Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

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  No account of Margaret Fell’s life as a Quaker would be complete without acknowledging that her conversion—or convincement—provided her with worldly opportunities inaccessible at that time to most women, regardless of their social station and religion. They also gave her a way to combine her work in the public sphere with her role as the mother of a large family. Proselytizing on behalf of a new religion—unless a woman happened to have inherited a throne—may have been the only semi-respectable way for a wife and mother to step onto the public stage. It may sound strange to apply the adjective “worldly” to activities promoting a faith that rejected the rituals and riches of established churches. But how else can one describe the life of a woman who used not only her Inner Light but her valuable estate and web of family and social connections to speak her truth to the highest powers in the land and, ultimately, to help transform a new religion from the ridiculed creed of a persecuted, oddball fringe to a respectable and respected minority? Furthermore, Fell also stood up for her own sex by organizing women’s meetings as a regular feature of life in the Society of Friends. These meetings were based on considerable female autonomy and had nothing to do with the women’s subservience preached by Paul, or with the segregation of men and women in Orthodox Jewish rituals. The Quaker groups did, however, honor conventional expectations about female virtues by emphasizing what were considered the special gifts of women with regard to providing relief for the poor, aiding prisoners and the homeless, and, above all, educating children. It would certainly be a grievous anachronism to describe Fell as a feminist in the modern sense, or the women’s meetings as seventeenth-century consciousness-raising groups. Fox was a strong supporter, but many other Quaker men initially opposed Fell’s activities for reasons ranging from antagonism toward all formal organization to resentment at having to provide financial support for “women’s work.” There may even have been suspicion of meetings that brought together women of varying social positions and levels of education. Who knew what they might be talking about without any men listening? Perhaps the men did fear that a certain amount of seditious talk against patriarchy might be heard at gatherings that were for women only.

  One major impact of the women’s meetings, in both England and later in America, was the establishment of Friends’ schools and an emphasis on education for all. Because Quaker boys and girls were educated together, in the New World as well as the Old, the literacy rate among Quaker women was unusually high. In 1692, the women’s meeting in Fell’s home county of Lancashire pushed hard for the appointment of teachers in every Quaker community. This recommendation was initially resisted (again, mainly by men) but eventually became the norm in every sizable Quaker congregation on both sides of the Atlantic. The nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement in America owed much to the emphasis placed on education by Fell and her contemporaries in England. (Lucretia Mott, the famous American abolitionist and suffragist, played the pivotal role in organizing the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, which marks the beginning of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement in the United States. As a devout Quaker, she denounced the discrimination against women that remained within her own religion as well as others.)

  Although Fell was not a crusader for women’s rights in either the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense, she spoke in an authoritative, often aggressive manner that had nothing to do with traditional images of desirable womanhood in England or anywhere else. It is in her proselytizing for Quakerism that Fell’s sometimes downright contemptuous voice comes through. As the historian Bonnelyn Kunze notes, Fell often wrote to her theological opponents in a “polemical style…not unusual for religious discourse in her era.”14 It was unusual, though, for a woman to employ the sort of invective Fell displayed in a letter to Allen Smallwood, the Anglican priest of Carlisle. “Thou has manifested thy ignorance and unskillfulness in the things of God,” Fell declared, “though thou art called a Doctor and art got up in as high as thou could….Thou never had the true knowledge of the Father nor of the Son…whereby the simple and innocent might be deceived and beguiled…[by] thee who art outwardly appearing to be great and in esteem, but it is in that which will vanish as the dust before the wind.”15 These are not the words of a deferential gentlewoman, or, for that matter, of a Quaker who found it easy to practice the humility exalted by her faith. One can only wonder if Fell, in the silence of a Quaker meeting where Friends meditate and consider their lives, reflected upon the sin of pride.

  This arrogant strain is seldom evident, however, in Fell’s rich trove of correspondence with her children and grandchildren. Her mission to promote her faith began with her family: All of her daughters and many of her grandchildren married Quakers. The Fell daughters became leaders in the Quaker movement themselves, and many of their signatures can be found on petitions protesting government persecution. In her large family, only her son, George, opposed his mother’s religious activities.

  After Fox died in 1691, Margaret spent nearly all of her second widowhood at Swarthmoor—the estate to which her second husband had renounced any claim. But she remained actively involved, through her extensive correspondence, with a Quaker movement that, as it became more respectable and established, was developing more ritualistic practices and rules than Margaret deemed appropriate for those who sought to live by their Inner Light rather than social conformity. One of her best-known letters to the Quaker community, written in 1700, when she was eighty-six, sharply criticized the relatively recent custom—it would become a requirement—of wearing drab gray clothes. Fell regarded outward conformity of dress as a haughty practice intended to designate Quakers as a special, identifiable, and better group than others. “Let us beware of this,” she wrote, “of separating or looking upon ourselves to be more holy, than in deed and in truth we are. Away with these whimsical, narrow imaginations, and let the spirit of God which he hath given us, lead us and guide us….

  But Christ Jesus saith, that we must take not thought what we shall eat, or what we shall drink or what we shall put on; but bids us consider the lilies how they grow in more royalty than Solomon. But contrary to this, they say we must look at no colours, nor make anything that is changeable colours as the hills are, nor sell them nor wear them. But we must be all in one dress, and one colour. This is a silly poor gospel. It is more fit for us to be covered with God’s eternal Spirit, and clothed with his eternal Light, which leads us and guides us into righteousness and to live righteously and justly and holily in this present evil world.16

  It is impossible not to like a woman who, having devoted her life after conversion to spreading her new religion, warns against confusing inner faith with dreary outer garb and signifying a conformity as rigid as the latest worldly fashion. Goodness, for Fell, could be clad in red silk just as easily as in gray homespun. Not only her words but her household account books, which record many purchases of attractive and costly cloth, say so.

  Her mind intact, Fell died at Swarthmoor on April 23, 1702, at age eighty-seven. Following an early Quaker custom, she was buried with no stone marking her grave.

  * * *

  *1 Eleven years after the death of her first husband, Thomas Fell, Margaret married George Fox, whose preaching had originally impelled her to embrace the new Quaker faith. I refer to her as Margaret Fell rather than Margaret Fox not only because it would be confusing to call her by different surnames but because Fell was, in the modern sense, the equivalent of her professional or public name.

  *2 In the Gospel of Matthew (5:33–36), Jesus tells his followers, “Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne: Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.”

  *3 Although women were encouraged to speak
at Quaker meetings, mainstream Quakers—especially in America during the battle over slavery in the early nineteenth century—were often opposed to women’s speaking in public, on public issues, in non-Quaker venues. See my discussion of Sarah and Angelina Grimké in Freeethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), pp. 74–77.

  *4 The Dutch-born novelist moved to the United States in the early 1960s and became a Quaker. De Hartog became interested in the role of women in Quakerism after he and his wife became involved in Quaker activities protesting the Vietnam War.

  11

  RELIGIOUS CHOICE AND EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT

  No man’s mind can possibly lie wholly at the disposition of another, for no one can willingly transfer his natural right of free reason and judgment, or be compelled to do so.

  —BENEDICTUS (BARUCH) SPINOZA, TRACTATCUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS, 1670

  That any man should think fit to cause another man—whose salvation he heartily desires—to expire in torments, and that even in an unconverted state, would, I confess, seem very strange to me, and I think, to any other also. But nobody, surely, will ever believe that such a carriage can proceed from charity, love, or goodwill.

  —JOHN LOCKE, “A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION,” 1689

  Toleration is not the opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it.

  —THOMAS PAINE, THE RIGHTS OF MAN, 1791

  FROM THE FIRST STIRRINGS of the Enlightenment in the mid-seventeenth century through the High Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, both the morality and the social utility of forced conversions were challenged by philosophers, and eventually by statesmen of the age of reason. Margaret Fell’s embrace of Quakerism represents only one familiar type of seventeenth-century conversion—a “conversion of conscience,” often involving a transition from one of the mainstream Protestant denominations to nonconformist Protestantism. Another kind of conversion—what my grade-school nuns used to call a “conversion of convenience”—was encouraged by religious intermarriage, as it has been throughout history. The few religious paintings among Johannes Vermeer’s surviving works, for example, are dated within two years after his conversion to Catholicism, when he married a Catholic, Catharina Bolnes, in 1653.*1 Then there were forced conversions under the least tolerant governments, most notably in France under Louis XIV, who, during his fifty-four-year reign, offered Huguenots the same choice that Spanish and Portuguese monarchs had offered Jews and Muslims two centuries earlier: convert or be prepared to lose everything, including your life.*2

  The religious turmoil and violence accompanying the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the proliferation of Protestant sects varied greatly according to the national character and traditions of each people and state, the degree of political power wielded by the majority religion, and the disposition (in a temperamental as well as a political sense) of various monarchs. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, it was clear in England and every country on the continent that the existence of so many religious denominations challenged the fundamental rationale for the legitimacy of forced conversion. That rationale, played out in states where the divine right of kings was coupled with the divine authority of the church, took for granted the willful sinfulness of the religious dissenter as a threat to public order. The obvious relativity of divine truth in societies where the voice of God said different things to different people only encouraged absolute monarchs like Louis, supported by religious authorities, in their effort to deny the obvious by forcing their subjects to recant “heretical” beliefs.

  The Enlightenment was a process, not an event. Nothing demonstrates that more clearly with regard to religion than the philosophical gap between John Locke’s use of the word “toleration” in his famous essays on religion, at the end of the seventeenth century, and Thomas Paine’s dismissal, only a century later, of the idea that any rulers should feel entitled to congratulate themselves for allowing wide latitude in religious practices and beliefs. George Washington, in his second year as president of the fledgling United States, would underline the distance between the limited toleration expounded by Locke and other early Enlightenment thinkers and the liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the new U.S. Constitution—itself a product of the High Enlightenment. In an extraordinary letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, Washington would declare in 1790, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”1

  It is remarkable, given the long history of violent religious oppression and repression in Europe, that it took only one century for the most advanced forms of Enlightenment thought to progress from a limited toleration of religious pluralism to the assumption of freedom of conscience as a natural human right. It cannot be emphasized enough that seventeenth-century toleration was not tolerance in the modern sense, which implies, at least in the West, that one religion is as good as another. Tolerationism, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, meant not that you approved of your neighbor’s differing religious beliefs or thought that he might be as right in his own way as you were in yours, but that you would refrain from inflicting violence on him in this world for not sharing your view of how to achieve salvation in the next. You would suffer the heretic or the infidel to live—a not-inconsiderable accomplishment by the standard of recent as well as ancient history. This limited tolerance, which Washington rightly dismissed as insufficient to fulfill the young American republic’s constitutional guarantee of complete liberty of conscience, was still a revolutionary idea everywhere in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. The voices of religious tolerationists—whether they took a moderate, limited stance like Locke or the rarer absolutist freethought position of Baruch a.k.a. Benedictus Spinoza—were greatly outnumbered by the voices of those who defended and encouraged religious intolerance.

  The historically intolerant Catholic Church was joined, as we have seen, by so-called magisterial Protestants in their attacks on heretics. The term “magisterial,” in this context, refers to mainstream Reformation figures such as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, who (like Catholics) supported the right of civil magistrates to enforce uniform religious belief. Nonmagisterial or, as they are more commonly called, nonconformist Protestants, including Quakers and Anabaptists, opposed any association between religion and government and were therefore considered heretics by both Catholics and mainstream Protestants. The last two decades of the seventeenth century, in which both Spinoza’s and Locke’s writings were circulated among the small but influential educated classes of all European countries, were also characterized by a level of religious repression and forced conversion that many today (especially in the United States, which escaped this history) associate with the Dark Ages rather than with the dawn of the Enlightenment.

  This was true throughout most of Europe with the exception of the Netherlands, a de facto haven of tolerance. Toleration of religious pluralism prevailed even though the Dutch Reformed Church—one of the most dour offshoots of Calvinism—was the only religion receiving public funds. Things were so much worse for minority religions nearly everywhere else on the continent. Louis XIV’s repeal of the Edict of Nantes meant that, even as Locke was writing his essays on religious toleration, Huguenot children in France were being taken from their parents’ homes at age seven—the “age of reason,” according to the church—to be educated as Catholics.*3 Before 1680, there were roughly nine hundred thousand Huguenots in France, making up about 5 percent of the population. By the end of the 1680s, it is estimated that seven hundred thousand French Huguenots had converted to Catholicism. (If
anyone believes those were voluntary conversions of conscience, she might also want to place a bid at auction for a bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Many of the Huguenot converts to Catholicism undoubtedly continued to profess their original faith in secret, or Protestants would not exist—which they do—in today’s France.) Another two hundred thousand Huguenots left France, although it was a crime to do so, for the Netherlands and England. As John Marshall notes in his magisterial (in the nonreligious sense) work John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (2006), the exile of the Huguenots in the 1680s gave rise to the widespread use of the term “refugee” in the modern sense as a definition of those fleeing religious or political persecution.2

  Moreover, England itself—despite the horror of English Protestants at the persecution of the Huguenots across the channel—was hardly a tolerant society. Seven years after Locke’s first letter on religious toleration was circulated in 1689, Thomas Aikenhead, a twenty-year-old Edinburgh medical student, became the last person to be executed in England or Scotland for blasphemy. He was said to have mocked the Trinity, characterized the dual nature of Jesus as God and man as a logical impossibility, and, worst of all, expressed the wish on a cold Scottish day to find warmth in hell. He was convicted on the testimony of five terrified fellow students who had been his friends and confidants. It was said that Aikenhead, as he mounted the scaffold, carried a Bible to attest to his contrition. It seems unlikely, if he did carry a Bible, that the action represented his true beliefs, since, on the morning of his execution, he wrote a letter to his friends stating, “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure.”3 Aikenhead must have considered himself fortunate to face the hangman’s noose instead of the more painful death by burning at the stake that had awaited most heretics at the beginning of the seventeenth century.