That of God in Every One: Fox v. Jones

An edited version of this text was “Thought for the Week” in the 1 May 2026 edition of the Friend.

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There is that of God in every one. Therefore, there is that of God in Donald J. “grab ’em by the pussy” Trump, apparently. What does it mean for us to answer that of God in a corrupt politician, a greedy, venial man? One who seems to have no moral or ethical sense, who’s every instinct seems to be to acquire wealth and power through exploitative deals and corruption.

There is that of God in every one. Therefore, there is that of God in Benjamin Netayahu, apparently. What does it mean for us to answer that of God in a corrupt politician, a violent man, apparently a genocidal racist? One who seems to have no moral or ethical sense, who’s every instinct seems to be to acquire wealth and power through exploitative deals and corruption. One who embraces mass death as a tool.

Yes, we can analyze the development of these characters, and we can come to an understanding of who they came to be the way they are today. But is ‘that of God’ in them really the driver for that? What even is a ‘that of God’?

Fox

In 1970 Lewis Benson published That of God in Every Man — What Did George Fox Mean By It? Of course we are Quakers, not Fox-ites and so we are not bound to agree with everything that Fox said, wrote, thought, or believed. On the other hand, if we’re going to quote him by repeating ‘that of God in every one’ quite as often as we do, perhaps we should attend to what he probably meant. Benson traces the 20th-century sense of that phrase, a sort of inherent divine aspect to every person, to the work of Rufus Jones.

Benson writes:

[…] we must take into account that, at the turn of the century, a revolution was taking place in Quaker life and thought. A new interpretation was beginning to appear which claimed that at the center of the Quaker faith is a belief about the nature of man, and that the ancestry of this belief goes back in direct line “to the Socratic movement in philosophy of those who find God involved and implicated in the nature of normal self-consciousness and in the idea of the Good toward which we live”.

 The earliest instance of the revived use of “that of God” that I have been able to discover is found in Rufus Jones’ “Introduction” to his abridged edition of Fox’s Journal, first published in 1903, in which he expresses his opinion that the “larger truth” implicit in Fox’s early experiences is the discovery that there is a “universal principle, that the Spirit of God reaches every man.” He then adds: “To all sorts and conditions of men, Fox continually makes appeal to ‘that of God’ in them or to ‘the principle of God within man’…In every instance he means that the Divine Being operates directly on the human life” [66]. In the following year he wrote: “What was the Inner Light? The simplest answer is: The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is something Divine, ‘Something of God’ in the human soul”. As a consequence of statements like these, the phrase “that of God in every man” began to acquire a meaning for twentieth century Friends that it did not have for Fox.

And Benson drily observes that, close to the end of his life, perhaps too late to do anything about it, Jones actually went and read what Fox had written about that of God in every one and came to the conclusion that his, Jones’, concept of that was not supported by the text. Oh dear.

This matters, because throughout the 20th century a belief in the divinity, even if very slight, very partial, of others was promoted by many Quakers sources as the reason why we opposed capital punishment, the reason why we opposed killing in war. This divine aspect of others, however tiny, however hard to discern, was promoted by many Quakers as the reason why we supported equality and egalitarianism, why we sought equality of outcomes and redistribution.

Well, maybe.

How hard is it to discern that in Trump? In Netanyahu? If those people really do have within them an aspect of divinity, a facet, however tiny, of a God of infinite compassion then I think we can reasonably ask: what is going on!?

As Benson’s analysis of Fox shows, Fox doesn’t seem to have meant that everyone is “a little bit God”. He meant that everyone is born receptive to the divine, that everyone is, in principle, capable of attending to the thing that allows their conscience to distinguish good from ill, righteous from corrupt, virtue from sin. Of course, they might not pay attention. They might even choose to disregard it.

Roots

The Society of Friends is at its heart and in its roots a Christian church. Those of us who are not Christians are nevertheless, for whatever reason, drawn, prompted, led to cleave to an essentially Christian tradition and an essentially Christian moral and ethical standard. Maybe it’s the that of God in us. Whyever, however it happens, we can check to see what the Christian response, confirmed by our prayerful spirit-led discernement says we should do with someone like Trump, like Netanhau. And it is: to love them.

We don’t have to like them. We do have to have a care for their welfare, to hope and work for their redemption. Not because they are a little bit God, but because that’s what the Christian God, via our capacity to respond to it (or whatever) leads us to do. Despite the fact that they are loathsome degenerates. We are not to let that stop us. In scripture we’re given the example of Jesus extending his love to sinners and tax farmers. The latter often being, as it happens, violent extorters, corrupt greedy venial men. Not because Jesus saw some aspect of the Father in them, but because of the alignment with the Father in his nature.

Maybe ‘that of God in every one’ isn’t meant to pull good intentions out of us towards others, maybe it’s meant to push them from inside us.