Quakers & Anabaptists

Tough ques­tion in the book­store today: a cus­tomer called ask­ing for books about the con­nec­tion between Friends and Anabap­tists. Remark­ably, we could­n’t come up with much of a list. But let’s be inter­ac­tive here, read­ers! What books did I for­get about? And what’s this phe­nom­e­na of deny­ing Quaker/Anabaptist com­mon roots and cross-pollination?


Peter Brock talks about it in “The Quak­er Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny 1660 to 1914”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/1 – 85072-065 – 7 and Doug Gwyn has some stuff in “Seek­ers Found”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0 – 87574-960 – 7 but there _should_ be more than that. We tried going from the oth­er end and surfed over to “Anabap­tist Books”:http://www.anabaptistbooks.com/ and typed in “Quak­er” but not much there.
After telling our cus­tomer that we could­n’t come up with too much on Quaker/Anabaptist cross-pollinization, he said that’s what he had been dis­cov­er­ing. He asked me why I thought that was. Good ques­tion. I told him that Quak­ers had spent much of the twen­thi­eth cen­tu­ry dis­tanc­ing them­selves from Anabap­tists, and on giv­ing up on our shared ‘pecu­liar’ tes­ti­monies on plain­ness and sep­a­ra­tion from the world. This real­ly coin­cides with the rise of the Quakers-as-Protestant theme and with the renam­ing of the tes­ti­monies in mod­ern sec­u­lar language.

16,046 thoughts on “Quakers & Anabaptists

  1. It’s often a mys­tery to me why there isn’t (or is) a book on some sub­ject or
    anoth­er. But ARE there Quaker/Anabaptist com­mon roots and cross-pollination?
    I’d be inter­est­ed in hear­ing what you know that leads you to won­der where
    the books are.
    I know the Ger­man­town Dec­la­ra­tion was a joint Quaker/Mennonite action, as
    were the CPS camps, but I don’t know of others.
    Rufus Jones pro­mot­ed a con­nec­tion between George Fox and Ger­man pietists,
    but his­to­ri­ans since then seem to have debunked that (per­haps part of the
    denial you men­tion, but then again, there’s lots about Rufus that’s been
    appro­pri­ate­ly dis­card­ed or reinterpreted).
    There are a cou­ple of books about plain dress, an old one by Gum­mere (a
    stan­dard of Quak­er cul­tur­al his­to­ry) and a con­tem­po­rary one by the
    infor­ma­tion cen­ter out in Inter­course. I don’t remem­ber if the new one
    com­ments on how the two sep­a­rate tra­di­tions of plain dress have influenced
    one anoth­er, but it is an inter­est­ing read.

  2. Hi Ken­neth,
    I real­ly don’t know about all the cross-overs, it’s just obvi­ous there are some and I wish some thor­ough his­to­ri­an would dis­en­ta­gle the myths pro and con to show us the connections.
    Cer­tain­ly there were a lot of sim­i­lar ideas swirling around and a lot of Eng­lish & con­ti­nen­tal dis­senters were influ­enc­ing each oth­er from John Wyclif and Jan Hus’s time onward. Sixteenth-century Protes­tant dis­sent seems to have been quite a swirl of cross-influences, often con­verg­ing in safe havens like Ams­ter­dam. William Pen­n’s moth­er was Dutch and as a Quak­er he trav­eled Europe invit­ing Anabap­tists to his new Amer­i­can colony. Cer­tain­ly the prox­im­i­ty of Friends and Anabap­tists in Penn­syl­va­nia would have cre­at­ed some cross-fertilization. Friends and Anabap­tists his­tor­i­cal­ly share dis­tinc­tive tes­ti­monies, paci­fism and plain dress being the two obvi­ous ones, and cer­tain­ly each group has influ­enced the oth­er this way. The long his­to­ry of joint projects in the Amer­i­c­as that you men­tion also point to ongo­ing his­tor­i­cal connection.
    Gum­mere’s book is part of that twentieth-century project of dis­miss­ing all Quak­er pec­u­lar­i­ties as out­dat­ed emp­ty forms (“cos­tumes”) and ready­ing Friends for the com­ing one-world social­ist utopia that will come from embrac­ing the mod­ern age (as I remem­ber she had some flow­ery lan­guage to this effect in the front). Cer­tain­ly Friends have now come to resem­ble main­line Protes­tants more than any­thing else but when the dis­tinc­tives were fol­lowed more there was a much stronger resem­blance to Anabap­tists. (For those unfa­mil­iar with the two books Ken­neth men­tions, I have ref­er­ences to them on my Plain Dress Resources page).
    So I don’t know how seri­ous­ly to take Anabap­tist influ­ences. They’re there, cer­tain­ly, but are they large­ly coin­ci­den­tal or fundamental?

  3. See here:
    this site quotes from the book MAINTAINING THE RIGHT FELLOWSHIP, Stud­ies in Anabap­tist and Men­non­ite His­to­ry, No. 26, a nar­ra­tive account of life in the old­est Men­non­ite Com­mu­ni­ty in North Amer­i­ca, by John L. Ruth( Her­ald Press, Scottdale, PA 15683 and Kitch­en­er, Ontario 1984. Library of Con­gress #83 – 18579; ISBN 0 – 8361-1259 – 8)
    The quotes tell how 17th C Eng­lish Quakers,including William Penn and George Kei­th, evan­ge­lized among the Men­non­ites in the Ger­man Palati­nate, and con­vert­ed sev­er­al. Some of these ex-Mennonite Quak­ers emi­grat­ed to Ger­man­town in Penn­syl­va­nia with William Penn(including Pas­to­rius, who co-signed the Ger­man­town protest against slav­ery in 1688).
    Also, look at this site:
    This essay titled “Rad­i­cal Women Activists and the Begin­ning of the Pietist Move­ment”, by Lucin­da Mar­tin, tells of the attempts that these same Quak­ers made to con­vert Princess Eliz­a­beth and her broth­er, Karl Lud­vig, Elec­tor of the Ger­man Palatinate(cousins to Charles II of Eng­land). Appar­ent­ly they failed, but they were able to enlist Eliz­a­beth’s sup­port in pur­suad­ing Charles to free Quak­ers from prison, and in pur­suad­ing her broth­er the Elec­tor of the Palati­nate to stop pun­ish­ing Men­non­ite and Quak­er con­verts in his state(some of whom are men­tioned in the book cit­ed above), as well as allow­ing them to emi­grate to Penn­syl­va­nia 5 years later.
    This site:
    quotes from a 1902 Edi­tion of a “Guide­book to His­toric Ger­man­town”. It describes var­i­ous inter­ac­tions between the Quak­ers, Men­non­ites, Dunkards and Bretheren in Ger­man­town from the 1680’s through the Rev­o­lu­tion. It states that the first Ger­man­town Friends Meet­ing and the first Men­non­ite con­gre­ga­tion both wor­shipped in the same pri­vate res­i­dence until 1708, and that Ger­man was the lan­guage of most res­i­dents until well into the 18th C. There must have been a lot of the­o­log­i­cal “cross-pollination” happening.
    then, in this site:
    the essay “Bridg­ing the Gap:Cultural Bro­kers and the Struc­ture of Transat­lantic Com­mu­ni­ca­tion”, by Ros­alind Beil­er, describes how var­i­ous Quak­er tracts were trans­lat­ed into Dutch, Ger­man, and French and then desem­i­nat­ed through­out Europe to var­i­ous anabap­tist the­olo­gians and communities.
    It seems to me that Quak­ers were active­ly preach­ing to the anabap­tists in the late 17th C., and, where they did not suc­cess­ful­ly con­vert them ful­ly to RSoF, these Quak­er mis­sion­ar­ies suceed­ed in con­vince the anabap­tists of some Quak­er doctrines.
    I have not yet seen how the reverse(anabaptists preach­ing to the Quak­ers) hap­pened, at least in the 17th C.

  4. Anoth­er pos­si­ble indi­rect Anabap­tist influ­ence could have been through Fox’s uncle. In the first chap­ter of his Jour­nal, he states that in 1644 he trav­elled to Lon­don to vis­it his uncle Pick­er­ing, a Bap­tist. In Eng­land at this time there were two sects that were called Baptist(see here). One sect, the Gen­er­al Bap­tists, were a dis­senters who had migrat­ed to Hol­land in the ear­ly 1600’s, had become very influ­enced by the Men­non­ites in Ams­ter­dam, adopt­ed sev­er­al Anabap­tist doc­trines, includ­ing adult bap­tism, and then returned to Eng­land in 1612. The oth­er stream was the Par­tic­u­lar Baptists,who orig­i­nat­ed in Eng­land in the mid-1630’s from dis­senters who had incor­po­rat­ed adult bap­tism with Puri­tan doc­trines. If Uncle Pick­er­ing was a Gen­er­al Bap­tist, this might have influ­enced Fox at the time he was being led to Quakerism.

  5. Hi James,
    Thanks for your good research. It’s great to have this online here. If you type “quak­ers anabap­tists” into Google, this dis­cus­sion comes up first, so oth­ers curi­ous about the con­nec­tions will find your contributions.
    Michael J Sheer­an’s “Beyond Major­i­ty Rule”:http://​www​.non​vi​o​lence​.org/​m​a​r​t​i​n​k​/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​0​0​0​2​4​6​.​php (“avail­able from Quaker­books”:http://​www​.quaker​books​.org/​g​e​t/0 – 941308-04 – 9) has a fas­ci­nat­ing lit­tle adden­dum about Quak­er influ­ences, which con­tains sto­ries about the Eng­lish Gen­er­al Baptists:
    bq. Uncer­tain as we are about the method of trans­mis­sion, we can be more con­fi­dent in claim­ing that, at a min­i­mum, Smyth’s con­gre­ga­tion [of Gen­er­al Bap­tists] was the prin­ci­pal medi­um through wich Con­ti­nen­tal Anabap­tism was trans­ferred into Eng­land. Part and par­cel of that Anabap­tism was the belief in divine guid­ance of com­mu­ni­ties seek­ing God’s will togeth­er. George Fox and his ear­ly fol­low­ers read lit­tle oth­er than their Bibles. Their doc­trine came from beliefs that were in the air and in the var­i­ous reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties which they vis­it­ed. p. 128
    I did­n’t real­ize that George Fox’s uncle was a Bap­tist. That might indi­cate a rather more direct influ­ence. I’ll have fun look­ing up your ref­er­ences. It’s a shame I did­n’t take the phone num­ber of the chap whose inquiry to the book­store start­ed all this interest!

  6. Hi. Inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion! I’m a mem­ber of the Church of the Brethren. Our roots are in Ger­man Pietism but our faith and prac­tise have always had a lot in com­mon with Anabap­tism — in fact that’s how we usu­al­ly des­ig­nate ourselves.
    We have his­tor­i­cal­ly lived in the same com­mu­ni­ties with lots of inter­mar­ry­ing — the Men­non­ites would say it’s a falling away on the part of their members.
    (We Brethren have had a hard­er time hang­ing onto our dis­tinc­tive witness.)
    Any­way, the sternest Men­non­ite will not acknowl­edge us as Anabap­tist because of our strain of Pietism. To them, the Pietist’s empha­sis on the indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ence is the com­plete antithe­sis of their com­mu­ni­ty cen­tered theology.
    I’ll end with a joke told in my joint-affiliated con­gre­ga­tion (Mennonite/Church of the Brethren): The Men­non­ites pray for the Brethren who vote for the Quakers.

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