Nothing earthshaking about such a split. The SoF has fragmented numerous times and ways. The bulk of modern Friends or Quakers look more like main stream evangelical churches with clergy, programed worship, a hirearchael structure, & some conservative doctrines that are at odds with the more traditional Friends Meetings in the US or UK.
Basically, some of the Friends groups which largely overlapped with conventional evangelical Christianity got involved with missionary ventures. None had an especially overwhelming effect on their destinations, but the Quakers are such a tiny group that it dramatically altered the proportions. A bare majority of Friends are now in Africa - mostly Kenya.
Note that several other doctrines currently associated with the SoF are not original to their founding in the mid 17th Century. Passificism did not emerge as a belief for many decades, and is less prevalent than outsiders understand. The concern with prison and law reform did not emerge for nearly two centuries.
I'm not sure that's true. Quakers sprang from a reaction to the English Civil War, more or less in line with the Anabaptist movement on the continent. William Penn was already inviting pacifist religious groups to Pennsylvania and reforming its prisons not so long after. Perhaps you could say it took that long for all Quakers to rally around those causes, but pacifism was a presence in the movement from its outset.
I attended a Friends Church when I was very religious for about a year and a half centered around age 14.
I briefly wore a button to school which said "I Found It" and the answer to the question was "abundant life through Jesus Christ." Struck me as too much a rehearsed salesman-like response.
I concur.
The one different part of the church is that there's a quiet time after the collection and before the sermon. People can share a verse or two of scripture, can offer a prayer, can share an insight they've had. This period lasts ten minutes often less.
A lot of emphasis on personal piety, which means abstaining from even sexual thoughts, which is a trap any Buddhist would see through in a moment for it's just going to make it more exciting.
A friend once gave the analogy, you're running across a field and you slip on a rock. You might slip on the same rock getting up but that's different than just laying there. It was patently obvious that my friend was talking about masturbation. I mean, so obvious that it's not even an analogy.
Well, what's being left behind is about three dozen other topics in ethics and how we treat other people. For example, don't engage in proxy bullying. And if you laugh while someone else does the bullying, you are engaging in proxy bullying. Well, it's not a hundred percent deal where you're striving for perfection which is too high a standard and you're going to get down on yourself. Instead, it's more a skill of moving away from the poker hand quite a bit quicker and more confidently than average. You might even want to extend a hand out to the person being bullied. And there's ways of doing this effectively and ineffectively. No one likes receiving scraps of charity. It's more about being matter-of-fact that bullying is a waste of time, but that's only one of the skills.
And this is a great example of the type of thing which can be lost by focusing so much on not even having sexual thoughts. Some Christians live small truncated lives. Certainly not all, but some do. Maybe a result of any religion or philosophy trying to achieve perfection in one area of life to the exclusion of all others.
I'm impressed that we can list 20 different religions all of which have some version of the Golden Rule, often amazingly similar to the Christian version. I also think that Kantianism and utilitarianism are maybe B, B+ theories of ethics, and perhaps that's the best we can hope for.
These days I'm an atheist, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not so much. A cousin got sick, who I'm not particularly close with and that aspect does make it worse. I do worry about my own death. I wish there was an afterlife like in the movie Defending Your Life with Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks, where sometimes you could pick within a range your own life to be reincarnated into, other times the cosmic lottery. And when you learned enough, you could move on to higher planes. Would like for this to be true, but don't think it is.
It must be so strange to encounter Quakers through a conservative/structured context like that. Friends
Church! At that point, they're just a really quirky protestant sect, rather than arguably being so fundamentally different that they qualify as a branch of Christianity alongside Mormonism and Protestantism itself. I spent some time with the "Religious Society of Friends (Conservative)" when I taught in Appalachian Ohio, and while they are very good people, at times it seemed I had no more in common with them than I had with any other peace sect - the Amish, or more strict Mennonite groups.
Growing up in the eastern Meetings, the kind of puritanism you describe seems almost absurdly opposed to the people I grew up with. In Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Georgia I found it different. Nor does that mesh much with Italian, British, or Hong Konger Quakers I've socialized or sat with. [I did once meet a Hong Konglish Quaker who was a fervent Trump supporter and climate change denier, but that's an altogether different flavor of bizarre.] I mean, I grew up taking it for granted that while Christianity and Buddhism were mutually incompatible,
Quakerism and Buddhism certainly weren't. There was a Buddhist nun in our meeting for some time, and I heard word occasionally of another meeting where there was some distress (of the gentle, verbal kind Quakers tend to) that some outspoken Wiccans were being a little more Wiccan than Quaker in their messages.
I keep coming back to that puritanism in your post and laughing out loud. When I was a teenage Friend it was generally understood that someone was getting laid at any really big Young Friends overnight event, and this was in no way viewed as hypocrisy. It was a bad idea, sure, the event organizers sought to avoid it, but no one was stopping the religion bus to weep over it.
How many Young Friends does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Young Friends don't screw in lightbulbs - they screw in sleeping bags. I heard that a lot, though it wasn't my scene.
We put our emphasis on personal piety to what I believe were more constructive ends. Sorry you ended up with a sort that didn't suit you. Didn't do much lasting damage, at least, to judge by your message.
To the extent that I'm still Quaker, it's for two reasons: Why that and not something else.... because after growing up without being told by an authority figure what to think of God, morality, and spirituality, I simply can't abide the experience of a priest (or equivalent) lecturing at me. The second, though, is more practical - Quakers produce good results. Few religions sound bad on paper, but few indeed have compromised power for principle so little. In that sense I suppose it's more that I trust Quakers to do the right thing where I expect many faiths to get misled by doctrine.