Photo: ‘Diagram of a slave ship’ from Charles Crawford’s Observations, 1790
Room for improvement: Elaine Green on the ‘shameful mantle’ of Quakers and the slave trade
‘I hope I am not blinded by sentimentality when I am called to ask what Love requires of me.’
It is an awkward question for Quakers in Britain to consider deeply and truthfully. The record of Quakers who enslaved people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries feels like a shameful mantle to wear, and it is hard to know how it can be made good by the current generation of the faithful.
Listening to Anthony Reddie, the director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture, giving the recent David Goodbourn Annual Lecture for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI), I was reminded of the powerful image of the vengeful God of the Bible, intolerant of rivals, that was taken into the Eurocentric Christianity of the third and fourth centuries. From the symbolism of the mark upon Cain (Genesis 4:15) to the Lutheran interpretation of Paul’s ministry of faith over works (which said that righteousness was imputed from God and not gained by human action), there emerged a religious formula that led white Christianity to collude with the practice of slavery. The Palestinian rabbi from Nazareth did not have a white face, but Jesus Christ from the fourth century onward apparently did.
The Quakers of the seventeenth century were undoubtedly caught up in this way of interpreting the Bible. Although they would have felt the obligation to well-treat their servants and the people they enslaved, some bringing them along to Meetings for Worship so that they too might have access to the Holy Spirit, they did not see them as equal any more than the Mayflower Puritans saw the (also not white) indigenous inhabitants of what is now the United States of America. In both Puritan Massachusetts and Quaker Pennsylvania, the precious sought-after freedom to practice all forms of Christianity did not find expression in any broader, postmodern understanding of equality.
To be fair, already in 1688, there had been some agitation against human slavery among US Friends in the little Meeting of German Friends in Germantown, Pennsylvania. But Philadelphia Yearly Meeting seemingly paid the concern little heed until 1754. That was when John Woolman published his ‘Some considerations’ essay protesting slavery on religious grounds, and the Yearly Meeting decided that the trade was a matter of church discipline.
London Yearly Meeting had recorded a discouragement to Friends to trade in enslaved people in the 1720s but did not speak out against profiteering from ‘that iniquitous practice of dealing in negroes and other slaves’ until 1758. Only then were all Friends urged ‘to keep their hands clear of this unrighteous gain of oppression’.
In developing the Lutheran doctrine of faith over works, Quakers of the eighteenth century – the so-called Quietists – paid more attention to discipline and conduct as essential to individual salvation. This may have opened the door for some to a new moral realism. A reformed interpretation of the Christian scriptures, by such as John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, spoke through an anti-mercantilist and anti-slavery prophetic voice. Chattel slavery, it seems, was no longer sanctioned by God.
The generation of Friends that included William Penn held as a principle that graves should not be marked. The Quaker distinction between earthly names and those ‘names in the book of life’ (Philippians 4:3), or those names who ‘walk with me in white: for they are worthy’ (Revelation 3:4), reflected a clear theological principle of individual salvation through complete transformation. The reputation of the faithful remnant people of God was a ‘name’ of which all members were to be worthy. Such reputation was far more important to a people in unity than individual acclamation. Still today, we Quakers worry about how we select for written testimony at the end of a life of grace. We are uncomfortable about heaping praise on one another, lest it offend our commitment to equality.
It must therefore have been quite a challenge when ten years ago, the Friends House Hospitality Company (now the Quiet Company) raised the idea of naming rooms at Friends House instead of blandly numbering them. I am not sure how it all unfolded, but my vague recollection was that many staff were consulted and the selected names – taking account of age, gender and race as far as practicable – was referred by management to the Britain Yearly Meeting trustees for approval. The most contentious and last name to be changed (in 2015) was ‘The Light’, known to many Friends still as The Large Meeting Room. That was not a person, but a concept of a critical element of our inclusive Quaker faith. It seems to have survived.
I was never wholly happy with the raising up of individual Friends to have rooms named in their honour, but I accept the process of faithful discernment which arrived at that decision.
I may be Quaker ‘old school’ in my regard for the principles of the earlier generations, but I hope I am not blinded by sentimentality when I am called by my faith to ask what Love requires of me. I cannot look a person with black or brown skin in the eye and say with any integrity that their life experience and value, based on a heritage of hundreds of years of Christianity-justified oppression, fuelled by the toxicity of modern social media, is less important to me than how I name a room. I cannot before my God declare that Quakers getting rich on the back of colonial trading and slavery is a fact of my church’s history that need not concern me. I do feel an obligation to understand better the heritage of my rich and full life, one that involves imperial trade and warfare. I do want to understand better the whiteness of my British Christian culture, as well as why it has such a grip on people like me. I do want to make what reparation I can, not in money, since that seems like crude tokenism, but in acknowledging what has been done in God’s name, and in effecting some restorative justice. This is a high price for a people of principle but, through grace and love, we can and should do this.
Elaine represents the Quaker Committee for Christian & Interfaith Relations on the Churches Together in England Racial Justice Working Group.
Comments
Elaine Green is a management consultant and a theologian. I would never dispute with her publicly on management or theology because I know my ignorance on those topics and would therefore exercise a certain humility. She, on the other hand, exercises no such humility in publishing her ill-informed comments on history, even though she appears ignorant of fundamental facts and unfamiliar with the original sources. Quakers do not have a “shameful mantle” of the slave trade but have always been admired by black slaves and abolitionists for their role in opposing it (started by William Penn) and finally ending it. Penn’s name was revered by Benjamin Lay, Thomas Clarkson, and by the abolitionists around Lincoln, and no black slave would have endorsed the “shameful” (in effect, racist) position of Elaine Green. Similarly, her use of the term ‘Eurocentric’ to describe Christians of “the third and fourth centuries” is in effect Eurocentric, since she blanks out Origen and Augustine (both African) and Jerome (Palestine). She refers to Quakers who “enslaved people” in the 17th C but Quakers did not even go to West Africa then, let alone enslave. “Mayflower Puritans” were not part of Massachusetts Bay Colony, as she seems to think; they were Brownists not Puritans; and they did not look down upon Indians for white racist reasons but had a very friendly relationship with them. Philadelphia YM were very concerned about the slave trade but could do nothing to stop it because they had no political power. As Quakers, however, led by Penn, they did much to undermine slavery from 1699 onwards. The Germantown protestors were followers of Penn (who had visited Germany). Quakers did not “speak out” because they were refugees in fear of persecution. There was no public campaigning against the slave trade until the mid-18th C, not because of a Quietist theology but because there was no way for freed slaves to find employment and avoid re-enslavement until a capitalist sector of the economy had developed. She says she cannot look at black people and say that their experience “is less important to me than how I name a room”, but that is exactly what she IS saying. The experience of black people was that Quakers, led by Fox and Penn, were on their side and she is contradicting what black people have been saying for 300 years. She is in effect disparaging the anti-slavery movement and its heroes. It should be pointed out that all this misrepresentation of history is not her fault alone - it is part of a trend since the 1980s to look down upon people in the past as inferior (“the condescension of posterity” as Edward Thompson put it) and so feel no guilt in using them for current political or PR purposes. This attitude means that facts don’t matter much and historians don’t have to be consulted. Thus she refers to “faithful discernment”, but there was no discernment in removing the name of William Penn because no attempt was made by the Trustees to establish the facts, or consult professional historians. The tragedy of all this for Quakers is that their good name is being besmirched on the very issue for which Quakers are most respected (anti-slavery).
By grahamtaylor on 29th September 2021 - 16:23
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