What’s in a name? Actually, quite a lot. A name gives us identity, whether for the individual or the group. Our personal names are usually given to us by our parents, but a group may struggle to find its identity and name it. That’s what happened when a resistance group born in the middle of the English Civil War in the 1640s began to dream of creating the republic of Heaven on Earth.
When George Fox got involved in 1647 with a group of ex-Baptists who shared his idea of God as an Inward Light they had a leader, Elizabeth Hooton, but as yet no identity and no name. Fox, who soon replaced Hooton, called them ‘shattered Baptists’. In search of a better name they tried one borrowed from European sectarians, ‘Children of the Light’, but some of them preferred ‘Friends in the Truth’.
The name ‘Quakers’ appears first in a 1647 tract which refers to ‘a sect of women [not the Fox group] who come from beyond sea, called Quakers, and these swell, shiver and shake, and when they come to themselves… they begin to preach what hath been delivered to them by the Spirit’. In 1651 another tract complains that ‘We have many sects now abroad, Ranters, Seekers, Shakers, Quakers, Creepers, Enthusiasts’; and the same year, when Fox and his followers were examined on a charge of blasphemy, judge Gervase Bennett called them Quakers because Fox had bidden him to tremble at the name of the Lord. Fox was by then referring to his group as ‘a society of Friends’, but the derisive name ‘Quakers’ was soon defiantly adopted, linked with Friends in what became the Society of Friends (Quakers), to which was added much later the word Religious to distinguish it from secular Friendly Societies.
So what is my point? If you have missed it, so too did this team of dreamers. While they struggled to find their identity and name, it was staring them in the face. They were Resisters. Resisting was what they did, and they did a lot of it. They resisted the national Church, its hierarchy, its ‘hireling priests’ who sold the gospel for a living; its buildings, which it mistakenly called churches; its printed prayers and hymns and psalms; its symbols, sacraments and scented rituals; its frocks and furniture; its apostolic claim to hold the keys of Heaven.
They resisted its theology and christology: the notion that the Bible was the infallible, inerrant Word of God, with all its justifications of enslavement, ethnic cleansing, patriarchy, misogyny and blood atonement. They resisted the enforcement of tithes and ‘Easter reckonings’, the taxes that financed the whole unholy edifice. They resisted holy days (including Christmas) since all days were holy, and the saints’ days had become party days. When they were persecuted for their resistance, they responded with non-violent resistance to their persecutors.
And that was only half of it. Their resistance to the established religion of their time led on to a resistance to the social norms of a rigidly class-based society. They resisted that honour and bowing the knee to one’s betters, as they were sure their betters were no better than they were. They resisted the ‘thee and thou’ that encoded conversation between gentry and commons.
After 1660 they resisted military taxes and the machinery of war. Music, sacred or profane, and indeed all the arts, were rigorously resisted as worldly pleasures. When the musician and composer Samuel Eccles became a Quaker he burned his violin. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton, Purcell nor Byrd, spoke to their condition. Their identity was Resistance. Resistance would have made a better name.
Inevitably, of course, such an intensity of resistance to religious and social norms could not be sustained for ever. Bit by bit it weakened. The men and women who had set out to turn the world upside down encountered the resistance of those who were determined to keep it the right way up. The Children of Light / Friends of Truth / Quakers became a nonconformist Christian denomination. Complicity and respectability replaced much of the movement’s early resistance – markedly in acceptance of the arts – but the mature Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) remains today resistant to religious creeds, hierarchies and the ignoble army of mitres: resistant too to militarism and the causes of war. Contemporary liberal Quakerism includes those who are resistant to supernaturalism and declare themselves Godless for God’s sake.
Perhaps it is time for Sea of Faith to work out its own understanding of what we feel compelled to resist in institutional, outmoded religion and its relation to the wider society. As the unknown author of Ecclesiastes tells us, there is ‘a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence and a time to speak’. As Sea of Faith takes a new turn, now is surely time to speak out, upping the volume, about what we resist and what we want to put in its place. Time, then, to take the fight to the hirelings and literalists in high places and low pulpits.
It’s not to be resisted.