In part as a response to comments on a recent QuakerQuaker post about whether Friends should engage the political system at all, this post is meant to stimulate further discussion by citing examples from the history of early Friends that brought them into direct contact with state authority. 

“Quakerism is not just a set of beliefs or a statement of faith; it is a practical, ethical, and functional religious approach to life,” says Wilmer Cooper in A Living Faith: An Historical and Comparative Study of Quaker Beliefs. “That is to say, it is a religious faith to be lived out and not just professed and talked about.” The connection between these examples is not merely that they show accidental or incidental contact with the state, then, but that the actions of early Friends in the world very much flowed from their understanding of faith and the importance of an outward expression of their inward reality. Further, I think we can reasonably assume that they were not only aware that their actions would be interpreted as a challenge to the existing political order but also of the likely consequences of those actions. 

In other words, even with a cursory overview of early Friends history it is difficult to maintain that Quakers drew clean distinctions between their spirituality and the "worldly concerns" of the political sphere.

You can read more here: http://quakerlibertarians.weebly.com/1/post/2014/04/quakerisms-inhe...