Three hundred and six years ago, on July 30, 1718, William Penn died, in England. Aged 73, he had been in very poor health for almost six years, after a massive stroke in 1712.

This is not exactly news. And in recent years, Penn has been out of fashion in many Quaker quarters — disowned and erased for having owned slaves, who labored at his estate Pennsbury in his proprietary colony of Pennsylvania.

The slaveowning was bad, and should not be forgotten. But if we cancel and further erase Penn, it is Friends, and friends of Friends, who are in my judgment the big losers.  Especially now.

We’ll be losers, I believe, on two counts. First, by all reasonable measures I can find, Penn was “punished” for this sin by fate if not in law during his own lifetime, more than fully, and piling on is becoming hollow and histrionic. After all, eight of his children, and a much-loved wife, died young; he lost all his wealth; he spent years in prison; and died penniless and in disgrace. Many career criminals have been subjected to lesser penalties.

And second, while the slaveowning was bad, it was by no means all of Penn’s legacy, and does not discredit the best of it. And we need that best part. It seems to me we need it more each month.

That’s because the best, most consistent, most timely and relevant part of Penn’s legacy is his devotion to religious liberty, pluralism and toleration.

Penn was first arrested for witnessing to this devotion, just by being a Quaker, in 1666 ; he was 22. In 1668, after publishing a defense of the new movement and arguing for religious liberty and toleration, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for eight months. Altogether he served several years in prison for his religious liberty witness, in which religious liberty was integral to his Quakerism. He kept advocating for it, facing jail several more times.

Further, the big achievement of his life, the founding of Pennsylvania, took form as a pioneering — and enduring — bastion of religious liberty and toleration. It made real the practical alternative to Europe’s (so-called) Christian civilization, in which religion had for centuries been a tool of persecution, inquisition, massacre and war.

Some might think that what Penn called his “Holy Experiment” was just good luck, privilege and inheritance: his father, a famed British admiral, was owed money by a profligate King Charles II; and when the admiral died, the debt remained, payable to his son William.

In 1680, to avoid actually paying the debt, the king granted Penn a vast, largely uncharted (by Europeans) stretch of land far across the Atlantic ocean. Besides clearing the debt, Charles expected Penn to entice the troublesome Quakers to follow him there, far away from England and out of the king’s long hair (though mainly his wig).

If the Pennsylvania grant was good fortune, the stamp Penn put on it as a haven of religious toleration and liberty was no accident. But its survival as such was by no means assured.

Establishing it was Penn’s dream; maintaining it became his calling, and burden.

Penn spent most of the next three decades, until disabled by a stroke, fighting to keep the colony from being snatched away by schemers in London, who had the ear of Charles and his royal successors. (What one king could giveth, Penn soon learned, another king could be persuaded to taketh away . . . .)

Some of the most determined schemers were in the Anglican church,  the official, state-supported church of England and most of its colonies. They wanted to become the established church in Pennsylvania, Britain’s largest colony at the time, and displace the Quaker influence.

The Anglican drive involved more than doctrinal rivalry: becoming the established church would also meant gaining access to much public tax money, and big chunks of political power. The church party intriguers never gave up.

In 1710, Penn summarized the years and toll of this struggle in a letter:

When that government was first granted me . . . I had then good reason to hope that if by my industry and vast expenses I should make a settled colony of it, and add such an improvement to the dominions of the Crown, I might without interruption peaceably enjoy the advantages of it . . . yet so it proved, that soon after its first settlement the easy ear the ministry from time to time lent to the unjust complaints of some designing and prejudiced men, has rendered my possession of it a perpetual uneasiness.

Penn Biographer Andrew Murphy charts how this endless struggle, combined with Penn’s ineptitude as a business man, ultimately bankrupted him. In those days, such insolvency was a crime; and Penn’s final imprisonment, in 1702, was not for some Quaker martyr’s selfless witness, but from the public disgrace of unpaid debt. (Wealthy Friends quietly took up a collection, enough to get their tarnished cofounder out of stir, but left him still deep in debt, and in 1712, fully disabled.)

[By] late May 1711, he heard directly from worried and restive colonists, and not Friends only: “other conscientious people of other persuasions” dearly hoped that their children would continue to enjoy the liberties they had enjoyed in Pennsylvania. They worried that a surrender [by Penn] would result in increased taxes and “many sufferings and inconveniences” for Friends, and that it would also reflect poorly on Penn himself. . . . Then again, they acknowledged that Penn had endured nearly three decades of criticism, personal attacks, and condemnation, and had invested enormous sums for little return. Even more critically (and self-servingly), they admitted that the unremitting hostility of Anglicans, whose “frequent attempts to wrest the government out of thy hands” and to deprive Friends of the benefits of the Affirmation Act aimed “to make thee and Friends dissenters under thy own government.”. . . .

Even after Penn’s death in 1718, this struggle went on. But then it was two of Penn’s own sons, Thomas and John, who became the chief antagonists. They quit Quakerism, became Anglicans, and tried to turn the colony into an Anglican-dominated money machine, in part to pay off debts inherited from their famous, feckless father. The Penn heirs’ misrule in Pennsylvania was only ended by the American Revolution in 1775.

So William Penn’s personal history may have stumbled to an inglorious end in an unmarked grave northwest of London. But in his distant Commonwealth, major pieces of his vision endured through decades of political turmoil and revolution: A democratic impulse animated the local government; and more important for our reflection today, Penn’s vision of religious liberty and toleration had put down tenacious roots. The growing population included immigrants from many other groups than Quakers, who had fled religious persecution. They stoutly resisted the efforts of the apostate Penn sons and others to impose and exploit religious authority.

Massachusetts suffered under witch-hunting Puritan theocrats; other colonies were taxed to support Anglican establishments; Maryland seesawed among Catholics, Puritans and Anglicans. But while Quakers were numerous and influential in early Pennsylvania, that “Holy Experiment” had no established (i.e., tax-supported) church at all; and this radical example shaped the ideals of the nation that it helped give birth to.

That was then, 300-plus years ago. How is this history of value to us now?

Good question, and I think the answer is very clear. First, because Penn’s model of religious liberty has persisted to this day, enough so that we mostly take it for granted. But we shouldn’t, because what goes around comes around, and many of today’s most polarizing social struggles involve organized and militant efforts to replace the Penn-inspired religious liberty and pluralism with modern versions of top-down religious-based oppression, enforced by taxation and criminal law.

There is not space here to list all the burgeoning efforts to abolish  the constitutional prohibition of an “establishment of religion.” Mentioning four will suffice: one is that billions of tax dollars are now being annually sucked away from public to private religious schools via vouchers. The second is the state suppression of reproductive rights, by laws many of which carry criminal penalties. The third is increasing suppression of LGBTQ rights based on religious prohibitions. Allied to this are book bans in schools and libraries, aimed to sanitize or end any encounters with the challenging U. S. history of slavery and racism, and discussion of other controversial topics. (This is definitely not a complete list.)

More than one group is involved in these lavishly-funded assaults, but the catchall term  “Christian nationalism” covers the bulk.  Whereas the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights  states flatly that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” the Christian nationalist forces aim to enthrone such an “establishment” on the installment plan, with the “blessing” of the right-wing  Supreme Court majority. They are steadily making inroads.

For me, this is where the importance of William Penn’s main legacy becomes very valuable as a rallying point and resource for resistance.

I suggest Friends and others would benefit by reclaiming and studying his example (without any whitewashing of the facts of slaveholding.) His steadfastness in these efforts are a model we should prepare to adapt: he started long before Pennsylvania began — and kept at it for fifty years, until his health failed.

It could well take us and our children many more decades to reverse some of the recent assaults. Why not look to Penn as a resource to understand how he managed to keep up morale and stamina in his efforts, and rooted these values in social structures able to outlive him.

After all, despite Penn’s failing on slavery (along with many other early Friends), his Commonwealth was still the first state to abolish slavery within its borders. And with its sturdy culture of pluralist tolerance, it also became one of the main incubators and strongholds for the later abolitionist movement. It was also a major milestone for many who risked all to escape bondage and take to the Underground Railroad.

Not least, progressive Quakers need to reclaim William Penn’s major legacy because the forces of Christian nationalism in the Pennsylvania region are continuing to work actively to pervert him and his witness into a mascot and guru figure for their own autoritarian ambitions.

A report on this effort was posted here in 2022. It featured, Abby Abildness, a longtime Trumpian activist who is spearheading this “transformation” of Penn into a mouthpiece for theocracy.  When we first looked her up,  Abildness was leading “prayer marches” around the Pennsylvania state capitol after the 2020 election, in pursuit of a promised miracle which would shift the presidential election results there to make Donald Trump the winner.

After January 6, 2021, when that “miracle” failed to materialize, Abildness didn’t give up. Just a couple of weeks ago, on July 12, she was on a far-right propaganda “news” outlet, “Real America’s Voice,” hyping a new film she’ll be streaming in October (just in time for the 2024 presidential election, an indicator that, no matter how the national election turns out, this crusade will continue). The video will expand and update the same message, which identifies Penn as a kind of American rightwing messianic prophet with Pennsylvania as the Christian nationalist model and promised land.

The film’s title is, naturally enough, Penn’s Seed.

Penn did plant valuable seeds in Pennsylvania. But they bore a very different and healthy kind of fruit. Not so much for his sake, but for our own and that of those who come after, I hope Friends will reclaim his legacy of freedom and rights before it is lost or completely perverted, not only on video, but in our real lives.