I was hard on atheists here a few posts ago but hanging out in the ‘reformed christianity‘ subreddits recently, actually i am more scared of those folks. Give me atheists any day. Give me Buddhists (who are atheists, originally). Give me tantra. Anything but reformed christians lol. Although, I do think the Quakers are ok.
Did i already post about James Nayler? He has an interesting sad story, he was there at the beginning of Quakerism. It was a wild time in England, the civil war going on. Lots of crazy new ideas about religion—about religious freedom, and freedom more generally, freedom from the oppressive church, landholders, societal norms. It was like the 1960s in the 1640s. There were the Levellers and the Ranters, who promulgated a kind of pantheism, with ideas that would not be out of place among new age spirituality now –
“All the creatures of the world …are but one entire being.” “Nothing that partakes of the divine nature, or is of God, but is God.” – Jacob Bauthumley, (emphasis added), quoted on p219 in The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill, an interesting history of the social changes of these years.
James Nayler was one of the visionaries at the heart of one of these movements—he was considered by some to be the ‘head Quaker in England’ in the 1650s. Quakers were denounced as ‘atheists’ by some, due to their distuptive opposition to the established church, and Naylor was a political radical who denounced the rich, declaring that god made people “of one mould and one blood to dwell on the face of the Earth”. He seems to have been looked upon as a sort of messiah, with the appearance of a “plain simple countryman.. a husbandman or shepherd”. In 1656 he went t0o far, enterring Bristol riding on a donkey, while women strewed palms before him, as a re-enactment of the Palm Sunday arrival of Christ in Jerusalem. He was arrested and brutally punished, but only after months of debate among the new parliament that emerged in the Kings absence and which chose in the end to make an example of him, and attempt to crush the extremely popular religious movement which he was a head of. He was whipped through the streets of London, pilloried, had a red-hot iron bored through his tongue, and his forehead was branded with the letter “B” for Blasphemer. Eventuallly released from prison but broken, he was robbed and left for dead on the road while making his way back to his family, and died in the house of a nearby Quaker.
The English parliament spent a long time debating his case, and in deciding to punish him I feel they took a stance on suppressing the activity of revolutionary religious figures in England that has stuck to this day, passing a constitution which put in place a state church and ended the 17th century experiment with religous toleration. It set a tone for down to earth practicality vs inspired feverous holy dreams. But the reformist or puritan movement James Naylor was part of went on to have a huge influence in the new world over the other side of the Atlantic, and it is there that the figure of the religious emissary or zealot still has a large part to play in society even today.