Background
Quakers, also called Friends, belong to a historically Christian denomination known
formally as the Religious Society of Friends or Friends Church. In the early 1800s, Elias
Hicks, a traveling Quaker minister from New York, began to break with traditional Quaker
beliefs, and his religious views were claimed to be universalist and to contradict Quakers'
historical orthodox Christian beliefs and practices. Hicks' Gospel preaching and teaching
precipitated the Great Separation of 1827, which resulted in a parallel system of Yearly
Meetings in America, joined by Friends from Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and
Baltimore. They were referred to by opponents as Hicksites and sometimes as Orthodox.
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