John Woolman's Plain Coat

In 1758, John Woolman stood before the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends in an undyed wool coat. The other Quakers wore fine fabrics — indigo, crimson — colors produced by enslaved hands in Caribbean dye works. Woolman had given up his profitable tailoring shop in Mount Holly, New Jersey, because prosperity was making him comfortable with injustice.

For twenty years, Woolman walked — literally walked, refusing carriages built on exploited labor — from farmstead to farmstead across the colonies, sitting in parlors with slaveholding Quakers, gently asking them to consider what their fasting and worship meant while human beings toiled in their fields. He did not shout. He did not condemn. He simply would not stop showing up.

His plain coat unsettled people more than any sermon could. It was a garment that asked a question: What are we willing to give up so that others might be free?

By 1776, four years after Woolman's death, the Quakers became the first religious body in America to formally prohibit slaveholding among their members. The chains loosened. The yoke broke.

Isaiah 58 tells us that the Almighty is unimpressed by religious performance that coexists with oppression. The fast God chooses is the one that costs us something — our comfort, our profit, our dyed coats. When we loose the bonds of wickedness and let the oppressed go free, then, the prophet promises, our light breaks forth like the dawn.