Holy Nation is fascinating in its scope and in its delivery. Sarah Crabtree looks at how Quakers navigated their interplay with the “world” and, in particular, potentially hostile nation states emerging in “an age of revolution” between 1754 and 1826. It is a period that started at the beginning of what Jack Marietta has called the “reformation of American Quakerism” and ended just before the “Great Separation,” a schism that was to split Quakerism in two. It is a period that saw Quakers accused of British sympathies during the American Revolutionary war and of revolutionary sympathies in a 1790s Britain afraid of what was happening in neighboring France. It was a period in which Quaker spirituality was bifurcating between an emphasis on the inward and a more confident and relaxed Quaker sensibility (labeled “gay”) that was starting to be less fearful of the outward. It is a period of Quaker history largely not researched, and for that reason alone, Crabtree's book is most welcome.

Crabtree also offers a compelling theorization of how Quakers responded to the transatlantic experience of suspicion and, in parts of the United States, the new experience of marginalization and hostility. The “reformation” was about spiritual renewal and a reclamation of authentic Quaker faith in a corrupt and corrupting world. The adage goes that Quakers emigrated from Britain to America to “do good” and they did very well. In major towns like Philadelphia, founded by Quaker William Penn in 1681, Quakers celebrated a religious freedom they had not experienced in seventeenth-century England and enjoyed mercantile dominance. Some Quakers became very rich and in spite of a numerical minority in the colony, ran Pennsylvania. However, antiwar Quaker integrity was compromised by the continuing demands of the crown for war taxes until, in 1756, most of the Quaker members left the Pennsylvania Assembly. Penn's “Holy Experiment” had come to an end due to the desire for spiritual renewal. A commitment to antislavery would quickly follow as part of a wider anti-worldliness. Quaker members whose behavior threatened the presentation and preservation of the purity of the true church, a gathered remnant in a corrupt and corrupting world, were disowned.

The reformation was transatlantic. Quakers in Britain did not enjoy the same privileges and freedoms that their coreligionists in North America did, but they had made steady progress in their campaigns for rights. Quaker worship was legal after 1689; they could affirm in court rather than swear an oath from 1694; and, along with Jews, were given special dispensation to marry in their own priest-less manner in 1753. They represented a separated people, dressing and speaking differently from the general population while practicing their form of mysticism in the midst of a successful commercial life, supported by endogamous networks. Small in number and yet influential in society, British Quakers of the eighteenth century also began to campaign against slavery and agitate for social justice based on their idea of spiritual equality. According to Rob Alexander, their early enthusiasm for the French Revolution was tempered by a centralized damping-down of political fervor as that Revolution extended into its less compassionate stages. Alexander argues that the disownment of Hannah Barnard on both sides of the Atlantic in 1802 was not due to her questioning of the scripture as “outward” but because of her radicalized political views (“Democratic Quakers in the Age of Revolutions,” PhD diss., University of Lancaster, 2006).

Sarah Crabtree uses Barnard as one example of the way Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic responded to nationalism and statehood by reimagining themselves as part of “an holy nation,” a chosen people that paralleled the Israelites of the Hebrew scriptures, a spiritual transnationalism that de-emphasized political boundaries and allegiances in favor of a spiritual unity with God. This device gave them a connection back to early Quaker self-identification as a people led only by God, “outcasts of Israel,” as well as a positive affirmation of countercultural anti-worldliness. It created a form of citizenship that could resist and match the demands of democracy and one that served as a platform for continued social agitation against war and the preparation for war, and social inhumanity in general. It served the Society of Friends well for decades. The sense of “an holy nation” would only ultimately fail as the opportunities of secular nationhood became too vital to resist for many Quakers, and in this Crabtree offers an original contribution to the theorization of the Great Separation between urban elites eager to take up new opportunities and more rural Friends seeking to conserve and reinforce an inward-turning spirituality. Quakers like Barnard hung on to more militant ideals at a time when wider Quakerism was already compromising.

Crabtree's research appears thorough, and while theologians might question the use of some of the terminology in a handful of places (such as calling Elias Hicks's theology “universalist”), it is equally easy to understand her own definitions. The book is very well written, although I would have preferred more descriptive subtitles. It covers a great amount of ground in about two hundred pages of text, but it will serve a legion of future scholars well as they test and utilize Crabtree's theorization in more closely focused regional investigations. Crabtree has taken on a socially, politically, and theologically complex period in Quaker history with refreshing vigor and clarity and provided us with a theoretical tool with which we should engage with great respect.