These are numbers of Friends in Canada and the United States (including Alaska, which was tallied separately prior to statehood) compiled from Friends World Committee for Consultation. I dug up these numbers from three sources:
- 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quakers World Wide: A History of FWCC by Herbert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWCC’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the relevant chart).
- 1972, 1992 from Earlham School of Religion’s The Present State of Quakerism, 1995, archived here.
- 2002 on from FWCC directly. Note: Current 2017 map.
Friends in the U.S. and Canada:
- 1937: 114,924
- 1957: 122,663
- 1967: 122,780
- 1972: 121,380
- 1977: 119,160
- 1987: 109,732
- 1992: 101,255
- 2002: 92,786
- 2012: 77,660
- 2017: 81,392
Friends in Americas (North, Middle South):
- 1937: 122,166
- 1957: 131,000
- 1967: 129,200
- 1977: 132,300
- 1987: 139,200
- 2017: 140,065
You could write a book about what these numbers do and don’t mean. The most glaring omission is that they don’t show the geographic or theological shifts that took place over time. Midwestern Friends have taken a disproportionate hit, for example, and many Philadelphia-area meetings are much smaller than they were a century ago, while independent meetings in the West and/or adjacent to colleges grew like wildflowers mid-century.
My hot take on this is that the reunification work of the early 20th century gave Quakers a solid identity and coherent structure. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remarkably confident document. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, participatory religious movement that was attractive to people tired of more creedal formulations; mixed-religious parents came looking for First-day school community for their children. Quakers’ social justice work was very visible and attracted a number of new people during the antiwar 1960s and the alternative community groundswell of the 1970s. These various newcomers offset the decline of what we might call “ethnic” Friends in rural meetings through this period.
That magic balance of Quaker culture matching the zeitgeist of religious seekers disappeared somewhere back in the 1980s. We aren’t on forefront of any current spiritual trends. While there are bright spots and exceptions , we’ve largely struggled with retaining newcomers in recent years. We’re losing our elders more quickly than we’re bringing in new people, hence the forty percent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign or it may be a statistical phantom. I’ll be curious to see what the next census brings.
2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some numbers in my original 2018 post, with some dates in my chart including the number of Friends in the U.S. and Canada and other or Friends from all the Americas (with roughly 20,000 Friends apiece in Bolivia and Guatemala, the difference is substantial). I’m redoing all of these numbers; if you’re interested in reading the original version of this, you can check it out in Archive.org.