Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism & Helped Save America

by Chuck Fager

The Progressive Quakers, though long forgotten by historians, were the radical seed of activist American religion in much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Remaking Friends is the first book to tell their unique, exciting story. Emerging in the decades before the Civil War, the movement included pioneer crusaders for abolition and women’s rights. They challenged authoritarianism in churches and questioned many traditional dogmas. They stood for applying reason to doctrine, the Bible and theology; yet they were also welcoming to the burgeoning spiritualist movement.   Come right down to it, the Progressive Friends were just darned interesting. They also shaped the contemporary liberal stream of the Quaker religious movement. Among many other outstanding figures of the era, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and William Lloyd Garrison were associated with them. The Progressive Friends have long deserved to have their story told. Finally, in Remaking Friends, they are. In Remaking Friends, the saga of the Progressive Friends comes to vivid life, with sketches of some of their outstanding leaders (and their dogged antagonists), their struggle for a voice, recognition, and impact. Beginning as a band of pacifists, some agonized over the Civil War, while others joined up to end slavery and rebellion. Then we follow their evolution and impact through the post-Civil War decades, into the first “Gilded Age,” and the emergence of modern imperialism and militarism--all issues they addressed, with striking contemporary resonance. It shows their ultimate success in shaping today's liberal Quakerism, even as their separate identity faded. Based on ground-breaking research in a wide range of original sources, the book includes more than thirty illustrations.

246 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2014

Reviews

[Chel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book and I loved reading it! As a picky, cranky reader, my only objection is that I wish it had had one more really good proofreading before going to press. There! That’s off my chest, and I have nothing else to complain about.

Admittedly, Remaking Friends is directed to a small audience, of which I am dead center. As a liberal, modern Quaker, I am captivated by a new interpretation of our story that adds dimensions to the picture of how we got to be the kind of people we are today. This book looks at the role of Progressive Friends in that evolution. I would guess many modern Quakers have hardly heard of the Progressive movement; even though it contained some highly recognizable Quaker figures, such as Lucretia Mott and Jane Rushmore, it barely makes a showing in our histories. If we know about Progressive Friends, we tend to think of them as an unimportant, peripheral blip, associated with the anti-slavery movement, but otherwise not worth attending to or taking seriously.

In this book, Chuck Fager makes a case that they were in fact quite important in the story of how we got to be who and what we are today, tracking their influence through historic Quaker documents, culminating in the creation of Friends General Conference and in the change of particular practices among Hicksite Quakers.

I have often regretted that Quakers’ story of our early origins is frequently told almost exclusively from the perspective of the Journal of George Fox. Ideas or practices began when they began for Fox, episodes were important when Fox was present, wrong when Fox disagreed with them. How would we see the story differently if we had easy access to similar journals from other perspectives in that movement? If we had such an account from one of the Westmoreland Seekers, for example, the whens, hows, and whys would have broader interpretations.

Well, Remaking Friends is like the discovery of religious memoir by Alexander Parker or Mary Penington. It is a whole new way of looking at a later period in our story. Imagine a rich account of liberal evolution within Quakerism from the mid-nineteenth through early-twentieth century in which Rufus Jones is mentioned only twice in passing! (I have always considered myself a Rufus Jonesian Quaker, and I still do, but I realize now that many of the attitudes and perspectives I have associated with Jones and his students may well have other or earlier roots.)

Fager does a pretty good job of retaining a certain kind of objectivity in his telling of this account. He explains his thinking about why he draws certain conclusions or is interested in certain individuals who emerge, but doesn’t do much “taking sides” in the accounts of Quaker arguments that led to the Progressive movement. (Not that such side-taking is called for – the story speaks for itself.) However, in a very satisfying 10-page “Afterward,” he discusses some of the issues and questions that this research has raised for him. They were much the same as the ones that arose for me while reading — such as the fact that I feel torn between seeing the Progressive movement as naïve in some of its ideas, yet l regret not sharing their hopefulness for the future.

This book is written as a narrative, in a style more conversational than scholarly, but generously documented with footnotes and quotations. It is a satisfying read. Yet recognizing that many skeptical readers will want to draw their own conclusions about his interpretation of historic records, Fager has simultaneously published a thicker version of his study, containing much more documentation and more complete transcriptions of the materials from his research. That book is Angels of Progress.

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful investigation of this period of Quaker history, which includes charting the rise and fall - and ongoing influence of the ideas - of the 'Progressive Friends'. In particular, changes to Quaker approaches to spiritual and worldly authority, especially but not only in their own ranks, are explored.