This essay is by Marina McPhail. Marina is Georgetown student who served as an intern to FGC in 2024. This essay shows the opinions of the author only. It does not represent view of FGC or Georgetown University

Many Friends say that Benjamin Lay had a prophetic voice. That is, he knew how to stand up and make a point, even
if it made people feel uncomfortable. Who do you know that has a prophetic voice today? In Quaker communities, how do you see people responding when someone names an uncomfortable truth?

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Benjamin Lay, a Quaker abolitionist born in 1682 in Essex, England, stands as an important figure in the history of American abolition, Quaker faith, and social activism.

Lay was born to Quaker parents in the English countryside, and grew up with the faith as a central part of his life. Essex, too, was a center of radical religious thought at the time, and the regional zeitgeist surely helped shape young Lay’s understanding of protest’s role in society. Benjamin Lay may be largely responsible for the Quakers’ legacy as abolitionists, and set a precedent for how a self-critical, values-driven person of faith should question injustice, even when that act of questioning is met with intense social opposition.

As a young man, Lay worked as a shepherd and glover. However, he later grew restless, and by the age of twenty-one, had run off to London to become a sailor. During more than a decade of work at sea, Lay lived in close quarters with a diverse crew of companions. He developed many multiethnic friendships and heard stories about the brutality of the slave trade. The powerful interracial camaraderie Lay felt was strengthened by the rigid power dynamics of the ships he worked on, where tyrannical captains ruled their crews with an iron fist. At sea, it was often the work a man toiled at, not his race, that determined his place in the pecking order. In addition to encountering an exceptionally diverse range of perspectives at sea and at port, Lay found love. It was during his time as a sailor that Benjamin Lay met his future wife, Sarah.

Sarah Lay was an impressive activist in her own right, and, like her husband, spoke for abolition as a Quaker minister. While Sarah was not born a Quaker, she joined the faith as a young woman, and remained a member in good standing until her death. The pair married in 1718 and moved to Barbados, where they came into firsthand contact with the brutality of chattel slavery. Benjamin Lay had heard stories at sea about the atrocities of enslavement, but seeing the violence before his own eyes brought a raw and frantic urgency to his cries for abolition. During the Lays’ short stay on the island, Benjamin witnessed a slave end his own life to avoid being subject to a brutal whipping. The memory was seared into Lay’s mind, and personalized his visceral repulsion and horror around the slave trade. The Lays soon had had enough of the sugar-producing island colony. However sweet the Barbadian sugar was on the lips, its production was built on a system of the most violent abuse conceivable. The wealth that the colony accumulated, built on the backs of stolen and abused Africans, disgusted Lay.

Furthermore, it illuminated the tremendous hypocrisy among the enslavers and the elite of Lay’s Quaker faith. In most of the 18th century American colonies, including the Quaker capital of Pennsylvania, the people in power accepted slavery as an integral part of the economy. While it was certainly not a source of pride for most people of faith, the system was too ingrained in public life for most people to dare question. Most Quaker elites kept slaves themselves, and refused to entertain Lay’s demands for immediate and unconditional abolition. However, despite the tremendous pushback from faith leaders on the issue of abolition, Benjamin and Sarah Lay continued to fight for the rights and freedom of their fellow human beings.

In 1735, Sarah Lay passed away. Fueled by the tragedy of his beloved’s death, Benjamin Lay embarked on an even more public and fiery crusade against enslavement. Yet, while his protest was more public than ever, Lay’s private life grew increasingly solitary. He became more reclusive and self-reliant, growing his own food and sewing his own clothes in the comfort of a secluded cave. He refused to eat or wear any product that came at the cost of an animal’s life. Lay also refused to wear or consume any product whose production involved enslaved labor. He understandably abstained from sugar, a good whose violent production he witnessed firsthand in Barbados, and spun his own clothes from flax to avoid slave-picked cotton. Lay came out of his isolation only to engage in protest and attend Quaker meetings. During this time, Lay’s protest antics became so notoriously theatrical that he was banned from many Quaker meetings across Pennsylvania. However, even if he was turned away, Lay was known to sprawl his body across the walkway leading to the meetinghouse so that worshipers would have to step across his body to enter the building.

If allowed into a meeting, Lay had a reputation of engaging in grandiose speech and fiery condemnation of the Quaker slave-owning elite. He would often come dressed in strange clothing, and once appeared at a meeting in military fatigues, bearing a long knife and a large book filled with a sachet of fake blood that he pierced at the culmination of his speech to demonstrate the violence of slavery. Once, Lay kidnapped the son of an enslaver family for a day to demonstrate the panic felt by enslaved mothers at having their children stripped away from them. With this flair for radical activism, Lay moved from meetinghouse to meetinghouse, spreading an impassioned gospel for abolition and moral righteousness.

To add to the popular spectacle of Benjamin Lay was the man’s peculiar stature. He was said to have a curved spine and hunchback, with skinny legs that made his frame appear even more unusually proportioned. Despite his physical deformities, Lay’s mind was sharp. However, that didn’t stop critics from routinely questioning Lay’s mental capacity as a way to undercut his articulate arguments for abolition. Benjamin Lay didn’t often find himself preaching to an agreeable audience. However, the man didn’t seek comfort, praise, or agreement. He viewed it his duty to illuminate the hypocrisy he saw corrupting those at the very top of his faith.

Benjamin Lay provides an early example of a key Quaker value: self-reflection–even at the price of personal discomfort and reevaluation of a comfortable status quo. Lay was adamant in questioning the faith he cared so deeply about, not because he wanted to undercut the legitimacy of the spiritual pillars of his community, but because he cared so deeply about the integrity of those principles. He did not call out the Quaker practice or his God for being sinful or hypocritical, just criticized those who he saw as violating the most sacred tenets of his faith. Faith values were the justification for his attacks, not the subjects of them.

In this modern era of complex intersecting identities, political divisions, and ideological extremism, we can look to Benjamin Lay as an example for what moral clarity and bravery look like in the face of injustice. Lay demonstrates the importance of examining existing systems with skepticism and keeping an eye out for those that are oppressed by the status quo. He shows us the importance of speaking truth to power, and he illustrates how faith can be a powerful tool in promoting equal justice for all.