(Page 1 of 36) - Quaker Pennsylvania: Refuge from Priestcraft? authored by Calvert, Jane.

UAKER

ENNSYLVANIA

EFUGE FROM

RIESTCRAFT

Jane E. Calvert

St. Mary’s College of Maryland

## email not listed ##

Prepared for delivery at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,

September 2 - September 5, 2004.

Quaker Pennsylvania has been lauded as the greatest experiment in religious liberty in the

early modern world and the strongest example of separation of church and state to influence the
framers of the Constitution. In 1781 when Thomas Jefferson contemplated the disestablishment
of religion in Virginia, he recognized the phenomenon of religious liberty in Pennsylvania. He
began his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” assumed by historians to be the blueprint for the First
Amendment, with an account of the religious persecution of members of the Society of Friends.
“The poor Quakers,” he wrote, “were flying from persecution in England. They cast their eyes
on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom; but they found them free only
for the reigning sect.” He continued his entire opening paragraph with a description of the laws
in Virginia that were instituted for the express purpose of persecuting Quakers. He then closed
with a description of the success of religious toleration in Pennsylvania and New York. “Their
harmony,” he wrote, “is unparalleled, and can be ascribed to nothing but their unbounded
tolerance, because there is no other circumstance in which they differ from every nation on
earth.” His final plea was to “Let us too give this experiment fair play, and get rid, while we
may, of those tyrannical laws” that have sanctioned religious persecution.

Historian J. William

Frost argues that “in the colonial period Pennsylvania’s pattern of separation of church and state
paved the way for similar policies in other states and the federal government.”

Patricia Bonomi points out that Pennsylvania is noteworthy because “the Quaker colony

had granted religious liberty on the basis of principle rather than expediency.”

The Quakers

were compelled by their theology to found a “holy experiment” based on liberty of conscience.
A product of the radical Reformation, Quakers were extreme Protestants who stripped
Christianity down to its most basic elements by rejecting everything that defined the high
church—all hierarchies, all outward rituals, symbols, and ceremonies—and instead embracing
egalitarianism in ecclesiology, and plainness and simplicity in dress, deportment, worship, and
theology. They attempted a revival of the primitive Church by putting into practice the Lutheran
idea of the priesthood of all believers and encouraging everyone, male or female, to shun formal
religious education and preach as the spirit moved them. Furthermore, unlike any other
contemporary sect, they believed in the possibility of universal salvation, regardless of religious

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1982), 157, 161.

J. William Frost, A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1.

Although Frost’s is the first book-length study of religious liberty in Pennsylvania, others have made similar claims.
See Thomas Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (New
York, 1986); Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New
York, 1987); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Bonomi, 36.