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Their preachers—often young men fresh out of Oliver Cromwell's cocky New Model Army who were fiercely independent and alarmingly egalitarian—had a reputation for being well-trained, ideologically driven, obnoxious religious hecklers. Breaking up Puritan worship services and tearing down the established ministry, these preachers proclaimed a commitment to what they called the doctrine of "the inner light."
Their followers—many of whom, significantly, were forceful women—supported the likes of James Nayler and fellow Quaker luminary George Fox in undermining England's institutional religion. Forgoing propositional theology in favor of the immediacy of divine truth, they distrusted biblical literalism disconnected from the Word within; they opposed the support of professional ministers and withheld the taxes that paid their salaries; they refused to swear any oaths and thus disrupted judicial proceedings; they declined to doff their hats as a sign of deference to social "superiors" (they usually removed their hats only for prayer); and they insisted on addressing these superiors with the diminutive "thee" and "thou," using only people's first names and ignoring formal titles.
More important, according to Damrosch, the Quakers upheld a threatening form of religious antinomianism, one that stood too close to Protestant orthodoxy to be ignored. Believing with many of their Calvinist neighbors that Christ communed directly with the elect, they found little use for the mediatorial role of laws, doctrines, and churches. Though not opposed to Christian mores, they thought that most Christians observed them too slavishly, missing the freedom that comes from genuine, immediate, and full participation in Christ. While the Puritans had been free spirits, they thought, at the beginning of their rise to power, their movement had since become petrified and now proved much too authoritarian.
For Damrosch, then, it comes as little surprise that the Puritans persecuted Quakers with zeal, for, in doing so, they were purging themselves of their own, original antinomian tendencies. He writes,
the early Quaker movement … played the role of scapegoat for the ascendant Puritans. In effect, the Puritans ascribed to Quakers versions of beliefs and practices for which they themselves were criticized but wished to repudiate, and they confirmed their sense of righteousness by throwing Quakers in jail.
It was Nayler's fate in this culture of fearful moralistic backlash to serve as a "double scapegoat" for the antinomian cause. There is "great paradox," according to Damrosch, in "the crisis of authority that developed when the Puritans, who had always defined themselves as individualist and oppositional, found that they had no choice but to assert control in much the same ways as their predecessors had done." But "still more paradoxically, the Quaker movement too, despite its ideology of absolute individualism, was forced in its turn to impose discipline." Significantly, Nayler was not only punished for impersonating Christ on behalf of his movement, he was also written out of Quaker history by his fellow religionists. An embarrassment to a movement trying to gain respectability in a hostile religious environment, he was abandoned by his friends and foes alike.
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