My mother’s been a Quaker for 40 years. They are the only religious group where members consistently came around to opposing slavery, and they were built on the initial idea of choice of abolition through individual internal acceptance of all, as. Every individual has god within them.. The founder, Fox, said he disagreed with slavery in 1652, and others followed. He and others wrote letters to call for the end to the institution in Barbados for example, where some brought their slaves to church in protest of inequality, showing that all belong in the house of god, even before the movement really grew. The first abolitionist tract in the American colonies was written in 1688 in Germantown near Philly, a state founded by a Quaker. The issue with the Quakers, unlike all other Christian sects (though it’s not Christian any more) is that individuals can’t be forced to believe or adopt a principle they don’t come to believe in through their own free will and fee decision. The Quakers could not universally adopt abolition, the way other sects could, because forcing a belief on someone is the opposite of belief. Belief must come from internal reflection from the God or spirit inside someone and from above someone. Thus adoption is done through inspiration and challenges morally by someone to slavery through pacifist ways of non-force. I’ve studied the internal spiritual “logic” of this religion and find it to be the hardest to grasp and accept spiritually and practice though perhaps one of the easiest to mentally understand. Since all other Christian sects are structured from a more top down authority way of “teaching” or lecturing to followers, building up expectations to them, this is the one that stands radically in opposition to the rest. A speaker or talker in unstructured meetings especially can only speak when the spirit moves them and not to make others conform or be preached to. That is when the silence is broken, and that is hardest to practice.