The Weird World of Religious Radicals in 17th Century England

Download the transcript and discussion questions.

Discussion Questions

1. What similarities do you see between the 17th century religious radicals and the religious response to political upheaval and social uncertainty in our day?
2. Which religious radical group do you most identify with? Why? 

Doug Gwyn  

So in the 1650s the Quakers are the scariest thing around and everything that had gotten so easily quashed in the previous decade can’t be contained. It’s just a lot harder to round up and jail this expanding vanguard of traveling men and women prophets rampaging around the countryside than it was to stamp out a few communes around the countryside. So it’s a much harder movement to stop.

Georgia Sparling  

On today’s episode. We’ve got Ranters, Muggletonian and Quakers. Oh my!

Various  

Thee Quaker Podcast: story, spirit, sound.

Georgia Sparling  

I’m Georgia Sparling. 

Jon Watts  

And I’m Jon watts. 

Georgia Sparling  

And today we are going back to the early days of Quakerism by mostly not talking about Quakers at all.

Jon Watts  

Right. Yes, I, so I put you up to this. It’s in anticipation of our big James Nayler episode next week. 

Georgia Sparling  

That’s right. 

Jon Watts  

So the the Nayler story is infamous in Quaker history because his reenactment in Bristol was perhaps outlandish, and he was persecuted mercilessly. There’s so much to explore there. And I hope that you’ll tune in next week to hear the whole story, but we thought we’d start this week with the context.

Georgia Sparling  

Yes, the context. So what were the circumstances that led to Nayler’s infamous ride into Bristol? Was he a lone fanatic? Was he in good company for his day? We thought we’d look into it. So today we’re talking exclusively about religious radicals of the 17th century.

Jon Watts  

Yeah, religious radicals of 17th century England, it was a pretty wild period. 

Georgia Sparling  

Yeah and more than one historian I’ve spoken with has likened it to the 1960s in America.

Jon Watts  

Yeah, I can see that comparison. So you know, we’re talking long hair, LSD and like, sex, drugs and rock and roll?

Georgia Sparling  

m=More like sex, jail and Sparkles of Glory.

Jon Watts  

Sparkles. Okay, what?

Georgia Sparling  

That’s the name of a religious tract that was written back then. And we will get into that in a few minutes.

Jon Watts  

Okay. So Georgia, you want to set the scene for us what was going on, generally, in 17th century England?

Georgia Sparling  

It was a pretty apocalyptic period, at least that’s how it felt to the people that were living through this time.

Jon Watts  

Right. There was there was a civil war, the monarchy was effectively ended, like they executed the king. So new religious ideas were rampant and sects were forming left and right. 

Georgia Sparling  

It was chaos and turmoil

Jon Watts  

And opportunity. For those with a radical vision for the future of society. It was like suddenly, what do we have to lose?

Georgia Sparling  

So today, we’re going to talk about those groups and get a sense of the mileau in which Quakerism formed.

Jon Watts  

Okay, bring on the Muggletonian!

Georgia Sparling  

We’ll get to them. Be patient. 

Jon Watts  

Oh, sorry. 

Georgia Sparling  

Today’s episode is a survey of the religious and political radicals that sprung up in 17th century England. These are groups that would have been known to the likes of early Quaker leaders like George Fox and James Nayler. And let me tell you, these groups have some amazing monikers as our friend, Quaker historian Max Carter explains:

Max Carter  

The Levellers, the Diggers, the Seeker, Seekers one, Seekers two, the Ranters, Muggletonians, eventually the Quakers. 

Georgia Sparling  

We’re going to talk about each of these groups and more, but first, let’s discuss why religious radicals were springing up all over the place in the 1600s. Partly it’s because the previous religious reforms didn’t go far enough for some people. And then there’s the political intrigue. King Charles I and Parliament were at odds and it had massive repercussions for the country.

Doug Gwyn  

Very quickly between 1640 or 42 there was this breakdown between Charles and Parliament and he began to raise his own army to punish Parliament. So Parliament’s scramble to raise their own army.

Georgia Sparling  

That’s Doug Gwyn. Doug is a retired Quaker minister. He’s been a scholar in residence at Pendle Hill, and he’s written a number of books, including Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience. He’s going to walk us through this history along with Andrew Bradstock:

Andrew Bradstock  

An emeritus professor of the University of Winchester in the UK. And I have been, I suppose, studying, researching, teaching, writing about the so-called radicals of the 17th century, probably for the last 40 odd years. My main book on them, I suppose, was in 2011, which was Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England.

Georgia Sparling  

Okay, so with the fracture between the king and Parliament, a civil war erupts in 1642.

Andrew Bradstock  

Which was really broken down into three separate wars, which was hugely traumatic, and in terms of the number of people who died in those wars as a percentage of the population, It’s second only to the First World War as far as the number of deaths in the UK. I mean, it really was bloody. And it was really divisive as well because it split families. So some, some in one family would support the king and others would support Parliament, you had a breakdown of a sort of breakdown of law and order, the main institutions in society were dismantled.

Georgia Sparling  

And with the Civil War

Doug Gwyn  

Quickly followed a suspension of censorship of the press, and suspension of enforced parish church attendance. So that allowed all sorts of religious and political ideas to begin to circulate.

Georgia Sparling  

King Charles was on the side of the aristocracy, naturally, but the country was also becoming more capitalistic. Meanwhile, the Puritans wanted leadership of the church to be elected by Parliament, instead of bishops appointed by the king.

Doug Gwyn  

Control of the church would would shift to to Parliament rather than than the king. Charles didn’t like that idea.

Georgia Sparling  

And a number of people were becoming increasingly disgruntled with the religious and political systems, which were all knotted up together. I mean, by law, everyone had to both attend church and tithe a percentage of their income.

Doug Gwyn  

What you found in that situation was people who were dissatisfied with with the situation of church and state before the war, yet men and women, by the 1000s, beginning to drop out from all these different solutions to the to the church and state. And these, none of these names were self chosen. They were all epithets thrown, thrown around, but they begin to be called Seekers.

Voiceover  

The Seekers.

Georgia Sparling  

This is the first radical group we’ll talk about. And it turns out, they weren’t much of a group at all.

Doug Gwyn  

I think Rufus Jones called them a generalized tendency.

Andrew Bradstock  

I think the Seekers, probably, were the most desperate of all, I mean, they seem to be people who thought that, you know, there was no proper church anymore. There was no church that was faithful to the teachings of the scriptures and the teachings of Christ.

Georgia Sparling  

These were church dropouts, who Doug says, we’re waiting for the big reveal of the true church.

Doug Gwyn  

They really wanted to belong to a church that they could believe was the solution to all this fragmentation of the English Reformation as well as reformation is on the continent. So some of them were wandering around in desolation, individually, like the young George Fox during these years, others were meeting in in small worship groups, but they were all waiting for something better to appear.

Georgia Sparling  

A preacher by the name of John Saltmarsh wrote a tract called Sparkles of Glory.

Doug Gwyn  

They had great titles of those days.

Georgia Sparling  

Agreed. And in that tract, he outlines two kinds of Seekers.

Doug Gwyn  

He describes the first secret type as very forlorn, looking for a way back to the purity of the New Testament church. But Saltmarsh says there’s a second Seeker type. He doesn’t even call them Seekers. He doesn’t give them any name. But he says, these, this this group, they reason that why would God bring the church back to a faith that had gone into apostasy so soon after the New Testament times. So instead, God must be leading us on to a fuller revelation. And they speculate that the church will not be a visible organized church like the the first Seekers expected, but the Spirit is being poured out on all flesh. They also believe that the documents in this new dispensation are inward, not outward forms.

Georgia Sparling  

Quakerism hasn’t formed yet, but there are some obvious parallels to this movement that’s still on the horizon. We’ll get to that later. For now we’re moving on to the Levellers.

Voiceover  

The Levellers.

Doug Gwyn  

Who aren’t really a religious group. They’re they’re a small group of political pamphleteers with rather Republican ideas of forming the political order in England. They were good at raising agitation in the streets of London and in the ranks of the army. In the ranks of the army, they tended to be called agitators.

Georgia Sparling  

Again, this was a name that was given to them. It was kind of derogatory, because they were, gasp, trying to make more equal laws, laws that didn’t just favor the wealthy. They wanted all men to have the right to vote, and for Parliament members to have salaries, so that even the poor members of society could afford to participate.

Andrew Bradstock  

So it was that kind of thing, which really was very, very farsighted. And in fact, so we’re talking 1640, 1650. Those kinds of reforms didn’t come in until the middle of the 19th centuries, 200 years later.

Doug Gwyn  

These are good political activists. They’re good at producing political pamphlets. They also innovate mass demonstrations.

Georgia Sparling  

The Levellers also advocated for religious toleration, the end of tithes, and the end of military conscription. It was pretty big stuff for that time.

Doug Gwyn  

Sort of the moment of truth for the Leveller agenda came in the fall of 1647 as the war was just coming to a close.

Georgia Sparling  

There was a big debate. Agitators and Levellers and generals and such were all invited.

Doug Gwyn  

This is where the Levellers begin to lose out and the generals sort of begin to quash the Levellers agenda.

Georgia Sparling  

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the defeated King Charles escapes, reassembles his army, and starts yet another civil war. This one was very short lived. Then he’s recaptured, tried for treason, and relieved of his head, if you catch my drift.

Doug Gwyn  

Which is just, you know, a trip to the moon for everybody. You know, monarchy goes back as far as anybody knows, you know, and and so here we are without a king. The whole political situation has moved so far beyond what anybody expected that it will henceforth be impossible to find a political consensus around this unprecedented and unexpected situation.

Georgia Sparling  

And as for the Levellers,

Doug Gwyn  

there’s a Leveller or agitator attempted insurrection of about 1,000 members of the army in May of 1649 that’s easily put down. I think it was three leaders of that insurrection are hanged by the generals. And that sort of begins the end of any serious Leveller conversation.

Georgia Sparling  

Now we’re on to the interestingly named Diggers, often viewed as the first communists and lauded by the likes of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. 

Various  

The Diggers. 

Georgia Sparling  

This group forms after Charles has lost his head and Parliament has been purged of its Presbyterian minority.

Doug Gwyn  

You’ve got a smaller Parliament that is ready to do somewhat more daring things, and they declare an English Commonwealth.

Georgia Sparling  

Enter Gerrard Winstanley.

Doug Gwyn  

A failed textile merchant in London, and he, he takes this declaration of an English Commonwealth to be license to start forming communes on common land for poor people to farm and garden and feed themselves. And about a dozen Digger communes in southern and central England start up.

Andrew Bradstock  

So the term Diggers is a reference to the fact that they literally picked up their spades, went to a bit of common land, and started digging it and planting vegetables and stuff, building huts and generally setting up a community. They wanted an end to the kind of enclosure system where the rich and the powerful would appropriate, you know, 1,000s of acres of land for themselves and fence it all off and no one could have access to it. And it was for them a kind of justice issue. That people were hungry and without work and, you know, hadn’t got easy access to food, and yet there were others who had vast tracts of land that could be used but wasn’t being used. And they formed literally about three months after the execution of Charles. They said right now is the opportunity to end the system of land ownership over which the king ruled, break it down, and let the common people have the land. And there was a strong theological principle behind that. God had created the land for everybody to share/

Georgia Sparling  

Although they were called Diggers, Winstanley referred to the group as the True Levellers. Amateur historian Johnny Dean Warren has a Facebook called Delicious Digger Memes for 17th Century English Dissident Teens. That’s a mouthful. And he describes Winstanley like this:

Johnny Dean Warren  

He basically reinterprets Genesis and other things in the Bible to talk about how the Earth was created by God in the beginning as a what he calls a common treasury for the well being of all and humans he saw were the stewards of this, but it was like this kind of system where, created by God and early humans, where we were all kind of in like a harmony with nature and, and we shared things with one another in a way that’s very idealistic.

Georgia Sparling  

It didn’t work. 

Doug Gwyn  

This group is scaring the jabbers out of the ruling classes.

Georgia Sparling  

Some 200 years later, Karl Marx would laud Winstanley for his ideas, and later Vladimir Lenin would inscribe Winstanley’s name on a monument in a Moscow garden, listed number eight among 19 other revolutionaries, but that wasn’t really Winstanley’s bag, says Andrew.

Andrew Bradstock  

This is a small “c” communism, which is sort of living together, sharing stuff, not putting a big emphasis on private ownership and private property, but saying, well, let’s have all things in common, which, you know, arguably you find in the Book of Acts where the Jerusalem church sold their possessions and, and shared stuff, you know, it’s that sort of small “c” communism. I think that’s more where Winstanley was.

Georgia Sparling  

The True Leveller movement was short lived.

Doug Gwyn  

That lasted about a year, and Winstanley and his group in Surrey were driven off Easter Week of 1650. Wonderful religious observance there. When Winstanley retires back to London, he writes some very exciting political tracts for, you know, kind of rethinking the future of England, but those will have no no future in the emerging government. He will eventually become a kind of a low profile Quaker.

Georgia Sparling  

So the True Levellers have themselves been leveled. And today on the land Winstanley occupied is ironically enough, a gated community.

Andrew Bradstock  

Most houses up there would be 20, 30 million pounds and where I think they might have been is now a very exclusive golf course.

Georgia Sparling  

Alas, as Joni Mitchell sang, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Georgia Sparling  

Okay, now it’s time for a short break. And when we return, we’re on to the Ranters and we’ll look at how all of these groups connect to the Quakers.

Jon Watts

Hey, it’s Jon here. Just wanted to hop on and share a little bit about the thinking behind how we’re structuring this podcast. We’ve divided the episodes up into 4 types, maybe you’ve noticed by now. We’ve got modern stories, thematic episodes, vocal ministry and then episodes like this one, which are about history.

Sometimes as Friends I know we can be a little wary of talking too much about our history, and I get it. The spirit is living and present in the here and now, and we strive to acknowledge the spiritual giftedness of all Friends, and so if we spend too much time talking about the 16 hundreds, we run the risk of feeling like we are venerating a handful of long dead heroes, or that we are a religion of the past. 

But I wanted to share a quick story with you.

When I was in my twenties, it was during the Bush administration and the Iraq War, just after 9/11, and I started questioning my involvement with Quakerism. I loved the community and the people, but with everything that needs healing in the world, and with everything that’s actively unraveling, what’s the point of devoting ourselves to sitting in silence every week? Shouldn’t we be doing something more bold?

That’s when I learned about the Early Quakers, from one of my professors at Guilford College. The audacity of these stories, and the spiritual courage of these religious radicals in 17th century England captured my imagination, and changed my life. I learned that path isn’t just about sitting in silence and being kind to each other but it’s about this inward revolution – the Lamb’s war. I started to wonder if maybe these sometimes outlandish stories of 17th century religious radicals might have something to offer us today.

As we see the world unraveling around us now, in different but no less scary ways, and with so much confrontation and healing needed I can’t help but think that these stories are more relevant than ever. If we can wrestle with these ideas together, and inspire each other into knowing that a different way is possible–and that this time of great change is also a time of great opportunity. Maybe it’s worth time traveling to the 1600s every so often.

And you know, history isn’t for everybody. That’s why it’s only one out of every 4 episodes. So whether this is your favorite one so far, or your least favorite, I hope you’ll consider supporting us in our work of exploring stories of spiritual courage. It takes a lot of work and resources to tell these stories well, and we need your support to keep it going. Please visit TheeQuaker.org to find out how you can help.

Georgia Sparling  

Welcome back, we’re on to our next group of nonconformist.

Voiceover  

The Ranters. 

Georgia Sparling  

With a name like that. This should be fun.

Doug Gwyn  

The quashing of the of the agitator insurrection or mutiny, I guess it should be called in the army in May, is followed that summer by some Ranters kind of rampaging in the streets of London, charging the carriages of the wealthy, confronting the clergy and instigating a kind of inverted Puritan morality, saying, you know, sin and righteousness are all the same, that the only heaven and hell are on earth.

Georgia Sparling  

You can imagine how well that went over.

Doug Gwyn  

A lot of them were former clergy, you know, so it’s, it’s, it’s not like they were just irreligious. These were hyper religious individuals that had reached this point of just kind of despair, but a kind of ecstatic despair. It’s such an interesting phenomenon. The Ranters, so they’re kind of monists, mystics of of a certain kind that are just also thumbing their nose at the Puritan establishment as it’s trying to take hold of the situation after the war is over. The first identifiable figure is a guy named Abiezer Coope who publishs two tracts that summer, called A Fiery Flying Roll, and a Second Fiery Flying Roll.

Georgia Sparling  

These are truly great titles, and some of the Ranters really had a way with words. Take this letter from Joseph Salmon.

Doug Gwyn  

He’s my favorite Ranter. So this is to his friend, Thomas Webb, 

Doug Gwyn  

“Eternal plagues consume you all. Rot, stink and damn your bodies and souls into devouring fire whence none but those that walk uprightly can enter. Sirs, I wish you damnably well, because I dearly love you. And Lord grant that we may know the worth of hell, that we need forever scorn heaven. For my own part, I am ascended far above all heavens, yet I feel all things and laugh in my sleeve to think what’s coming.”

Doug Gwyn  

To the Puritan 17th century mind that’s just a sign of a kind of a nonstop curse, cursing and blasphemy. But you can you can hear that he’s just, he just exploding all the categories. And and this is what lands him and a lot of other people that take up this kind of behavior in jail.

Georgia Sparling  

What was that Cole Porter song? “Anything Goes?” That would surely be at the top of the Ranters Spotify playlist. Take this line from Coppe, he said, “I can, if it’d be my will, kiss and hug ladies and love my neighbor’s wife as myself, without sin.” 

Georgia Sparling  

Once more, this is a loose group of people, maybe in more ways than one. They weren’t having weekly meetings, and they’re more sensational than substantial, it doesn’t last long. Okay, now we’re gonna take a minute to talk about another short lived group.

Voiceover  

The Fifth Monarchists.

Georgia Sparling  

These ones get their name from the Old Testament Book of Daniel. In the book, Daniel has this vision of four beasts who equal four empires that came into power over the Jews, then he has a vision of a fifth empire that will arise.

Doug Gwyn  

One such as a son of man, who will come in and rule with righteousness. And the Fifth Monarchists believed that that the fifth monarchy in the in the book of Daniel will be fulfilled, as, as the saints, the true true Christians. The more radical wing of Puritanism basically come into power. And the army gave them sort of a chance, but they couldn’t do seem to do much else. They couldn’t seem to agree on anything. And so that fell apart it by the end of 1653. And that really was the end of the Fifth Monarchist’s chance at power in England. They henceforth became a more violent insurrectionary group, they attempted completely futile, violent instructions, and all of them completely ridiculous.

Georgia Sparling  

There are truly an astounding number of groups rising up at this time, some of them very small, all of them disruptive in their own way. And now we come to the Muggletonians, which are perhaps the best name of the religious and political radicals that we’re talking about today. I mean, who knew there were muggles before Harry Potter?

Voiceover  

The Muggletonians.

Doug Gwyn  

It’s hard to know what to say about the Muggletonians, except that they were probably the best deserving of, of the term cult of any of these groups, because they really formed very tightly around two men, Lodowicke Muggleton and John Reeve.

Georgia Sparling  

This was a very small group centered on these two guys who thought they were the prophets written about in the book of Revelation.

Andrew Bradstock  

They believe that people had everybody had a measure of good and evil in them. But some people are much more good than evil, and some people are much more evil than good. And so they went round blessing those who had more good than evil and cursing the others. And and they believe that that had some effect and there are examples of people they would curse who would then get drowned the next day, so it is said. But and the main thing about whether you are good or evil was whether you actually recognized Muggleton and Reeve as the as the two last witnesses. The group never gained much traction, but here’s the bizarre thing. There was known to be Muggletonians right through the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. And right down to 1979. There was somebody who claimed to be the last Muggletonian. He lived in a farmhouse in, in Kent in southeast England. And after he died, that was that was the end of it. But isn’t that bizarre?

Georgia Sparling  

So in this morass of disgruntled, unsettled, and probably pretty freaked out Brits, all of these factions rise up. And that includes the Quakers.

Voiceover  

The Quakers. 

Doug Gwyn  

The Quakers pulled together the ideas and experiments of the Civil War period of the previous decade. And when they, when they come into their own in the 1650s. In some ways, I think the Quaker movement could begin only after people had given up hope that Parliament or the army were going to save them, you know, and it was going to really have to happen from from the grassroots. And there’s other important leaders in the movement, but Fox seems to be the one who had come up with this form of spiritual counsel that that lit a new fire under radicals that were disillusioned and lost and in despair by 1650.

Georgia Sparling  

We have a whole episode on George Fox and the beginnings of Quakerism that you should definitely check out. We’ll make sure and include a link in our show notes. Anywho Fox would have known about all of these groups. We even know from his journal that he visited Joseph Salmon, the Ranter in jail and maybe Coppe, too. He apparently thought they were pretty unhinged, but then he gets mistaken for a Ranter himself and thrown into prison for a year.

Stuart Masters  

One of the things that the early Quaker movement had to deal with is the accusation that they are Ranters.

Georgia Sparling  

That Stuart Masters, an author and teacher at Woodbrooke, a Quaker study center in the UK.

Stuart Masters  

The model of the Ranter is someone who is a pantheist. They say God is everything, God is in me. And if God is in me, anything I do is of God, and therefore I can do anything. Now Quakers, of course, share enough commonality with that sort of vision in the early days that they are open to that kind of accusation. They are claiming that Christ is within them. They are claiming that what they do and what they say is Christ doing it through them. But they are very clear that that is an experience of God’s law being written on your heart, you will act in righteousness and with propriety if Christ is living through you. But because of this complicated political situation, Quakers are often open to the accusation that they are Ranters, particularly given how assertive they are, how charismatic they are, and how threatening they appear to be to those in power.

Georgia Sparling  

When Fox gets out of jail, he walks North away from London, preaches to a bunch of people and the movement really gets going. These folks were of that first secret type that Doug talked about earlier.

Doug Gwyn  

That were trying to find the way back to the to the New Testament church and looking for new apostles. And Fox, he did some faith healings and he did some kind of uncanny things that they probably meant that they decided he might be this apostle. And he certainly had a form of spiritual counsel that that got them energized in ways that they’d never known before. They were gonna, it was gonna have to start from them. And so this thing grows very rapidly as as Fox and then Nayler are moving in, across from Yorkshire across into Westmoreland and Lancashire, gathering 1,000s of people in into this fledgling movement, that is scaring the clergy up there to death. They’re writing to Parliament saying, look, you’ve got to do something, help us out here. This, this is really out of control. And so it’s not until till the movement arrives in Bristol and, and, and London and 6054, that it begins to get the attention of the army and Parliament and you begin to find some, some serious persecution begin to take place

Georgia Sparling  

By the time the Quakers really get going some of the other radical religious groups that we’ve talked about have already disappeared. We do know that some of those folks join the Quakers, but it’s not clear how many.

Doug Gwyn  

so things are very fluid and mercurial, especially in the first decade.

Georgia Sparling  

The second type of Seekers were also attracted to the Quakers.

Doug Gwyn  

Progressive Seekers, you might say, seem to predominate more in the south, in the urban centers, and in the army. And so they have been discouraged and waiting for something better to happen too and and so they’re waiting for Quakers to arrive because they’re hearing wild reports of what’s going on up north. So, you know things things catch fire very quickly in London and Bristol over the summer of 1654.

Georgia Sparling  

Quaker apostle Edward Burrough meets the former Digger leader, Gerard Winstanley

Doug Gwyn  

Winstanley tells Burrough that, you know, this is this is the way forward. 

Georgia Sparling  

We don’t know how many Seekers and Diggers and Levellers became Quakers, but we know that there was definitely overlap. Unlike those other groups, though, the Quakers had staying power.

Doug Gwyn  

It’s just a lot harder to round up and jail this expanding vanguard of traveling men and women prophets rampaging around the countryside than it was to stamp out a few communes around the countryside. So it’s a much harder movement to stop. And they publish at a rate unlike anything anybody had had done before. And all kinds of people were getting into print, men and women, Quakers were getting tracks published. It’s a rapidly moving situation. The kind of spiritual counsel that Fox and others begin to help people with gets them centered in a radical present. That that is incredibly energizing, the energy is partly out of all the frustration that they’ve experienced over the previous decade. And all the faded hopes that suddenly catch fire again, with a new conviction and a new sense of authority, you know, to go out and speak the word of the Lord in the marketplace and in the streets and interrupt parish churches all over the country in their worship and denounced the clergy and stuff that was done in small ways previously, but nothing like like this. So in the 1650s, the Quakers are the scariest thing around and everything has gotten so easily quashed in the previous decades can’t be contained.

Georgia Sparling  

Of course, Quakers had anything but an easy time of it. They were persecuted for three decades, and hundreds of them died in prison.

Doug Gwyn  

But again, they were too rapidly growing, too mercurial, too rapidly moving, too large a vanguard of male and female prophets. Their stubbornness as a prophetic sign that that Christ is still teaching his people himself and not ready to fit back in the box that the the Anglican Church has prepared for him is still at large and they’re not going to go away. Other groups are meeting quietly underground at secret times and places. Quakers still put it out there.

Georgia Sparling  

Thank you for listening and thank you to Doug Gwyn, Andrew Bradstock, Max Carter, Stuart Masters, and Johnny Dean Warren for their time and expertise. Learn more about their work on our episode page, where you will also find a transcript of this episode, discussion questions, and a place to leave a comment on this episode.

Speaking of comments, we’ve had quite a few recently over at QuakerPodcast.com, including this one on our last episode featuring pastor Mark Condo. Mark preached on Matthew 25. And our commenter Kurt shared his experience with that episode.

 He said that he had this experience where he was really short with a panhandler who he encountered at a restaurant. Kurt writes that Mark’s comment, “Did you happen to see me down?” there really made him think. Kurt writes, “I have lived my life in the church, and I’ve had personal commitment since my teenage years to stay in the faith. I’ve heard this reading at least 40 times over the years in sermons and Sunday readings, but it hit me this morning when I heard Mark’s rephrasing of it. It is amazing how humbling a simple comment can be to realize how short of God’s expectations we are. I appreciate Mark’s reminder that Jesus is in the person disrupting my conversation with friends and I need to react accordingly. Thanks for the reminder. By the grace of God, I’ll hopefully do better next time. Peace.”

Thank you so much for sharing that experience, Kurt. It’s amazing really how one phrase can have an impact on our thinking and kind of change something that we’ve heard a million times. 

So have you been impacted by a recent episode? Is there something that stuck out in your mind after listening? If so, please tell us about it by leaving a comment on our website or by giving us a call at 215-278- 9411. That’s 215-278-9411. We just might share it on the next episode. And if you didn’t catch that number, head over to QuakerPodcast.com. 

Thee Quaker podcast is part of the Quaker project, a Quaker media organization with a focus on lifting up voices of spiritual courage and giving Quakers a platform in 21st Century Media. If you want to give to our work, we would so appreciate it. Please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can learn more about how to join our giving team at TheeQuaker.org That’s Theequaker.org. Every contribution expands our capacity to tell Quaker stories in a fresh way. 

This episode was produced and edited by, me, Georgia Sparling and Jon Watts. Jonn also composed the music for this episode. Kareme Lambie was our voice actor. 

We’ll be back next week with an episode that’s all about James Nayler. You won’t want to miss it.

Recorded and edited by Georgia Sparling and Jon Watts.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)

Referenced in this episode:

• Doug Gwyn is the author of multiple books, including Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience
• Andrew Bradstock is the author of Radical Religions in Cromwell’s England
• Check out Delicious Digger Memes for Seventeenth Century English Dissident Teens by Johnny Dean Warren on Facebook
• Stuart Masters has written and taught extensively on Quaker history and theology.