By Jim Schacht

In our Quaker history, politics has always been interwoven with spiritual matters.

We began in a particular set of circumstances. Prior to peace churches, three things Catholics, Protestants, and Russian Orthodox churches agreed on were that (1) rulers got to decide the religion of their people, (2) disputes were settled by fighting, and (3) state taxes were imposed and utilized to support a ruler’s chosen religion as well as the fighting.

In Zurich some men who would later be known as Anabaptists got together in 1525 to challenge each of those agreements. They articulated clearly that they thought people should have the right to choose their own religion; they refused to engage in violence; and they believed in the separation of church and state. Within two years or so they were killed by the authorities, of course.

Killing those men did not stamp out their ideas––those ideas spread all over Germany and the Low Countries, as did those of the persecuted and killed, in every established religion. It is hard to know whether the persecution was more about the religious differences or the fact that the ideas they advocated would reduce the power of both states and state religion, as well as end state support for state religion.

Anabaptists evolved into Mennonites and Amish and both have a long and complicated history. The Mennonites and Amish were invited to move to places more welcoming to them because they were hardworking, peaceful and honest. However, sometimes counties changed their mind and began to persecute them. Together the Mennonites and Amish now number over two million scattered throughout the world.

When George Fox began preaching in 1647, he benefited greatly from the groundwork laid by the Mennonites, although they were still persecuted, and England still had a state church determined by the King. England itself had just lived through a civil war that resulted in the capture of King Charles, and in a few years King Charles would be executed and the religion changed to Puritanism under the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.

What George Fox and Margaret Fell did not do is significant. They did not support the Puritans’ attempt to coerce goodness, or seek a restoration of the Anglicans, or try to challenge either of them. Instead I understand them to have claimed that the Kingdom of God, writ small, was available to all who sought it––as long as the seekers withdrew from the world enough to be able to listen for and hear the Spirit, and to love one another.

Fell and Fox also had what the Mennonites did not have: connections in a country with a strong legal system. Fell was married to a Judge and was minor landed nobility, so she had legal protection that others did not.  She also had the sensitivities and outlook of her class and was able to correspond and care for incarcerated people. William Penn, too, was counted as a member, and he had enough standing to be given his own colony for Quakers.

I have my ideas about how this relates to our current problems––but what doth thou say?

Editor’s Note: This article is jointly published by the Multnomah Friends Meeting Newsletter