What produced growing disunity among Friends? The schism of 1827-28 was a product of several factors working over time, which culminated in the public spectacle of unseemly struggles for control and organizational separation. Many of these factors continued to work as Friends continued to splinter. These seem to me to be some of those factors:
- Waning of Faith Commitment. As the freshness of the spiritual insights faded with passing time, increasingly people associated with the now quite organized movement without always having the fervency of the first generation. And people brought up among Friends often continued to identify with Friends, but did not always have the same depth of feeling in their guts about the faith.
- Legalism. What were originally true leadings can ossify into rigid, legalistic patterns. Legalism always breeds discontment. Legalistic tendencies began to develop in the second generation of Friends. Margaret Fell, the "mother of Quakerism," survived into this period and eloquently denounced creeping legalism as "silly poor gospel!" (See All In One Dress and One Colour...) Legalism erodes the discipline of spiritual accountability into the enforcement of rules, sometimes petty ones. A major factor in Friends declining from a major religious group in America to a tiny group sometimes regarded as a cult was the pattern which developed of removing from membership of large numbers of people for breaking what had become rules.
- Stifling of the Spirit. The elders, who at their best had been the spiritual nurturers opening up people to the exercise of their God-given gifts, too often became the people repressing expressions of the Spirit that didn't fit into their narrow conceptions of what was acceptable expression. By the end of the eighteenth century, once can find many indications of concern that overbearing elders had produced meetings that were spiritually moribund.
- Becoming Comfortable. As Quakers' reputation for integrity and fair dealing brought them respect from the larger society, it also brought business success to many. As persecution waned, Friends could settle into comfortable patterns of life not possible in the early days. Such comfort has a way of dulling the edge of one's faith commitment and tempting one to compromise the elements of faith that most bring one into conflict with the larger society.
- Power Struggles. Some individuals and some places developed and sought to hold on to positions of power in the Society of Friends. Others resented that. The Hicksite movement was in part a rebellion of rural Friends against entrenched urban power structures in Friends.
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