There are sections of the Gospels that I find challenging to comprehend. For example, Jesus tells his listeners that calling their brother a fool puts their soul in danger, yet Jesus himself calls the Pharisees a brood of vipers. This man who described himself as "gentle and lowly of heart" also overturned tables in the temple and drove out the moneychangers and sacrificial animal sellers with a scourge. It is perhaps easier to reconcile these seemingly contradictory precepts when you consider that the Gospels portray the Pharisees as self-righteous and hypocritical individuals who placed a heavy emphasis on outward displays of piety while neglecting matters of the heart. Likewise, those driven from the temple were symbols of the corruption and exploitation that had entered into their religious system. Jesus' anger was righteous.

Recognizing this makes it all the harder to read The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by the historian Marcus Rediker. In this biography, the object of Benjamin Lay's righteous anger were Quakers—at least those Quakers who owned slaves themselves and refused to hear Lay's abolitionist message.

There is no question that the Quaker position on slavery evolved over time. When George Fox, one of the founders of the Religious Society of Friends, visited Barbados in 1671, he admonished Quakers there to treat their slaves kindly, to provide them with a religious education, and to eventually set them free. It wasn't until 1688 that Friends in Germantown, Pennsylvania, wrote a statement declaring slavery fundamentally immoral for defying the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have others do unto you. However, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting apparently took no action on that petition. It wasn't until the 1770s that all yearly meetings in North America included a testimony against slavery in their Book of Discipline (which we now call Faith and Practice).

According to Rediker, Benjamin Lay (1682–1759) helped lay the groundwork for this transition. After moving from England to Barbados in 1718, Lay was profoundly disturbed by the severe abuse he witnessed being heaped upon the enslaved. One slave he knew chose to kill himself rather than submit to weekly whippings. When Lay subsequently settled down in Pennsylvania, he was appalled that William Penn's "holy experiment" included Friends who held others in bondage.

When it came to expressing his disgust with this practice, Lay was definitely not "gentle and lowly in heart." He regularly shouted down slave owners who spoke during meetings for worship. He also often engaged in what Rediker calls guerilla theater: dramatic public protests. One of Lay's most spectacular performances was to run a sword through a bladder full of red pokeberry juice and spatter the "blood" all over the slave owners gathered at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1738. On another occasion, after the obstreperous Lay was turned out of a meetinghouse in the rain, he laid down in the mud, requiring everyone who left the building to step over him.

According to Rediker, Lay may have inspired younger anti-slavery activists such as John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, both of whom would "adopt kinder, gentler methods of persuasion in the antislavery struggle, no doubt because they saw how much opposition Benjamin's zeal and fury provoked." Rediker argues that Lay's "extreme tactics may have made the later successes by Benezet and Woolman possible."

This may well be true. Rediker claims that Lay "knew that many Quakers opposed slavery but did not speak out for fear of antagonizing their brethren, undermining consensus, and creating turmoil, all anathema to Quaker ideals of peace and harmony."

Are there issues today that Friends hesitate to speak out against, mindful of remaining quiet and polite? While I myself am more likely to adopt "kinder, gentler methods of persuasion," reading The Fearless Benjamin Lay at least helped me to empathize with those who take a more prophetic and bombastic approach. Even Jesus.

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