On Decline in the West and Growth in the Global South
by Marshall Massey
Where does Quakerism actually live? In January 2004, Marshall Massey — a longtime participant in soc.religion.quaker and historically grounded Quaker theologian — turned to the numbers. Drawing on statistics compiled by the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), he laid out a picture that surprised many participants in the newsgroup: the Religious Society of Friends had undergone a dramatic geographic recentering in the twentieth century, with growth concentrated not in the liberal unprogrammed meetings of the United States and Britain, but in the evangelical Quaker communities of Africa and Latin America.
The implications Massey drew were unsettling for those who assumed that liberal, unprogrammed Quakerism defined the tradition's future. If success belongs to the Quakerism of Africa and Latin America — success measured not in ideology but in the simple fact of people finding something real and powerful enough to commit their lives to — then the questions facing Western Friends run deeper than demographics.
Religions that have something real to offer that speaks to people's condition, tend to grow by significant percentages every decade — if need be, moving from the areas where they began, if those areas are losing population, into other areas where the emigrés from the first areas are settling, and making further converts there. Thanks to this sort of thing, certain religions in the U.S. have had skyrocketing membership figures — e.g., the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.
Certain styles of Quakerism have succeeded along these lines to a certain extent in certain fairly limited subsections of the U.S. — e.g., evangelical Quakerism in some areas; liberal unprogrammed Quakerism near many college campuses. But this has not been enough to offset the overall decline in the RSoF's numbers in the United States.
According to the FWCC, as of the early 1960s, there were about 124,000 Friends (of all persuasions combined) in the U.S. and about 21,000 in Britain. Forty years later in the year 2002, there were just over 91,000 in the U.S. and just over 17,000 in Britain. That's a loss of over 25% in the U.S., and of 18% in Britain, in a generation and a half.
Negative changes of this scope raise serious questions about Quakerism's viability in these countries. They show that Quakerism in these countries has had too feeble or questionable a life even to hold many of its own kids' loyalties, let alone attract outsiders in numbers large enough to offset attrition.
Meanwhile, in that same forty-year period, the number of Quakers in Africa has grown from under 40,000 to 156,000; and in Latin America it has grown from under 3,000 to 60,000. These are figures that indicate a religion with something real and powerful to offer.
In the early 1960s almost three-quarters of all Friends lived in the U.S. and the U.K. Today almost two-thirds live in Africa and Latin America. If we want to talk about what Quakerism is today, then let us face it: it is not where Western Friends live that defines Quakerism today. And it is not liberal permissiveness that defines what makes Quakerism successful today. Africa and Latin America are the shape of Quakerism's present, and even more, the shape of Quakerism's future. And the Quakerism of those areas succeeds, not because of permissiveness, but because of its Christian gospel.
Colophon
Posted to soc.religion.quaker by Marshall Massey ([email protected]) on 9 January 2004, in a thread on Christian Universalism and Quaker identity. Statistics drawn from the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC). Marshall Massey was a historically grounded Quaker theologian and longtime contributor to soc.religion.quaker, known for bringing primary sources and demographic analysis to theological discussions.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
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