History of The Quakers - 20th Century Developments

20th Century Developments

During the 20th century, Quakerism was marked by movements toward unity, but at the end of the century Quakers were more sharply divided than ever. By the time of the first World War almost all Quakers in Britain and many in the United States found themselves committed to what came to be called "liberalism," which meant primarily a religion that deemphasized corporate statements of theology and was characterized by its emphasis on social action and pacifism. Hence when the two Philadelphia and New York Yearly Meetings, one Hicksite, one Orthodox, united in 1955—to be followed in the next decade by the two in Baltimore Yearly Meeting—they came together on the basis of a shared liberalism. As time wore on and the implication of this liberal change became more apparent, sharpening lines of division between various groups of Friends became more accentuated.

World War I at first produced an effort toward unity, embodied in the creation of the American Friends Service Committee in 1917 by Orthodox Friends, led by Rufus Jones and Henry Cadbury. A Friends Service Committee, as an agency of London Yearly Meeting, had already been created in Britain to help Quakers there deal with problems of military service; it continues today, after numerous name changes, as Quaker Peace & Social Witness. Envisioned as a service outlet for conscientious objectors that could draw support from across diverse yearly meetings, the AFSC began losing support from more evangelical Quakers as early as the 1920s and served to emphasize the differences between them, but prominent Friends such as Herbert Hoover continued to offer it their public support. Many Quakers from Oregon, Ohio, and Kansas became alienated from the Five Years Meeting (later Friends United Meeting), considering it infected with the kind of theological liberalism that Jones exemplified; Oregon Yearly Meeting withdrew in 1927. That same year, eleven evangelicals met in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to plan how to resist the influence of liberalism, but depression and war prevented another gathering for twenty years, until after the end of the second world war.

To overcome such divisions, liberal Quakers organized so-called worldwide conferences of Quakers in 1920 in London and again in 1937 at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges in Pennsylvania, but they were too liberal and too expensive for most evangelicals to attend. A more successful effort at unity was the Friends Committee on National Legislation, originating during World War II in Washington, D.C., as a pioneering Quaker lobbying unit. In 1958 the Friends World Committee for Consultation was organized to form a neutral ground where all branches of the Society of Friends could come together, consider common problems, and get to know one another; it held triennial conferences that met in various parts of the world, but it had not found a way to involve very many grassroots Quakers in its activities. One of its agencies, created during the Cold War and known as Right Sharing of World Resources, collects funds from Quakers in the "first world" to finance small self-help projects in the "Third World," including some supported by Evangelical Friends International. Beginning in 1955 and continuing for a decade, three of the yearly meetings divided by the Hicksite separation of 1827, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, as well as Canadian Yearly Meeting, reunited.

Disagreements between the various Quaker groups, Friends United Meeting, Friends General Conference, Evangelical Friends International, and Conservative yearly meetings, involved both theological and more concrete social issues. FGC, founded in 1900 and centered primarily in the East, along the West coast, and in Canada, tended to be oriented toward the liberal end of the political spectrum, was mostly unprogrammed, and closely aligned with AFSC; by the last part of the century it had taken a strong position in favor of same-sex marriage, was supportive of gay rights, and usually favored a woman's right to choose an abortion. Its membership tended to be professional and middle class or higher.

Rooted in the Midwest, especially Indiana, and North Carolina, FUM was historically more rural and small-town in its demographics. The Friends churches which formed part of this body were predominantly programmed and pastoral. Though a minority of its yearly meetings (New York, New England, Baltimore, Southeastern and Canada) were also affiliated with Friends General Conference and over the decades became more theologically liberal and predominantly unprogrammed in worship style, the theological position of the majority of its constituent yearly meetings continues to be often similar in flavor to the Protestant Christian mainstream in Indiana and North Carolina. In 1960, a theological seminary, Earlham School of Religion, was founded in FUM's heartland - Richmond, Indiana - to offer ministerial training and religious education. The seminary soon came to enroll significant numbers of unprogrammed Friends, as well as Friends from pastoral backgrounds.

EFI was staunchly evangelical and by the end of the century had more members converted through its missionary endeavors abroad than in the United States; Southwest Friends Church illustrated the group's drift away from traditional Quaker practice, permitting its member churches to practice the outward ordinances of the Lord's Supper and baptism. On social issues its members exhibited strong antipathy toward homosexuality and enunciated a pro-life position on abortion. At century's end, Conservative Friends held onto only three small yearly meetings, in Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina, with Friends from Ohio arguably the most traditional. In Britain and Europe where institutional unity and almost universal unprogrammed worship style were maintained, these distinctions did not apply, nor did they in Latin America and Africa where evangelical missionary activity predominated.

In the 1960s and later, these categories were challenged by a mostly self-educated Friend, Lewis Benson, a New Jersey printer by training, a theologian by vocation. Immersing himself in the corpus of early Quaker writings, he made himself an authority on George Fox and his message. In 1966, Benson published Catholic Quakerism, a small book that sought to move the Society of Friends to what he insisted was a strongly pro-Fox position of authentic Christianity, entirely separate from theological liberalism, churchly denominationalism, or rural isolation. He created the New Foundation Fellowship, which blazed forth for a decade or so but had about disappeared as an effective group by the end of the century.

By that time, the differences between Friends were quite clear, to each other if not always to outsiders. Theologically, a small minority of Friends among the "liberals" expressed discomfort with theistic understandings of the Divine, while more evangelical Friends adhered to a more biblical worldview. Periodical attempts to institutionally reorganize the disparate Religious Society of Friends into more theologically congenial organizations took place, but generally failed. By the beginning of the 21st century, Friends United Meeting, as the middle ground, was suffering from these efforts, but still remained in existence, even if it did not flourish. In its home base of yearly meetings in Indiana especially, it lost numerous churches and members, both to other denominations and to the evangelicals.

Quakers in Britain and the Eastern United States embarked on efforts in the field of adult education, creating three schools with term-long courses, week-end activities, and summer programs. Woodbrooke College began in 1903 at the former home of chocolate magnate George Cadbury in Birmingham, England, and later became associated with the University of Birmingham, while Pendle Hill, in the Philadelphia suburb of Wallingford, did not open until 1930. Earlier, beginning in 1915 and continuing for about a decade, the Woolman School had been created by Philadelphia Hicksites near Swarthmore College; its head, Elbert Russell, a midwestern recorded minister, tried unsuccessfully to maintain it, but it ended in the late 1920s. All three sought to educate adults for the kind of lay leadership that the founders Society of Friends relied upon. Woodbrooke and Pendle Hill still maintain research libraries and resources.

During the 20th century, two Quakers, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon, both from the Western evangelical wing of the group, were elected to serve as presidents of the United States, thus achieving more secular political power than any Friend had enjoyed since William Penn.