They're historically very interesting but you have to be careful about what you understand about contemporary quakers based on reading on the internet. Their traditions & cultural impact are attractive to a lot of people, who then write about it.

But quakerism as a living religion is extremely small and quite diverse for its tiny size, and groups practicing the traditional silent worship are a small minority even within that. The majority of living quakers experience a religion much closer to the main stream of evangelical christianity than you will expect from reading about it online. IIRC something like half of quakers are african.

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rimunroe 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> But quakerism as a living religion is extremely small and quite diverse for its tiny size, and groups practicing the traditional silent worship are a small minority even within that. The majority of living quakers experience a religion much closer to the main stream of evangelical christianity than you will expect from reading about it online.

Could you elaborate on this? This is fairly surprising to me as someone raised as a Quaker and who still attends meeting occasionally despite being an atheist. While I’m aware of a few different sects within Quakerism, I’ve never heard of one which eschews silent worship. I haven’t ever personally encountered an evangelical Quaker, and the thought seems particularly strange to me.

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doom2 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Many meetings associated with Friends United Meeting practice worship as a more "traditional" Christian church with a pastor. They associate with many other national and international Quaker organizations and have a majority of their members in countries like Kenya. Evangelical Friends Church is more like other evangelical Christian churches and does not associate with any other Quaker organization as far as I can tell.

	▲	rimunroe a day ago \| parent [-]
		That’s wild! Though I guess it should be unsurprising that Quakerism diverges just like any other religion

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giraffe_lady 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I attended a silent meeting in the US almost two decades ago and this was my understanding at the time too. I later got interested in the demographics of religion and keep checking on the quakers and it's just not at all what you would extrapolate from this.

In the US iirc only about half of meetings are "unprogrammed" which is the traditional silent meeting. The other half more or less follow a normal low church formula, with congregational singing, bible readings, and one or more sermons. Also usually a period of silent worship still but it's not the bulk of the meeting. The doctrine of these churches is still quaker, because nearly anything can be, but people's polled beliefs are basically protestant christian.

Outside the US this second style was much more active in evangelism and missionary work and so the "programmed" style is vastly more popular. The majority of silent worshipping quakers are in the US & england, but globally they only represent something like 20% of active quakers. Africa and a few south american countries outnumber them by a huge margin.

The numbers are not good or reliable either because it's an extreme minority religion, something that might not be obvious if your exposure was in a large american city (or esp in one of the historical quaker regions) or on the internet. But best counts are less than half a million globally so even by the standards of minority religions just so so small. By comparison with other religious minorities there are more jews in los angeles, more muslims in chicago than there are quakers in the world. So whatever your local expression or personal experience of quakerism is it is probably unique and in some sense a historical outlier.

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rimunroe a day ago | parent [-]

I’m familiar with programmed vs unprogrammed services, but it sounded like you were saying that most Quakers don’t even do silent worship anymore, which sounded bizarre. I’m quite aware of how few Quakers there are, but doesn’t that definitionally mean my experience would be less of an outlier compared to the population? Did you perhaps mean to say that they’re more spread out and thus diverse in practices? Regardless, I’m not surprised my experience isn’t representative of the whole, just that there would be Quakers who aren’t doing silent worship. FWIW I spent part of my youth in a very high density Quaker area (eastern Massachusetts) but for the majority of it was in Virginia where Quakers are much less common

	▲	giraffe_lady a day ago \| parent [-]
		Most quakers don't experience silent worship as a main part of their practice, it is only a small (ten minutes or so) part of programmed meetings. There are certainly some who don't do it at all, but I don't know how prevalent it is. I believe globally it is at least as well represented as unprogrammed meetings are.

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JKCalhoun 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My experience in the U.S. has only been of the silent worship variety.