653-disco-sting License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Sweeter Vermouth by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4450-sweeter-vermouth License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
human estate on the world episode 25 the Quakers welcome to that episode of human estate on the world I am Dustin and joining me for the first little bit is me Kylie alright Kylie and how old are you bye do you go to school yes what great are you in oh well preschool all right and then what are you going to be in in the fall next year kindergarten yeah very nice so what's your favorite color well my favorite color is pink and that's my favorite favorite color all right and your favorite animal she doesn't bake cats and with a cat okay so basically all cats mm-hmm and all dogs all dogs or just our dogs dog dogs and all cats okay all dogs and all cats so your big big fan of the canines and the few lines mm-hmm boss even boss even Dustin how it is of quakes happen earthquakes the tectonic plates are constantly moving and our continents are sitting on top of the tectonic plates and pressure builds as plates bump into each other so earthquakes that we get around here are because the Pacific plate that is underneath the ocean is going under the North American plate which we live on top of and that subduction builds up pressure that causes earthquakes all over the western US really cool Dustin you can also call me daddy you know yeah you're on a podcast I mean podcast and you're not pretending you actually are on a podcast yeah yeah this is really cool daddy sometimes I call you daddy uh-huh so what do you want to be when you grow up oh well a mom and a ballerina okay and what's your favorite food oh well I can't aside there's too many choices choices so you like a variety of food mm-hmm all right and what's your favorite mythical creature mm-hmm those are the creatures that aren't real oh well unicorns unicorns very nice and your favorite TV show oh Legos you like all the Lego get back to the microphone you like all the Lego shows mm-hmm like even even yeah Ninjago and the Lego movies and Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman oh oh yeah guess what dad that song is very cheesy which song oh and the after song and from everything is awesome oh yeah everything is awesome is a pretty cheesy yeah because that's stupid cheesy song all right well Kylie thank you so much for joining me on the podcast you're welcome all right so friends I'm sorry this is taking so long I was supposed to talk about Quakers in the episode either before or after the shakers because I really wanted to have a Quakers and Shakers series the shakers were easy they're crazy they're consistent you know what's going on the religious society of friends it's taken me okay I did the shakers August 22 of last year and I have finally wrapped my head around it so the religious society of friends is the official name of the Quakers and if you talk about what Quakers are now good luck because are they Christian most of them are about 90% of Quakers identify as Christian do they believe in God yeah a little over 80% do are they a church sort of it's more a loose association of churches that have and other groups that meet periodically that get along do they have core doctrine mostly like some of the the general things that most Quakers can agree upon is that the local church has the power that at least some of the time they should sit quietly and wait for the spirit to move which in the case of Quakers that don't believe in God I don't know what that means they also are pretty much all pacifists and pretty much all believe that marriage is supposed to be for life most are anti-abortion but like that's really the core of what Quakers are it's it's those handful of beliefs with pacifism being one of the most core traditionally Quaker services their first day services because traditionally Quakers do not use the pagan names of the days of the week or months so the first day services was a group of Quakers coming together and sitting in silence until somebody felt compelled to speak about 11% of Quakers still have that as the primary form of worship it's what's called the unprogrammed services you will find Quakers like that in Britain Australia Canada and parts of the US about 89% of Quakers now have programmed services where they have pastors who preach they have music and they have a portion of the service where they sit in silence until somebody speaks Quaker governance is also kind of strange they the local Quaker churches or meetings can be called monthly meetings because once per month they get together for a business meeting where they conduct church business at those business meetings they sit in silence until somebody feels compelled to speak and there is a clerk present to help ensure that basically the debate doesn't happen you are not allowed to respond to something that somebody else says you can only speak an original idea that you feel compelled by God to speak no debate there's also no vote you have to the meetings have to sit and wait until they reach a point where there is a general sense of consensus on an action to be taken which is incredibly as somebody who carefully studied Roberts rules of order when actively involved in student government and clubs and college that hurts me at a very deep level like the way to make good decisions is through debate the way to actually agree on you know determine if people agree on something is to take a vote and they don't allow debates and they don't allow votes it's crazy at the regional level Quaker communities will send delegates to quarterly meetings so for example the Quaker communities in Greenleaf Idaho and Newburg, Oregon are both part of the Northwest quarterly meeting for the evangelical Quakers and that quarterly meeting is part of a higher organization that is called an annual meeting and there is also even higher levels such as the Friends Worldwide Committee for Consultation which is the highest level of Quaker organization it is a very loose association as you can imagine and they hold what is a triennial meeting so every three years they used to be five-year meetings but now they're three-year meetings which is yeah the Quakers are bizarre at present within the the broader overarching umbrella of Quakers there are evangelical Quakers which make up about 88% of all Quakers and they have their own international organization with the Evangelical Friends Church International which has annual meetings for evangelical friends churches in other countries like in the US and most notably Kenya at present there are about 377 Quakers around the world in total with 146,300 of those in Kenya and 76,360 in the United States there are also tens of thousands in Burundi and Bolivia there's also about 35,000 in Burundi and 22,000 in Bolivia and also over 5,000 Quakers in Guatemala the United Kingdom Nepal Taiwan and Uganda so they're spread out a lot there is a tendency for Quakers to be consolidated in Quaker communities or specific cities a lot of these were founded as kind of Quaker settlements most notable for the Quaker settlements would be Philadelphia Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania as a whole Newburg, Oregon, Greenleaf, Idaho, Whittier, California and Friendswood, Texas you can also find significant amounts of Quakers or Quaker influence in Richmond, Indiana, Birmingham, England Greensboro, North Carolina and Ramallah, Ramallah, Palestine all right and I've mentioned the the evangelical Quakers I've mentioned the program services the those two generally are the same the ones who are evangelical tend to be the ones are are the ones who have pastors and have sermons and songs the Quakers that still have unprogrammed services tend to be liberal fitting a lot more closely in line with mainline Protestants like the United Methodist and Episcopal churches or even with liberal Christianity and just liberal religion like the Church of Christ and Unitarians there's a lot of variability and with that variability if somebody just says that they're Quaker you know almost nothing about them and that really makes sense the when you have a structure that doesn't allow debate that has been around since the 1650s that allows anybody to speak and that vest all control at the local level that is a system that very easily can be that can be adjusted or modified along with major cultural events like the first and second grade awakenings and the modern evangelical movement so let's get into a little bit of history the Quakers didn't arise out of a vacuum they came out of the English Civil War this was a time period in England where the Puritans had taken over the country they had overthrown the king and George and Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector of England so the Catholic Church was in even more trouble than it had been under the Protestant Kingdom and the Church of England was in well definitely some trouble and there were a bunch of people that just who had been Puritans who didn't like them anymore one of them was George Fox he claimed to have a revelation a vision that quote there is one even Jesus Christ who can speak to thy condition end quote based on that he became convinced that you don't need clergy that all believers are priests so the priesthood of all believers and that everyone needs to have a direct experience and communication with God so he started preaching he would travel around through Puritan churches and preach his his version of things and as he started to convince people they would go on and preach as well and the early Quakers were loud they were boisterous they would preach in churches they would preach in courtyards they would preach in the city square at markets at festivals at fairs at anywhere they could find people and by 1680 in 1650 George Fox was arrested and taken before the magistrates Gervais Bennett and Nathaniel Barton on the charge of blasphemy and according to his own autobiography magistrate Bennett quote was the first that called us Quakers because I bade them tremble at the word of the Lord end quote it was a pejorative at that time Quakers were describing themselves as you know true Christians saints children of the light and friends of the truth and settled eventually on preferring to call themselves friends and the Society of Friends and eventually the religious Society of Friends but eventually they came to embrace the term Quaker in 1662 there was official persecution of Quakers with the Quaker Act of 1662 and the Coven Sinticle Act of 1664 and that persecution was relaxed after the declaration of indulgence in 1687 and it was absolutely stopped under the act of toleration in 1689 and by that time an aristocratic Quaker by the name of William Penn established Pennsylvania as an explicitly Quaker Commonwealth and prior to the act of toleration there were Quakers in Massachusetts who were executed and Quakers throughout England and Wales were routinely arrested, logged and faced all sorts of punishments. Of note the early Quakers would often have women preach and viewed women as having a very important and special place in the community where they were in charge of the community's management of family and households and marriage and were able to form women's councils to kind of manage make sure the Quakers within their community were living up to the standards and much of those standards was that Quakers were supposed to have plain speech plain dress and simple lives they're expected to be honest and any business dealings honest and everything generally expected to be you know upstanding members of the community. By the time of the American Revolution Quakers had entered into a quietism period where they stopped being quite so loud and did not accept disruptive or unruly behavior and they spent less time trying to convert others and also stopped allowing members to marry outside of the Quaker Church. As a result numbers dropped in England and Wales for example they went from a 1680 peak of 60,000 down to under 20,000 by 1800 and by under 14,000 by 1860. Throughout the 19th and 20th century there were splits within the Quaker movement during the American Revolution. Some American Quakers started splitting out from the Society of Friends to form the free Quakers and the universal friends and over the next 200 years there were numerous other splits within Quakerism with the Huxsite Orthodox split which was largely over economic socioeconomic issues with the Huxites being rural and poor and the Orthodox Quakers being urban and wealthy. The Orthodox Quakers wanted to turn their group into a more formal church with mainstream Protestant orthodoxy and the Huxites opposed that and explicitly viewed the Bible as being second to God's light within each member. So the Huxites and the Huxites today are represented by the Friends General Conference. The Orthodox Quakers then split again with the Beaconites where Isaac Prudson, a minister, Quaker minister and Manchester England, wrote a book called A Beacon to the Society of Friends where he argued that inner light was what mattered, not a religious belief in salvation by atonement. So he resigned from the religious Society of Friends and took 48 members from the Manchester meeting and about 250 other Quakers with them in 1836 and 1837. Some of them joined the Plymouth Brethren. After that there was the Gurneyite conservative split. This was with Orthodox Quakers becoming more evangelical as a result of the influence of the Second Great Awakening. Joseph John Gurney led that move and they held revival meetings in America and in Britain. They definitely fell in with the holiness movement and the Gurneyites formed, well, the Gurneyite split again with one group forming the Friends United Meeting and the other forming the Evangelical Friends International with both the Gurneyite and Evangelical branches being Evangelical. The Quakers who opposed the Orthodox Quakers who opposed the move towards Evangelicalism were led by John Wilbur who formed the Fritschlie General Meeting and is now represented by the Conservative Friends. So as a general rule of thumb, the Friends General Conference are the liberal and unprogrammed Quakers, the Hicksites, and the Conservative Quakers are also pretty liberal. Not as liberal as the Friends General Conference Quakers, the Hicksites, but way more liberal than the Evangelical Quakers. And it's all that being said, if you encounter a Quaker outside of England or Australia, chances are that Quaker is probably an evangelical part of the Evangelical Friends International. Evangelical Quakers, you should be focusing on the word Evangelical, not Quaker or Friends, because they are young Earth creationists, they believe in abstinence before marriage, marriage for life, their anti-abortion, their anti-alcohol tobacco and drugs, and pacifists, and otherwise basically just Evangelicals. If you happen to have conservative Quakers around you, they're going to look a lot more like mainstream Protestants. And if you have Hicksite Quakers around you, they're probably going to be really liberal and may even be atheists. And on a personal note, my grandpa Williams was born and raised Quaker. He was born in Kansas and his family moved to Caldwell, Idaho when he was a young child, and he attended the Quaker school in Greenleaf, Idaho about six miles away. So about Greenleaf being about 35, 40 miles away from Boise. I do know that at some point as an adult, he converted to the Adventist church, I do not know if his parents were converts or multi-generational Quakers. But it's still an interesting family connection. And as I've learned more about various ancestors, I've found that I have had ancestors who have been a part of basically every major Protestant group. And I definitely find that pretty interesting. So I hope this hasn't been too confusing. I personally find the Quakers confusing. I've been wanting to get this out. I've been wanting to do the Quakers and Shakers for like eight years. And I'm finally getting it done. And I'm not going to bother trying to make more sense of it than this. The Quakers are a confusing mess because they have a system of governance that involves not debating things and all right, no new patrons and no new feedback. If you want to contact us, you can use the feedback form at htotw.com slash contact. You can leave us a voicemail message at 208 996 8667 or go to htotw.com slash beak pipe. You can also just send us an email at contact at htotw.com. You can support the show on a monthly basis with Patreon or just once with PayPal credit or debit or with Apple Pay or Google Pay. And you can find links at htotw.com slash donate. And until next time, remember not all those who wander are lost.