# Can you tell me about Quakers? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 21, 2009, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818 "2009-02-21T04:51:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/41 "2009-02-23T21:03:43Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Which is grammatically the same thing as saying “Me am a Quaker” or “Them are Quakers.” Thou art right. (I lived as child for three years with a Friends’ meeting house over the back wall from our house in Yorkshire, so I have no excuse for not getting “thee” and “thou” right. But, apart from that, I have nothing much to add to this thread.) ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/42 "2009-02-24T04:24:17Z")
If it wasn’t for Quakers and their records, I would know an awful lot less about my family tree. A large number of them were Quakers in the late 1600-1800’s. ---
**Author:** ![Mongo\_Ponton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eb9ed0/32.png) [@Mongo\_Ponton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mongo_Ponton)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/43 "2009-02-24T04:43:30Z")
Lapsed Quaker The rest of my family still attends. Several things made me uneasy over the years. 1. I witnessed a changing of the guard if you will from a conservative agrarian group, extremely tight knit and running many generations deep, to a freak show counter culture who found a group too polite to tell them to beat it. My sister’s wedding being the biggest and last freak show I had the horror to recoil from. 2. Young members joining the Military. Not large numbers but jarringly out of place. And it’s jarring to the congregation as a whole but not enough to actually make anyone wonder about the message these members received for 18 or 20 years. 3. A simmering under current of anti-semitic thought. I think this is very old and I don’t know much about it or why. When my Mother relates some current shenanigans going on I invariably ask “What would George Fox think?”. No one in one of the oldest and largest meetings really gives a rat’s ass what George thinks. I miss the basic premise and when I look around at society at large I always think there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from learning to just sit still for an hour. ---
**Author:** ![Hunter\_Hawk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/50afbb/32.png) [@Hunter\_Hawk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hunter_Hawk)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/44 "2009-02-24T06:04:59Z")
> [@Lyanthya](#): > > there are atheist and agnostic Quakers. How does that work? ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/45 "2009-02-24T13:20:17Z")
> [@Hunter\_Hawk](#): > > How does that work? I never quite figured that one out. Well agnostic maybe, but “atheist Quaker” made me giggle the first time I heard it. Seems a bit of a contradiction, no? I’ve only met one; she was part of a Quaker group a friend and I started up in undergrad. New students would come check us out and she always had to pipe up about how she was an “atheist Quaker”. That and other unrelated strangeness made sure that no one came back. I never actually asked her to explain it. There are also Quakers who claim to be Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan, other stuff. Many (of the FGC type, probably not of the FUM type, and never of the evangelical type AFAIK) don’t consider themselves to be Christian. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/46 "2009-02-24T13:33:50Z")
> [@Mongo\_Ponton](#): > > Lapsed Quaker > > The rest of my family still attends. > > Several things made me uneasy over the years. > > 1. I witnessed a changing of the guard if you will from a conservative agrarian group, extremely tight knit and running many generations deep, to a freak show counter culture who found a group too polite to tell them to beat it. My sister’s wedding being the biggest and last freak show I had the horror to recoil from. > > 2. Young members joining the Military. Not large numbers but jarringly out of place. And it’s jarring to the congregation as a whole but not enough to actually make anyone wonder about the message these members received for 18 or 20 years. > > 3. A simmering under current of anti-semitic thought. I think this is very old and I don’t know much about it or why. > > When my Mother relates some current shenanigans going on I invariably ask “What would George Fox think?”. No one in one of the oldest and largest meetings really gives a rat’s ass what George thinks. > > I miss the basic premise and when I look around at society at large I always think there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from learning to just sit still for an hour. Sounds like I wouldn’t like that meeting much either. I’ve moved around a bit and had the opportunity to attend meetings in different places. Some of them are really nice and some of them…ugh. 1. I’ve found some meetings to be populated by old former(?) hippies who found Quakerism recently and Don’t Really Get It. A healthy population of “elders” (I don’t really like the term, but it gets used) can help keep things on track, but sometimes, as you’ve seen, it doesn’t. 2. Can’t say I’ve experienced that one. Aside from WWII, when many Quakers were conflicted about participation and many enlisted, most non-evangelical types are pretty pacifist IME. This wasn’t always the case though. Many early prominent Quakers were military officers. IIRC, the whole “Peace Testimony” thing was just a letter sent to the king saying that Quakers wouldn’t revolt against the crown. It wasn’t a condemnation of military violence. I’m not sure when pacifism worked it’s way in. 3. I haven’t run into that either, and I’m glad. I once attended a Passover Seder at one meeting. As for George Fox, I’m not sure he’d recognize _any_ meeting. So much has changed ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/47 "2009-02-24T14:08:57Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Which is grammatically the same thing as saying “Me am a Quaker” or “Them are Quakers.” Exactly. It’s an odd practice. Some interesting stuff [here.](http://www.sls.hawaii.edu/bley-vroman/thee.txt) > [@](#): > > 1. Loss of the thou/thee distinction in Quaker speech. > (Here, I am on unsure ground. I know of no really good > research on this matter, so what follows is mostly > speculative.) As the singular/plural or familiar/polite > distinction died out in most of English, a change within the > Quaker usage began to take hold. The accusative “thee” form > began to supplant the nominative “thou”. This change is said > to have been most complete in America. Interestingly, the > change is parallel to the development in general English > usage, where the accusative “you” eventually supplanted the > nominative “ye”. The thou/thee merger may also be related to > regional dialects in England; those areas in which Quakerism > was strong may have been losing the distinction, so that what > was in part a regional peculiarity developed into a > disinctive Quaker form of speech. > > * * * > > 1. Change of the inflection on the verb to third singular. > As it finally evolved, much Quaker plain speech began to use > the third person singular verb forms with “thee”. So, instead > of “thou art”, “thou hast”, we find “thee is”, “thee has” > I know of no research on this phenomenon. This, too, is said > to be a peculiarly American phenomenon. (Is it, and is there > some regional basis in Britain here, too?) ---
**Author:** ![Kalhoun](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3bc359/32.png) [@Kalhoun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kalhoun)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/48 "2009-02-24T15:09:50Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Which is grammatically the same thing as saying “Me am a Quaker” or “Them are Quakers.” M N O Quakers (O S A R!) ---
**Author:** ![Khampelf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Khampelf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khampelf)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/49 "2009-02-24T16:38:24Z")
> [@Kalhoun](#): > > M N O Quakers (O S A R!) C D E D B D straw hats? ---
**Author:** ![Mongo\_Ponton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eb9ed0/32.png) [@Mongo\_Ponton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mongo_Ponton)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/50 "2009-02-24T17:05:48Z")
Ruken Thank you for helping to make my point regarding the first. The old hippies are pretty benign. It’s some of the whack jobs populating the meeting houses that are scary. They certainly haven’t found Quakerism. It is my belief that they are more interested in the real estate than the religion. As the elders get rolled by this meme of extreme tolerance more and more youth from the old families disengage until the message is becoming lost. Having Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans, Atheists and other groups specifically aligned against the teachings of not only this religion but against Christianity as a whole just would not be tolerated anywhere else. These don’t tend to be Birthright that discovered a new path but newcomers who demand their views not just be heard but vocally accepted. I think that may be the difference with the ideological struggles some of the catholic faiths are having. Now they’re on the facing bench and it begins to feel evangelical but not in a good way. Not that this is reflective of you in particular but Quakers as a whole, you yourself had a group destroyed by an atheist and other strangeness but never asked for an explanation. If you had students coming around to check out your message there may have been some one searching for that life changing spark. Your atheist wasn’t out on the sidewalk expounding her message or at the atheist old folks home. She was in your religion extinquishing that light. Unfortunate. As to the other points it is not my intention to hurt the people I’ve known and loved all my life so I’ll leave off. There are many good and simple people in the Quaker religion. It’s just that the signal to noise ratio is making it tough to hear them. And also worthwhile to seek them out. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2009, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818/51 "2009-02-25T21:18:30Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > Interestingly, the change is parallel to the development in general English usage, where the accusative “you” eventually supplanted the nominative “ye”. Wow, that’s an excellent rejoinder, I’d forgotten about that. Who are we to criticize them for using an object pronoun as a subject, when we all do exactly the same thing! > [@](#): > > much Quaker plain speech began to use the third person singular verb forms with “thee”. So, instead of “thou art”, “thou hast”, we find “thee is”, “thee has” Is thee is or is thee ain’t my Quaker? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-tell-me-about-quakers/486818.md?page=2)