Quakerism, Bondage, and Freedom

Abstract 

Why did slaveholding persist among members of the Religious Society of Friends long after biblical arguments against slavery were already circulating within the community? This paper argues that the delay cannot be explained by moral blindness alone. From the early eighteenth century onward, Quaker critics developed increasingly sophisticated scriptural critiques of slavery, drawing on texts such as Acts 17:26, Matthew 7:12, Isaiah chapter 58, and the commercial imagery Chapter 18 of Book of Revelation. Yet these arguments met a specific institutional obstacle: from 1718 onward, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Overseers of the Press reviewed manuscripts for anything likely to raise contention, and by the 1740s at least five of the committee's seven members were themselves enslavers. This paper traces the friction between expanding scriptural critique and editorial suppression, arguing that what delayed Quaker abolitionism was less the weakness of the arguments than the organizational power arrayed against their circulation.

This paper analyzes the transition from seventeenth-century Puritan theocracy to the modern architecture of religious liberty through the lens of early Quaker persecution. It examines the experiences of Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson to argue that the violence towards the Quakers was a foundational disruption of sacrificial logic. It shows how the failure of Puritan scapegoating catalyzed a move toward a theological friendship and religious freedom.  By tracing the development from William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” to the twentieth-century contributions of the American, John Courtney Murray to Vatican II teaching on religious freedom, this paper demonstrates how the Quaker experience and theology anticipated modern religious toleration and the institutionalization of the right to exist.

Proposal