Lamb-Like Warriors: A Nation of God and the Quakers’ Church Militant

Sarah Crabtree

From its inception in the 1660s as a millennial sect, the Society of Friends forged a truly Atlantic community.  Its itinerant ministry, Public Friends, reinforced religious ties across several continents and flourished despite eighteenth-century wars for empire and independence.  These networks transcended geopolitical borders and promoted the Quakers’ political agenda of pacifism, abolition, and gender equity.  In this way, Friends challenged the authority of fledgling governments and highlighted democracy’s unrealized potential during the so-called Age of Revolution.  This piece of my project examines the ways in which these ministers utilized the language of a church militant in order to challenge the growing association be-tween citizenship and military service and to prevent national and imperial governments from claiming a Christian mandate.  This identity as a church militant allowed Quakers to remain separate from but engaged with the outside world, as they modeled both their actions and their idea of community on Biblical precepts.  The Friends’ church militant was thus a rearticulation of the “nation” as well as the obligations of citizenship, as their allegiance was not to a geopolitical community but rather to a religious “nation” that promoted their theological and political agenda.

[WP #0607]