Quaker Outcasts and the Creation of Missionary Anglicanism, 1691–1706

Abstract

Abstract This article re-examines the creation and implications of missionary Anglicanism during the later 1690s. It focuses on a small group of Quaker outcasts and their role in the creation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as well as their continuing influence during the institution’s earliest years. An initial Anglican missionary impulse was stimulated and directed by the belated realisation among ministers that, since the 1670s, the Society of Friends had expanded rapidly in the Americas. Seeking strategies for how they might respond to this growth of organised dissent, Anglicans turned to those who had been cast out of the Society of Friends on both sides of the ocean. In particular, they sought the aid of George Keith, who had been disowned by the Quakers because of the schism he caused in Pennsylvania during 1692. These outcasts came to serve as confessional intermediaries, importing specifically Quaker techniques of missionary tours, networking and the usage of cheap print into the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Their actions also had further, parallel consequences across the Atlantic. The division Keith caused and the activities of the outcasts thereafter encouraged a reformation of Quakerism, the formation of Anglican networks and the first soundings of a transoceanic public sphere. Being neither Quakers nor truly Anglicans, but entangled with both, the outcasts fomented strife between these two faiths. However, they also promoted ecclesiological reaction and borrowing between them, which, in turn, catalysed processes of Atlantic confession-building and opened a transatlantic dimension in anglophone debates around religiosity.