• 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 1960s¹ 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 ², 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 sign³ or it may be a statistical phantom.⁴ 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 and have corrected them above.

FAITH: This is an invitation for a gathering for young adult Friends ages 18–35 from all the branches of the Religious Society of Friends from all across the continent. It’s going to be in Wichita Kansas from May 28–31. It’s a time to get together and learn about each other, to hear each other’s stories and worship together. We’re really excited by this opportunity to have people who have never been to these before and to have people who have been to other gatherings to come back.
MICAH: A lot of the advance material is already up online so you can get a good idea what this conference is going to be about and to get a sense of how to prepare yourself for a gathering like this. We’ll be getting together with folks from all over the country, Canada and Mexico–we’re hoping a lot of Hispanic Friends show up and we’ve already translated the website into Spanish. Registration is set up already; early registration goes until April 15. Airfare to Wichita is looking pretty good at the moment; if you register early you’re likely to get a fairly decent plane ticket out.
FAITH: We’re hoping people will choose to carpool together. So get organized, register early and look at the advance materials online.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
2010 Young Adult Friends Conference

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

The big news is in the south: “Hispanic Friends Churches” in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There’s surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I’ll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:

One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends
congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations.
I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own
property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an
opportunity to share growth and challenges together.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a program on an issue that’s central to Nonviolence.org’s mandate: conscientious resistance to military service. After looking over the material, I thought the interviews of resisters who have fled to Canada would be interesting to my readers and so wrote a short entry on it. Thinking it all a little funny that a publicist would care about Nonviolence.org, I mentioned the incident in the “Stories of Nonviolence.org” section of my personal site. One by one the leading political sites of the blogosphere have run the story as further proof of the vast left-wing mainstream media conspiracy. It’s rather funny actually.

I have to wonder is who’s kidding who with all this feigned outrage? For those missing the irony gene: the Nonviolence.org PayPal account currently has a balance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last donation–$5.00 back on November 20th. My corner of the left wing conspiracy is funded by the vast personal wealth I accumulate as a bookstore clerk.

Wonkette’s pages advertise “sponsorship opportunities,” she’s a recent cover girl on New York Times Magazine, her husband is an editor at New York magazine and in October she cashed out her blogging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first novel (“It’s not Bridget Jones does Washington, it’s Nick Hornby does politics”: good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for Sandra Day O’Connor), teaches law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee, has served on White House advisory panels, and is a paid correspondent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the others, calls a two minute phone call “recruiting”?

I’m beginning to think the real interest comes from the fact that this top tier of bloggers is totally in bed (literally) with the MSM. Their income comes from their connections with media and political power. Their carefully-crafted fascade of snarkish independence would crumble if their phone logs were made public. They’re not really blogging in their pajamas, folks.

By mentioning the existance of blog publicists, I’ve threatened to blow their cover. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtains: my social gaffe was in publicly admitting that the mainstream media courts political blogs. Kudos to journalist Derek Rose on admitting the practice:

But why shouldn’t a news organization’s publicity department court bloggers? As a MSM member, I get emails from TV flacks all the time promoting their scoops. From ABC, for example, I’ve received emails regarding a tape they got of the Beltway sniper’s call to the Rockville police; Barbara Walters’ Hillary Clinton interview; and their ‘Azzam the American’ video … as well as a Rush Limbaugh drug laundering story that never panned out. I even got attention from publicists when I was working for a newspaper that didn’t have a 20th of the circulation of Instapundit…

Rose aside, there’s incredible distortion in the “reporting,” a term I have to use very loosely. Wonkette says “Kelley claims that a CBS minion put the screws to him to post something about a ’60 Minutes’ package on conscientious objectors” yet all readers have to do is follow the link to see I never said anything like that. Why do the cream of bloggers feel like a posse of self-absorbed seventh graders? When I started Nonviolence.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new political world of the internet might be All the President’s Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it’s just Heathers. God help us.

Originally posted as a comment to “My Experiments with Plainness”, Amanda’s story deserves its own post: “I’ve noticed that I’m becoming really attached to my clothes. As I was grimly and methodically culling my closet, a whiny, desperate voice in my head piped up, and I began to have a serious conversation with myself… [A] reservation I have is that plain dressing may just be another way of telegraphing the image I want the world to have of me. Only instead of that message being ‘I am cool and worthy of your attention and envy’ the message might be ‘I’m so hoooooly’.”

Hi there!

I am 21, and the only member of my family who attends meetings of Friends. (I am not a Friend yet, being young to the whole experience, and an ex-catholic, and having wandered for several years in strange paths!! 🙂 However, I am taking it very seriously, and reading all I can get my hands on. I feel a strong call towards plain dress, and have gone through fits and starts of it spontaneously, even as a Catholic child. At 12, I decided I would no longer wear colours in imitation of all the siants habits I saw in my books, and my friends and I (I grew up in rural Canada, homeschooled, the oldest of 11 kids, an anarchonism to begin with) tried sewing our own clothes ourselves, praire dresses and pinafores.

When I was 14, we moved to the States, to the suburbs, away from our uber-traditional Catholic enclave, and I began to normalize myself out of the “homeschooler uniform” (its own sort of plain dress — those terrible jumpers with ankle socks and canvas sneakers! Ack!) and into mainstream fashion, where I’ve been solidly entrenched ever since, especially since moving to NYC.

I am now in the process of purging a lot of my stuff, and seeking a simpler way of living. I quit smoking, and have decided that drinking as a recreational activity is out unless it’s an organized event. This may become more strict in time, but I have to ease into it a little bit. I got rid of several bags of clothes and a bunch of household items I was hoarding “just in case I might need them someday”. Classic. A lot of things have precipitated this, but one of them is my absolute horror at how I’ve gone from making $12,000 a year to nearly $30,000, and I still am saving no money at all, nor am I making any lasting purchase/investments, etc…I’m just spending it on vain and useless things. I’ve noticed as well, that I’m starting to have more and more big-salary fantasises, and recreationally go to stare in shop windows at clothes, not just to appreciate the asthetic value of some of the most gorgeous garments in the world (after all, this is Manhattan) but also to drool and covet. I found, while examining my concience, that it wasn’t even the thing — the piece of clothing that I wanted, and it wasn’t a simple desire to have something pretty. I saw myself linking these clothes and things to my self worth and future happiness. You know:

“Once I am thin and rich enough to wear this, I will be happy. I will be so happy. So very happy. Everything will be perfect, and my hair will always be straight, and I will have my teeth veneered, and I will have a handsome man who worships the ground I walk on, and three bright-eyed children who appear only on Sunday mornings to snuggle with me in my California-king-sized bed with the white crisp sheets, while I languidly smile at their frolicing and plan to buy them a golden retriever puppy later that afternoon as I stroll through an antique fair and buy a vintage wicker bird cage, which I will fill with finches and hang from my sun-drenched porch in my second house in the south of France, and I be happy. So happy. So very happy, if I am only thin and rich enough to wear those clothes.”

I really, really woke up one afternoon to find myself standing on 5th Ave and 59th street, on my lunch break, staring in a window, and having that fantasy with absolutely no internal ironic monolouge at all. At all.

It completley panicked me.

I’ve noticied that I’m becoming really attatched to my clothes. As I was grimly and methodically culling my closet, a whiney, desperate voice in my head piped up, and I began to have a serious conversation with myself.

“You can’t get rid of so many of your cool clothes. The clothes are you, they’re a huge part of who you are.”

“Wait,” the other voice in my head, the stern one, said (I am a schizophrenic and so am I) “You are saying that I am what I wear. That’s supposed to make me want to keep them? Do you even hear what you’re saying?”

The first voice was totally backtracking.

“No, no, no, I didn’t mean you were your clothes, or that you were only worth as much as your clothes, why do you always have to be so literal? I meant that your clothes tell people about you, about who you are and what you believe in. They’re an outside sign of who you are.”

“Ah.” said the second voice, rather sarcastically, I thought, “So we’d rather have people learn everything they need to know about us by our clothes, instead of having them take the time to get to know us from experience of us.”

“Well, that’s all very well!” said the first voice. “That’s nice in an ideal world. But the truth is, the sad truth is, most people won’t take the time to get to know you if you don’t seem cool.”

“Wow.” said the second voice. “Wow. This has nothing to do with fashion, does it? This totally has to do with your inferiority complex, dating back to about second grade, doesn’t it?”

At this point the first voice began to suck its thumb, and I realized to my horror that the second voice was right. It’s always right.

“Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” ~Quentin Crisp

I’ve actually begun buying my personality in a store, and telling myself that it’s okay because I’m buying it in a thrift store. I know from personal experience that the right headscarf or pair of vintage shoes, or funny t‑shirt will suddenly raise the value of my social currency off the charts. And I’m becoming really dependent on that, to the point where I’ve started to actually feel anxiety around my “style” and my clothes. I ironically played the role of fashion police for a boy at a party who was mocking me for being from Williamsburg, and although I was kidding around when I excoriated him for his American-Eagle shorts and surfer-boy hair, it struck me, I’m spouting all these “rules” as if I’m mocking them, but I actually live by them, don’t I?

And I’ve increasingly begun to obey them out of fear instead of out of a love of neat clothes or a sense of aesthetic. I have cooler clothes than ever, and sudenly I have a need to make more money so that I can keep looking cool, and keep fitting in, and keep proving to everyone, most of all myself, that I should be invited to Angelica’s birthday party because the whole rest of the class is and it’s not fair…oh wait. That was second grade.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way.”

This seems like a huge cliche, but you know, the more I think about it, the more it seems that the modern horror of cliches may have less to do with a love of originality than with a fear of the truth.

So those are the motivations — that much is worked out. But the practice of it is hard. Was I experienceing a genuine calling to plain dress as a child, or did I just read too much “Little House”? (Is there such a thing as too much “Little House”?) And now, am I just a costume-loving poser?

I feel a bizarre attraction to head-covering as well, though I recoil with my whole post-feminist self from those passages in the bible. I don’t think I believe in submission to anybody. In fact, I’m not sure even God wants me submissive ‑I feel he wants my co-operation.

“I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends: because all things whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you.” John 15:15

Another reservation I have is that plain dressing may just be another way of telegraphing the image I want the world to have of me. Only instead of that message being “I am cool and worthy of your attention and envy” the message might be “I’m so hoooooly”. Or, perhaps more positively, it might be a message that is “witness” — a concept I am struggling with on its own — what if I make mistakes and my witness is mistaken, etc.

My compromise was to get rid of all the clothes I’d bought just for attention, all the clothes I was keeping for purely sentimental reasons, everything that didn’t fit, or match with anything else, etc. And to be honest, that just pared it down to where I can actually fit all my clothes in my 1 closet and dresser, a feat heretofore unknown to me. Also, a big part of this move was to start taking care of my clothes, something I’ve never done. I’ve made an active dicipline of something as simple as hanging up my clothes each night, as an act of respect and gratitude. It occured to me that when I am so fortunate as to have many posessions, it seems extremely wrong that I should mistreat them the way I’ve been doing.

Wow. Forget plain dress, plain speech is going to be an even bigger problem. I’ve written a novel.

* blush *

Anyhow, it is wonderful to see it discussed, sometimes I feel like I’m just nuts. I mean, I know I’m nuts, but I don’t like feeling that way. 🙂

in friendship,
Amanda