In the past decade, Pink Dandelion, program leader in the Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies at the venerable Woodbrooke Quaker Studies Centre in Birmingham, England, has established himself as one of, if not the most, prolific and provocative scholars of Quakerism working today. All of Dandelion's writings are interdisciplinary, grounded in wide-ranging research, and abounding with insights. An Introduction to Quakerism is his best work yet.
Dandelion's book gives equal attention to history and contemporary practice. He organizes his work around three themes. The first is time. Dandelion argues that “early Quakerism … was built upon an understanding/experience of an unfolding second coming (experienced inwardly), and the history of Quakerism is best understood in terms of its changing relationship to this founding experience of endtime and the necessary internal shifts which take place as a sense of endtime is replaced by one of meantime” (5). The second theme is “spiritual intimacy, of direct intimate relationship between humanity and God and Christ” (5), which Dandelion sees as fundamental to understanding early Quaker faith, and still key to contemporary Quaker spirituality. The final theme is “the world's people” (5)—the proper relationship of Friends with non-Quakers and the larger world around them.
Even scholars of religion find Quakerism confusing because of its extraordinary contemporary diversity, striking in a group that numbers only about 367,000 adherents worldwide. Much of Dandelion's work is devoted to explaining this diversity. He begins with a brisk but thorough overview of Quaker theology in the years from 1647 to 1827, between the rise of the Quaker movement in England and the split in North America that forever sundered the Religious Society of Friends. Dandelion's command of both primary sources and the growing body of research on early Quakerism is impressive, and the text bristles not only with references to the writings of the first two generations of Friends but also to three generations of twentieth-century Quaker scholars, from Rufus Jones and William C. Braithwaite through Geoffrey Nuttall and Hugh Barbour to more recently Douglas Gwyn and Rosemary Moore. The basic outline is familiar. A “radical and outspoken” (37) movement emerged in the North of England in the 1640s. George Fox, Margaret Fell, James Nayler, and other early Quaker leaders emphasized the immediate revelation of Christ to human beings, personal experience of His Second Coming, the possibility of perfection, worship based on following the leadings of the Holy Spirit rather than human tradition, and openness to the ministry and leadership of women. In Restoration England, between 1660 and 1689, often in the face of intense persecution, Friends focused more on internal matters of organization and softening some of their more radical theology. Nevertheless, this was still a period of accomplishment, most notably in the experiment that was early Pennsylvania. By the 1690s, with legal toleration in England, a new period had begun that would extend into the 1820s. Friends turned ever more inward, focused on maintaining “right order” and avoiding “creaturely activity”—actions that were in the human will rather than under divine leading. Nevertheless, these Friends also began the humanitarian work of antislavery activism, prison reform, and humane treatment of the mentally ill that became Quaker hallmarks.
By 1828, Friends in North America had divided into Hicksite and Orthodox groups. Both claimed to be heirs to traditional Quaker theology and practice, and both accused the other of having been contaminated by contacts with outsiders. In Orthodox eyes, Hicksites, who questioned the inspiration of some parts of the Bible and even the Virgin Birth, showed signs of infidelity, deism, and Unitarianism. Hicksites responded that Orthodox Friends were really Presbyterians and Episcopalians in Quaker plain dress. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the general trend, with some notable exceptions, was for the smaller Hicksite body to see itself as embodying liberal Christianity, while Orthodox Friends moved closer to the dominant evangelical religious culture of the United States and Great Britain. This came to a head after 1865, as most American Friends came to embrace revivalism and a pastoral ministry. These Friends were also responsible for a missionary movement that would make Friends in Latin America, Africa, and Asia the overwhelming majority of the world's Quakers in the twentieth century. By the late nineteenth century, however, a reaction was beginning that would create a small but articulate and influential modernist movement among Orthodox Friends. It would come to dominate English Quakerism and find its chief American exponent in Rufus Jones.
Today, Dandelion concludes that worldwide, Quakers fall into six groups. There are unaffiliated, deeply evangelical Friends; Evangelical Friends International, affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals; Friends United Meeting, which includes both pastoral and nonpastoral Friends and is the most diverse Quaker body; the theologically and socially liberal unprogrammed American Friends of Friends General Conference (FGC); other liberal, unprogrammed Friends not affiliated with FGC; and small bodies of Conservative Friends, heirs to the Orthodox tradition who did not embrace radical change in the late nineteenth century. In North America and Europe, numbers are stagnant or declining, while growth has continued at impressive rates in Latin America, Kenya, and East Asia.
Dandelion does not shy away from judging, for example, that the trajectory of British Quakerism is toward extinction by 2037 (247) or that some evangelical Friends churches are growing by abandoning even the pretense of a Quaker heritage (248). Overall, however, his pronouncements are so balanced and reasonable as to command assent. And they are supported by extensive quotations from Friends around the world. Probably no book about Quakerism has ever incorporated so many voices from outside North America and the British Isles. The result is what will almost surely be a classic work.
