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How do contemporary Quakers construct their practices and create a Quaker ‘way’? How have they responded, in doing this, to the prevailing conditions for the possibility of religious experience?

The first question asks: what is ‘Quakerism’? The term ‘Quakerism’ is

therefore problematic. Quakers certainly refer to ‘Quakerism’ 29 and in this

study where they do so I retain their usage in the ethnographic account. These self-references to ‘Quakerism’, a general reference to some set of defining characteristics, can however, include a number of features – Quaker history, their tradition, to the canonical text Quaker Faith and Practice, to the totality of world-wide highly diverse Quaker practices, or to the broad church of contemporary British Quaker practices with common salient characteristics but significant personal variations. Since this study is an attempt to explore what contemporary British Quakerism entails, I do not deploy the concept ‘Quakerism’ as an analytic or explanatory concept, it is retained when Quakers use it, I use it to refer to the general field of enquiry,30 and it remains

29 _{For examples of Quaker usage see (1) Page 29, line 7 item (8) above (2) Page}

115, Fieldnotes: Kindlers, Alec Davison’s overview account, (3) Page 216 Fieldnotes: Text Kindlers, Rose and (4) Page 417, Murgatroyd 2010:14ff.

30 _{Quaker academic commentators however do not always limit themselves to this}

an open concept.31

There are a series of subsidiary questions that flow from these initial questions. How have Quakers changed in terms of their own tradition? Are these responses ‘new light’ or submission to social pressures? What are the practices, the personal choices, and the spiritual disciplines that Quakers enact in their worship and beyond? What relationships exist between the elements of the Quaker tradition – collective worship ritual, personal preferences in practices, cosmologies, ethical action and self-representation and narrative? Do Quakers consider themselves as engaging in ‘religion’ and how do the various Quaker cosmologies interrelate? Do Quakers have beliefs? What is the relationship between worship rituals and the conditions for social enactment? How does a recognisable set of Quaker practices, survive or reproduce itself over time and what changes might take place during this process?

To address these questions the study employs a number of theoretical perspectives to open up the primary question. I also present an ethnography of Quaker practices for exploration both on their own terms and in the light of these theoretical perspectives.

I set out here the central aspects of the theories I use and note the way in which they are deployed in this study. The theories fall into four types: first

substantive characteristics of practice, as in Dandelion 1996:268, see page 349 of this study. My usage avoids reifying and essentialist interpretations of the term.

macro theories which rely on historical perspectives and are sociological and applied philosophical studies of secularisation with direct anthropological relevance; second, middle-range theories of local conditions derived from empirical studies of religious and spiritual practices; third theories of practice and fourth, theories that concern the use of analytical concepts.

1.2.2. Macro Theories: the Developed Theory of Secularisation.

I present here a development of secularisation theory from Bruce (1995, 2011) as critiqued by Cannell (2007), Berger et al (1999) Davie (1994) Jenkins (1999) and Prince and Riches (2000), and developed by Martin (2005) into a revised general theory and deployed and augmented by Taylor (2007).

Bruce (1995, 2011) exemplifies the standard secularisation thesis that asserts the decline of religion under the pressure of modernism as a determined linear process leading to a secular end state. The pressures in this process stem largely from social differentiation and include the decline in membership of churches, the loss of various community groups, egalitarianism, individualism (privatisation), relativism, pluralism and naturalism. Drawing on the critics noted above, I adopt Martin’s view (Martin, 2005:2-22) that the

teleological aspects of standard secularisation theory are unnecessary.32

However I retain the features Bruce describes as the effects of modernism -

32_{Martin rejects the view of secularisation as ‘a uniform intellectual advance to the} arrival of the secular age as a kind of epiphany’ (Martin, 2005:10).

pressures, or ‘cross-pressures’ in Taylor’s terminology – as having validity and potential applicability to the Quaker case.

Critics of the standard secularisation theory raise a number of other theoretical points. Martin (2005), Cannell (2007) and Berger (1999) note how Christianity is itself implicated in shaping accounts of modernism and secularisation. Quakers, with their early and radical commitment to egalitarianism are part of this process, as well as being subject to continued external pressures. Critics, particularly Berger (1999), also note that the social sciences contribute to the creation of the ‘myth’ of secularisation. James (2003) and Cannell (2007) consider the problem of anthropological discourse as tending towards a naturalistic and immanent interpretive use of the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’.

Prince and Riches (2000) noted the dangers of grand narratives and stress the local and constructed nature of religious movements. They also note that religious movements in their self-representations often seek to place themselves in a grand narrative. There are two intertwined narratives here – the Quaker narrative and the theorised process of secularisation. I approach the former as an ethnographic exploration and the latter I establish here, not as a grand narrative, but as a series of pressures and social biases that combine, and can be combined as theory, to have some explanatory value.

I wish to retain the pressures towards secularisation that Bruce identifies but

use the theory in a more dynamic way.33 The title of this thesis refers to the

way in which Quakers articulate their inspiration, ideas and perspectives. I require therefore a theoretical approach to the conditions that make this more or less possible and which point to the conditions within which Quaker discourse is formed. I therefore adopt theories that develop the secularisation thesis along these lines. I use them to characterise a context for Quakers, a ‘spiritual landscape’, an epistemic space, in which certain ‘cross-pressures’ influence the conditions for religious thought and experience (Taylor, 2007:302).

Both Taylor and Martin base their theories on a reading of history that implicates Christianity, in its diverse forms, in the processes they describe. In Martin’s case the four ‘incursions’ of Christianity into European culture culminate in the effects of Protestantism producing a ‘recoil’ to each incursion within Christianity towards ‘nature’ (Martin 2005:134-136). Taylor draws on similar roots in what he calls the ‘Reform Master Narrative’ implicating Protestantism, which ‘introduces an anthropocentric shift and hence a break- out from the monopoly of the Christian faith’ (Taylor, 2007:774). In the long historical arc Taylor sees the post Protestant reforms as producing influences

33 _{Bruce (1995, 2011) identifies from his empirical studies: social differentiation;}

egalitarianism; individualism (privatisation); relativism; pluralism; and naturalism. Martin argues for the dominant effects of social differentiation, individualism and pluralism, and adds a dialectical relation he terms ‘faith-nature’ (Martin 2005;8-20). Martin also notes that Europe and the USA differ markedly in these matters. The use of Taylor’s work enables me to move away from the reification of these pressures towards the conditions for the possibility of religious experience, nevertheless I retain them as terms pointing to ‘pressures’ related to, Taylor’s concept of ‘cross pressures’ (Taylor, 2007:302,414-415).

of individualism, self-fashioning, pluralism leading to relativism, and the retreat from theism to a relatively impotent deism which sows the seeds of religious redundancy. Critically here, social life becomes seamless with nature in the sense that there is no knowledge to be encountered as something discontinuous with a human moral order. In short, the ‘cross pressures’ on those who may maintain or develop an interest in religion or in religious belief do not primarily concern questions of belief, a/theism, but the irrelevance and marginality of religion and the loss of conditions that point to what religious experience might comprise.

I now set out the key aspects of Taylor’s theory and the complementary contribution made by Martin (2005). Taylor begins his exploration by asking ‘what are the features of the new spiritual landscape?’ By this he means the social forces creating conditions for belief and religious experience, the ‘new ways in which we experience our world’ (Taylor, 2007:4,573). He describes a spectrum of social ‘cross-pressures’ as the ‘nova’ (Taylor, 2007:299-313,414- 415). This is the contested space of ‘galloping pluralism’ stretching out between the polarities of the ‘immanent frame’, ‘closed world systems’ and some notion of the ‘transcendent’ (Taylor, 2007:542-557). Both Taylor and Martin characterise this epistemic space, the nova, as dialectical. Taylor proposes a ‘transcendent-immanent’ dialectic (Taylor, 2007:13-16, 544, 632). Martin proposes a dialectic of ‘faith-nature’ (Martin, 2005:1-13). Martin notes that, ‘once the dialectic between transforming vision and natural and social

reality characterised as good has been introduced into history, it does not and cannot lapse’ (Martin, 2005:11).

The nova is not a ‘level playing field’ (Taylor, 2007:275) but a space in which irruptions of religious commitment take place against a set of default assumptions whereby believing becomes an ‘embattled option’ and the drift is to ‘exclusive humanism’. All religious options in the nova are ‘fragelised’ (Taylor, 2007:303), undermined not just by contestation, by the fact that contrary views to our own are held by those we respect, by the plurality of religious claims, but also by the suspicion attaching to master narratives as

truth.34 The provisional and tentative way in which beliefs must be held in the

face of competing claims to religious truth and the tension between the desire for truthfulness and the rejection of a notion of truth contributes to ‘fragelisation’.

Taylor (2007), argues that the secularization of the public sphere in the nova has the effect that our default orientation is not only to distance religion from the public sphere but to assume that the social and natural world we live in is

34 _{Fragelisation can be understood through the discussion in Bernard Williams}

(2002). Here he addresses the tension between the demand for truthfulness and a pervasive suspicion about truth itself, ‘the devotion to truthfulness and the suspicion directed to the idea of truth are connected to one another. The desire for truthfulness drives a process of criticism which weakens the assurance that there is any secure or unqualified stateable truth’. Williams notes that this is no abstract paradox, ‘…it does not mean that the demand for truthfulness and the rejection of truth can happily co-exist as stable. If you do not believe in the existence of truth, what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for? Or – as we might also put it – in pursuing truthfulness, what are you supposedly being true to? (Williams, 2002:2-6).

a ‘closed world system’ of immanence. This effect is intertwined with a story he calls ‘the subtraction narrative’ (Taylor, 2007:530). In this account science has released us from the grip of the enchanted spirit world. The autonomous self, freed from the grip of religion, feels ‘a sense of power, of capacity, in being able to order the world and ourselves’ (Taylor, 2007:531). The positive impact upon the person of the subtraction narrative is that the self is apparently freed from servitude to metaphysical and ecclesiastical forces; we arrive at an unsullied place and become our more natural selves. The ‘buffered self’ emerges (Taylor, 2007:300-307). This self has won through to invulnerability where power and reason have freed us from ‘unreasoning fears’ (Taylor, 2007:307). The person, the self, the body, become sources and sites of authenticity and authority. The buffered self thus freed is less porous to other possibilities. It has the courage to create its own moral order.

Taylor develops his theory as part of an arc of history. He also rests these consequences, the cross-pressures he describes, on some assumptions. He portrays the cross pressures, in part, as operating within the answers we give to certain questions. These answers flow from shared concerns with the shape of our moral lives and our image of human flourishing. He links this to the desire for ‘wholeness’ and ‘authenticity’. He theorises once again as to the conditions that support this perspective and on how our answers are shaped by the ‘shaping of our reasoning’, and suggests that some of these aspects are unconscious assumptions and ‘hold us captive’ (Taylor, 2007:549).

These are the key elements of the theories of Taylor and Martin. I discuss their consequences and effects in Chapter 2 where I show how they contribute to a picture of the spiritual landscape – the conditions necessary for the possibility of religious experience for Quakers.

I make use of another macro theory in Chapter 5, at the end of this study.

After presenting the ethnographic material and considering it in the light of various theoretical perspectives, I reassess an aspect of the historical arc to which both Taylor and Martin refer. I use the theoretical perspective from the work of Mary Douglas (1996) and the development of her work in Cultural Theory (Thompson, Ellis and Wildavski, 1990). Using this framework I consider whether the contemporary balance between the main elements of the Quaker tradition – the worship ritual, testimonies, decision-making and cosmologies – shows a significant shift from early Quaker practices. I consider that these effects may be consistent with the secularisation thesis and the effects of the cross-pressures identified by Taylor. Cultural theory and specifically, the grid-group model, enable me to chart the change over time in Quaker practice and organisation from sect to ‘enclave’ (Douglas, 1996:16) to a ‘network mix’ (Douglas and Ney, 1998:146) (from sect to congregation in Bruce’s (1995) terms) and show that some residual enclave features now might also be expressed as features of Douglas’s ‘latent groups’ (Douglas, 1986:37-42). Secondly, by plotting the changing relationships of the internal dynamics of the elements of contemporary Quaker practices I explore how this illustrates adaptation for survival and an equilibrium of unity in diversity.