Elias Hicks - Hicks's Reported Views

Hicks's Reported Views

Hicks considered “obedience to the light within” as the primary tenet and the foundational principle of the Religious Society of Friends. He downplayed and reputedly denied the virgin birth of Christ, the complete divinity of Christ and the need for salvation through the death of Christ. He was reported to have taught that the leading of the Inner light was more authoritative than the text of the Bible. His detractors considered these views heretical because they contradicted the traditional teachings of Christianity. He insisted at times that he believed in Christ's divinity and quoted the Bible from memory in spoken ministry. He may be seen as within the quietist tradition of John Woolman and Job Scott. His followers thought the Orthodox Friends were taking on evangelistic notions that were alien to the original Quaker faith.

The views of Hicks and his followers were consistent with a Freethought tradition already prevailing in the United States, particularly among Deists of Quaker heritage, such as Thomas Paine. The most original aspect of Hicks's theology was his rejection of Satan as the source of human "passions" or "propensities." Hicks stressed that basic urges, including all sexual passions, were neither implanted by an external Devil nor the product of personal choice, but were aspects of human nature created by God.

"He gave us passions—if we may call them passions—in order that we might seek after those things which we need, and which we had a right to experience and know," he claimed in his 1824 sermon, "Let Brotherly Love Continue."

Hicks taught that evil and suffering occurred not because human nature harbored these "propensities," but rather resulted from "an excess in the indulgence of propensities."

In 1858, Walt Whitman, one of Hicks's most famous exponents, astutely assessed Hicks as "a wonderful compound of the mystic with the logical reasoner," and explained that Hicks was "destined to make a radical revolution in a numerous and devout Society, and his influence to be largely felt outside of that Society..." The Quaker theology of "God within" (another name for the Inner Light) appeared subsequently in the theory of the Free Love movement, where it was deemed compatible with the religious sociology of Charles Fourier, a French leader in progressive thought.