Summary Of Whikers In America By Thomas Ham

Thomas Hamm is a professor of history and director of special collections at Earlham College. “Earlham's historical beginning in Richmond, Indiana, is rooted in the Great Migration of Quakers from the eastern United States in the first half of the nineteenth century” (Hamm viii). Among Thomas Hamm’s accomplishments, “he is a lifelong member of First Friends Meeting in New Castle, Indiana; he has served as recording clerk and a member of the executive committee of Indiana Yearly Meeting, and was co-clerk of the Reconfiguration Task Force of Indiana Yearly Meeting” (Hamm viii).
The Quakers in America is the fourth book in a series of books written by Tom D. Hamm. In this book, Thomas Hamm tries to balance unity with diversity; a task that is
His book begins with descriptions of four different congregations bearing few similarities to one another. These four groups are Friends General Conference (FGC), Conservative Friends, Evangelical Friends International, and Friends United Meeting (FUM), and He then declares that they are all Quakers. He writes, "Clear categories for these Friends are difficult to create, and labels can be confusing" (Hamm, 9). Therefore, in a comparable way Hamm describes the founding of sects starting with their founders. Elias Hicks was a traveling Quaker preacher from Long Island, New York. In his preaching, he promoted beliefs that involved him and his followers in a dispute, which caused the first major schism within the Quakers. The Hicksite Separation was a result of both religious and social issues. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Hicksites were more rural and poorer than the urban, wealthier, Orthodox Quakers. With increasing financial success, Orthodox Quakers wanted to make their group a more respectable body by adopting mainstream Protestant orthodoxy beliefs. Hicksites, on the other hand, saw these changes as damaging, and believed Orthodox Quakers had given up their traditional Christian spirituality for material success. Hicksites viewed the Bible as secondary to the individual’s development of God's light within the believer. The Hicksites is formally known as
This controversy was between John Wilbur and Joseph Gurney, which led to a division among the Orthodox Friends into Gurneyites and Wilburites. The Gurneyites beliefs follow evangelical Christian doctrines of Jesus Christ, the Atonement, and the Bible. The Wilburites became the Conservative Friends. The Conservative Friends share some of the beliefs of George Fox and the Friends. Many Wilburites see themselves as the Quakers whose beliefs are exact to original Quaker doctrine, claiming that the majority of Friends departed from the Wilburite Quakers in the 19th and 20th