Ask a room of Quakers what hope means to them and you’ll get a variety of answers. Ask these same Friends to describe the shared Quaker hope and it might take a while. You won’t find a section on hope in Quaker faith & practice. The most recent collective statement on hope made by Quakers in Britain, to my knowledge, is from 2009 in the context of climate change: ‘our faith in common humanity gives hope; love, rather than fear, can still lead us through this crisis.’[1] What does it mean to have faith in common humanity? Isn’t common humanity why we’re in this mess? Hope is something that Quakers today aren’t well practiced at talking about, even as situations like the climate crisis compel us to articulate what hope means. I can think of four reasons why liberal Quakers today might struggle to be a community of hope: our lack of a shared story, how we value uncertainty, our reputation for good works, and the idea that Quakerism is the ideal spirituality for the modern world.
Obstacles to being a community of hope
Quakers value our theological diversity. We believe this is a strength which makes Quakerism more inclusive. A consequence of this diversity is that Quakers no longer have a shared theological story. We might see ourselves as part of the Quaker story, but this can be hard to make sense of when we don’t share the Christian story of our Quaker ancestors. Stories help us make sense of our lives. We use narrative to connect all the different experiences we have into a continuous, meaningful thread. We might use one or more stories to do this, and our lives are often shaped by stories without our knowing or choosing. An important part of stories is how they end. Endings give stories a shape. They give meaning to everything that’s gone before. At the end of a classic detective story, the detective gathers the suspects and explains the mystery. All the twists and turns of the plot that have led up to this moment are given their full and proper meaning. I think to hope is to yearn for a meaningful ending. To talk about hope is to ask, ‘How will it all turn out?’ To ‘hope against hope’ is to hope even in the face of events that suggest that everything will ultimately amount to nothing. Although we all may have our own individual stories and our own individual hopes, because Quakers don’t share a theological story, it’s very difficult to say what it means for Quakers to be a community of hope.
Another challenge to being a community of hope is the way we value uncertainty. We are very wary of people who express their beliefs with confidence. We like to quote our Advices and Queries saying ‘Think it possible that you may be mistaken.’ Quaker sociologist Ben Pink Dandelion has described this as the Quaker belief in the ‘absolute perhaps.’[2] The only thing we’re certain about is that you can’t be certain about anything. Ben has said that Quakers have reached a point where the way we believe things is more important than the beliefs we hold. We can believe anything we want as long as we don’t believe we have the final truth.[3] In the Bible, hope is described as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 6.19, 11.1). This kind of hope doesn’t seem to be available to us as Quakers who value uncertainty. It’s difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to say anything collectively about hope with confidence.
Another challenge is that we’ve inherited a weighty reputation for good works, for helping others. Whenever I mention that I’m a Quaker in conversation, I’m likely to get the reply ‘They’re good people the Quakers.’ Quakers today often think our natural place is at the forefront of moral progress, that Quakers should be at the front of every worthy campaign. Disappointingly, this is usually not the case. Our collective Quaker self-image doesn’t always match the reality. We struggle to live up to this reputation when our numbers and energies are declining. Quakerism is mainly run by volunteers, and people don’t have the time and resources they used to. Our reputation and the reality are a recipe for exhaustion and despair.
Related to this is the way we understand the Quaker message. Over the years I’ve been to various outreach conferences about spreading the Quaker message and growing the Quaker community, and I’ll hear Quakerism spoken about as the spirituality of the future. We think Quakerism is the natural spirituality for modern people in the modern world, for people who are tired of religion but also tired of materialism and consumerism. But again, this hope doesn’t match the reality. Quakers have been saying we’re the ideal spirituality for the modern world as long as I’ve been alive, and we’re still in decline. What we’re offering is not as appealing as we think it is.
The hopes of our Quaker ancestors
If it’s difficult for us to be a community of hope today, maybe we can find some useful theological tools in our Quaker past. How did our Quaker ancestors hope? A useful if simplistic way to think about Quaker history in Britain is to divide it into four periods, one per century: revolutionary (17th century), Quietist (18th century), evangelical (19th century) and liberal (20th century). How have Quakers hoped in each of these periods?
The Quakers of the revolutionary period held an apocalyptic hope. Quakerism began during the tumultuous period of the English Civil War. This period was a confrontational and dangerous one, and Quakers often found themselves in conflict with the wider Puritan culture. From 1660 onwards, once Charles II was on the throne, it was also a period of intense persecution, with many Quakers jailed and mistreated. The first Quakers made a sharp distinction between the fallen World which was ending, and the Kingdom of God which was arriving. The end of the World was nigh. A lot of people, not just Quakers, thought was happening at the time, with the date 1666 being a particular focus for people’s apocalyptic hopes. The first Quakers believed the Second Coming of Jesus was occurring amongst them, the Risen Christ was arriving spiritually in the body of the Quaker community, in the individual quaking bodies of Friends. Quakers looked forward to the end of the World as a good thing, because the World was a place of evil and violence. Their experience was that God was bringing them out of the World. The Inward Christ was teaching them to live in a new reality. What they were experiencing, soon, everyone would experience. They were confident that the Second Coming would occur in its fullness in their lifetime, hastened by Quaker preaching and people’s spiritual transformation. This is what spurred Quaker preachers to travel widely. They hoped that everyone would turn to the Light of Christ within themselves, and through this transformation the Kingdom of God would arrive.
After the intense persecution of the 1660-1680s, Quakers understandably wanted to be left alone. The Act of Toleration was passed in 1685, making Quakerism legal, and Quakers entered a period of respectability. They found spiritual inspiration in a mystical movement from France and Spain called Quietism, from which this period gets its name. This was a spirituality of quietness, inwardness, and stilling the self to allow the Holy Spirit to work in the soul. For these Quakers, the Second Coming hadn’t happened as their forebears expected. Friends didn’t give up hope for the Second Coming, but they believed they needed to wait faithfully until it arrived. The Second Coming would happen eventually, but not in the way the first Quakers had thought. They saw the Quaker community as a holy outpost of the Kingdom of God in the World. Their focus was on the moral purity of the Quaker community, rather than spreading the Quaker message. They still made a distinction between the World and the Kingdom of God. The World was still a place of evil and violence. To keep the Quaker community pure, they built what has been called the Quaker ‘hedge’ to separate themselves from the World. This ‘hedge’ was made up of various behaviours that marked Quakers out as a distinct group, e.g. dressing and speaking in distinctive ways, marrying within the community, etc.
In the 19th century many Quakers were influenced by evangelical revival movements and Methodism. The strictness of Quaker hedge meant that Quaker numbers were in decline. Too many Quakers were being ‘disowned’ for breaking the rules that were meant to keep the community holy. Quakers therefore brought down the hedge, relaxing the rules. Quakers stopped seeing themselves as the one true church and started working with other Protestant Christians. Instead of being a holy, set-apart community, Quakers began to involve themselves in reforming the structures of the world to be more in line with the values of the Kingdom of God. They involved themselves in political activity, social reform and philanthropy. At the same time, Quakers still saw themselves as a spiritual elite who helped those outside the Quaker community.[4]
In the 20th century Quakers were influenced by liberal Anglicanism and Biblical studies and opened themselves to learning from science including evolution and psychology. There was a new interest in religious education and Quaker history. For these Quakers the distinction between God and humanity fades. They began to see God as part of the human being. This was accompanied by an optimistic faith in humanity and human moral progress. Liberal Quakers continued to emphasise reforming the structures of the world. ‘God has no hands but ours’ (often attributed to Teresa of Avila) could be thought of as a quintessential liberal Quaker idea. The Kingdom of God is now something to be realised on earth in time through human effort. Liberal Friends continued the evangelical focus on Quakers helping those outside the Quaker community. In all four of these period, the Kingdom of God has been the Quaker hope but Quakers have held different views on where are we in relation to this vision. Is the Kingdom happening now? Is it far off in the future? Will we see it only after death? How much of a role does God have in the realisation of this future?
Adapting Quaker hopes for today
I think the hopes that worked for our Quaker ancestors have something to offer us today, but I don’t think we can adopt them wholesale. They need to be adapted in a way that works for us as Quakers in the 21st century.
I find an apocalyptic hope very attractive. Although I don’t have any confidence that God’s reign of peace and justice will be fulfilled in my lifetime, as the first Quakers did, I think we could rediscover their strong distinction between the World and Kingdom of God. By the World I don’t mean the ‘natural world,’ plants, mountains, butterflies etc. I mean all the social, political and economic systems that make up our lives. Also, I think the phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ is too patriarchal. I prefer to talk of the Kin-dom of God, and this refers to a vision of wholeness, justice and peace for all creatures.[5] Our evangelical and liberal ancestors thought the World could be reformed into the Kin-dom. But, like our apocalyptic ancestors, I don’t believe this can ever happen. Our world is built on such deep injustices e.g. antiblackness, colonialism, and patriarchy, that the only way to be rid of these injustices is to end the World as we know it. In Black thought, there’s a movement called Afropessimism.[6] This philosophy says that the modern world is built on and depends on racism, so why are we expecting it to ever change for the better? Working to end racism is ultimately futile, and so Black folk should focus their energies on living enjoyable, fulfilling lives as much as possible within the racist system. Therefore, we must hope for the endof the World, the abolition of all our unjust systems. The trouble with this is that the end of the World is, at least for me, unimaginable. But what we can do is let go of any hope that these systems can be reformed. We can’t reform the World into the Kin-dom. Another reason I find apocalyptic hope attractive is that there’s the very real possibility that, with the ongoing climate crisis, the end of the world as we know it isn’t far off. Apocalyptic hope involves letting go of many of the things we might otherwise put our faith and hope in, and learning what hope looks like in a World that is coming to an end.[7]
Our Quietist ancestors focussed on the holiness of the Quaker community. This led to many strict rules about behaviour and Quakers were banished from Meetings for wearing the wrong clothes, getting into debt, or marrying the wrong people. I think we can reclaim the focus on communal holiness but without the high standards of the hedge. By holiness, I don’t mean a saintly, unachievable perfection. I mean faithfully listening to and following the guidance of the Spirit. Quakers in the past felt a great responsibility for each other’s faithfulness. We no longer feel that responsibility today. Our individual spiritual growth has become a private matter, and we don’t like to pry into the state of each other’s spiritual maturity. But maybe we could be a community of hope if we made supporting each other’s faithfulness to the Spirit a part of our communal life. We could find hope in the still small voice that will help steer us in a World that is coming to an end. What would it look like if we saw our individual faithfulness to the Spirit as each other’s business?
Along with hope for the end of the World and cultivating faithfulness to the Spirit in each other to lead us on this difficult path, what are we to do? We can’t make do with an entirely passive hope were we just wait for things to happen. Many Friends have been taken with Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s book Active Hope.[8] For Quakers today hope is accompanied by action. I think we’re right to praise the social and political activism of the evangelicals and liberals even if there’s something very problematic about their self-image as saviours of the world. Could we keep their focus on action, on active hope, but reduce the focus? Instead of seeing ourselves as the hope of the world as we might have done in the past, could we make small things the focus of our hope? Instead of hoping to save the world, we could do small things that undermine and diminish the power of unjust systems, small things that match our energies. Those small things include how we treat and support each other in our Quaker community. Our focus should not just be on helping those outside the Quaker community. We are a community of people in need of help in many ways? How can we alleviate each other’s pain, or help each other to bear the pain that can’t be alleviated?[9] Instead of being hope for the world, what would it look like to be hope for each other?
[1] ‘A Quaker Response to the Crisis of Climate Change’ (Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain, June 2009), https://quaker-prod.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/store/de7f01e99d824a1cc6f18a17ec112414a1abfd51a16726095ef63ee96c37.
[2] Pink Dandelion, The Liturgies of Quakerism, Liturgy, Worship and Society Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 118.
[3] Pink Dandelion, The Cultivation of Conformity: Towards a General Theory of Internal Secularisation (London: Routledge, 2019), 129.
[4] Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 282.
[5] This phrase entered academic theology via Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the 21st Century (Orbis Books, 1996).
[6] Frank B. III Wilderson, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020).
[7] For this perspective I’m indebted to Marika Rose’s Theology for the End of the World (London: SCM Press, 2023).
[8] Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (Novato, Calif: New World Library, 2012).
[9] This comes from the idea of ‘palliative hope’ which I first heard about from Timothy Beal, see Tim Nash, ‘Timothy Beal – Finding Hope at the End of the World’, Nomad Podcast (blog), 10 April 2024, https://www.nomadpodcast.co.uk/timothy-beal-finding-hope-at-the-end-of-the-world-n318/.
Featured image photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash
Jolly Quaker 
I have met many Quakers of whom I might say, sadly, “These are not my people,” because they have not yet surrendered self-will and asked to be led, checked, corrected, and propelled forward by the One and Only Good Will, which is Almighty God’s: In other words, they are still living in the Old Adam.
But when we ask that One and Only Good Will to free us from the Old Adam, I’ve found, to my relief and happiness, that we are led to others of our people. Therein we find hope.