Author Chat with Chuck Fager on Progressive Friends

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• published: 27 Aug 2014
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Friends Journal chats with Chuck Fager, the author of two new books: "Angels of Progress: A Documentary History of the Progressive Friends 1822–1940" and "Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism and Helped Save America." Read Mitchell Santine Gould's review of "Angels of Progress" in the August 2014 issue of Friends Journal: http://www.friendsjournal.org/angels-progress/ Partial transcript: Welcome to this Friends Journal author chat. I'm Gabriel Ehri, executive director here at Friends Journal, here today with Chuck Fager. Chuck Fager is a Quaker historian, author, and former director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He's the author of two new books: "Angels of Progress: the documentary history of the Progressive Friends" and "Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism & Helped Save America." He joins us from Durham, North Carolina. GE: Thanks for joining us, Chuck. CF: Sure. GE: So, Chuck, How did Progressive Friends get their name?What does Progressive mean? CF: Well, it was a name they gave themselves, and they felt that they were more progressive than a rather hidebound Quaker elite that they were challenging and also getting disowned by. There were a number of groups that were kind of essentially split from the Hicksites -- we don't have time to explain any of that stuff, so I hope viewers will just understand -- they split from the Hicksites and started organizations of their own, or yearly meetings, really, and they called them Progressive. GE: What in particular were the social issues that were the most prominent in their split from the Hicksites? CF: Well, they were external and internal; that was one of the things that caught my attention. Externally, they were particularly interested in the abolition of slavery. The Quaker establishment, both Hicksite and Orthodox, was dead set against abolitionism. They were against slavery in theory; in practice, they were up to their necks involved with the slave economy, making money off of it, and they just said "leave it all to God, pray away slavery, and otherwise shut up." And people like Lucretia Mott and the other early Progressives said "No. God told us to get to work." And so that was the matter of where they got disowned for that. And that was the external one, and then the internal issue was that Quakerism in their day was a top-down hierarchical body, and they said, "that has to go." We have to have something like equality inside equality as well as outside, and that was a very big struggle also. GE: So, we see that some of our sort of candy-coated myths about Quakers always being morally upright in what we like to think of the right side of history are not really true when you look back at the establishment Quakers in the 19th century. CF: Well, yeah, I mean, there were some good people there trapped in bad structures and obsolete structures. And I'm afraid my work here has done a whole lot of myth busting for me, and I think it would also be the case for readers. The idea that there was a Quaker testimony of equality, that's a complete myth. That notion has really only been invented in the last 25 to 30 years. That includes equality for women. Even though women had more space in Quakers than they did in other churches, Quaker women were not equal in the society until about 250 years after Fox started preaching, the end of the 19th century. It was actually 1922 when good ol' Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) actually made women equal. 1922! That's really something. So, that's just a couple. For a complete transcript, visit: http://friendsjournal.org/chuck-fager-progressive