I’ve seen too many of my thirty-something contempories in the Society of Friends leave. Last week I had lunch with yet another who’s gone. “I feel like he’s just another eroded-away grain of sand in the delta of Quaker decline. He’s yet another Friend that Quakerism can’t afford to loose, but which Quakerism has lost. No one’s mourning the fact that he’s lost. No one has barely noticed.”

Updating a story we "brought you back in July":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000008.php , the U.S. Justice Department wants to "drop the charges against the only person charged in an American court over the September 11 attacks two years ago":http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/national/26TeRR.html. The Justice Department doesn't want to allow Zacarias Moussaoui or his defense team to interview other suspected terrorists. What does Moussaoui know? What do his potential defense witnesses know? And why doesn't U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft want these people to speak in an open trial? Moussaoui has admitted being a member of Al Qaeda but any information he or his witnesses know is at least two years old. Why is a trial so worrisome that the U.S. would throw away a trial over it?

Filmmaker Michael Moore's satiric documentary on gun ownership in the United States is out on video and DVD now. "Bowling for Columbine" is pure Moore: he goes around the country talking with gun owners and gun victims but also ties it all in with a culture of militarism and violence. Not unpredictably, the pro-gun lobbies have campaigned against the movie and have tried to discredit it. In the last month or so, plenty of blogs and even some of the cable news networks have been full of exposes of the filmmaker's supposed deceits. "Now Moore response to his critics":http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/ If you haven't seen "Bowling for Columbine" go right out to your video store and do. Moore is one of the best satirists in the country today. He combines humor with horror and produces work that is always compelling to watch.

When Bush bypassed the U.N. to start the war with Iraq singlehandedly with only a few major allies, he took a big gamble with world opinion. His Administration painted the dissenting nations--especially France--as self-interested cowards who hid behind their talk of international morality. But he hoped that they would come help the war effort after the dust settled and the occupation was in place. But as the _Washington Post_ reports today, Bush Fails to Gain Pledges on Troops or Funds for Iraq. The failure will be borne by U.S. army reservists who will spend even longer times away from home and by American taxpayers who will be financing a much larger percentage of the occupation costs.

As the months of Iraq occupation have gone by it has become more and more clear that no weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. Now the Bush Administration is preparing the world for the official declaration that they didn't exist. An Administration "source" has told the BBC that the "Iraq Survey Group will report that there aren't any weapons.":news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3135932.stm Not that this means Bush will admit he overtly over-exaggerated the case for war. The report will blame Saddam Hussein for deceiving the world.

everyone's abuzz at President Bush's explicit statement that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This was in response to a statement over the weekend by Vice President Dick Cheney, where _he_ said: bq. we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11. It's a rather pathetic admission by the President, since anyone who follows the news carefully already knew there was no connection. (Unfortunately the Washington Post found last month that nearly "70% of Americans don't read carefully enough":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000138.php to figure this out) But don't worry that the President might finally be getting a conscience and undergoing a bout of uncharacteristic integrity. He followed the statement by saying that "there's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al-Qaida ties." Yes, Mister President, there is a question. It's an important one, one you used to rev up the country to war. You have never provided evidence and now even while you admit to having no evidence you continue to dupe the public. What do you mean by there being "ties"? Al-Qaida has well-documented "ties" to both the United States and Saudi Arabia. Stop playing fey little word games, stop being an asanine preppy who can't come clean. If there is no evidence of active support, then stop the misleading lies. Arab News has an interesting take. They note all the confusion and askWhy now, two years on — after the invasion of Iraq that so benefited from the US public believing that Saddam Hussein was involved — has Bush come clean?

For anyone who’s followed the link from my page to Kenneth Sutton’s site and wondered why there was nothing new: he’s moved it. It’s now at “http://kenneth.typepad.com”:kenneth.typepad.com. Here’s a link to his latest Quaker entry, on the “nature of religious services”:http://kenneth.typepad.com/blog/2003/08/mostrecentrel.html.

From _Slate's_ David Plotz, "What You What You Think You Know About Sept. 11...But Don't":http://slate.msn.com/id/2088092/, from the twentieth hijacker to the Iraq connection. From the Philadelphia _Daily News_, "twenty questions about 9/11 we still don't have answers to":http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/6742902.htm.

It was Adolf Hitler, the world's most notrious dictator, who told us that "The great mass of people ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.":http://www.bartleby.com/66/59/28359.html And it is in the vein that I will pass along the latest poll by MS-NBC, that has found that "70% of American people think Hussein and 9/11 are linked":www.msnbc.com/news/962627.asp?0cv=CB20. This is perhaps the biggest lie of my lifetime. I fear for the very soul of my nation, that so many of my fellow Americans would deny all evidence to allow themselves to go along with this myth. There has been no evidence of any connection. Most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, opposed to the U.S.-backed ruling Saudi family. Al Qaeda is a group of religious fundamentalists trained in part with CIA money who have always been opposed to the secular socialist regime of Saddam Hussein. There's no mystery who the hijackers were or why they chose the U.S. as their target. Conspiracy theories aren't needed to explain the events of two years ago. So why then do we believe Saddam blew up the World Trade Center towers? Maybe there are too many of us who love our lives of convenience, who love our big cars, our big homes, our opulent lifestyles and maybe we know that deep down our lifestyle is based on control of Middle east oil. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein has become the demon we pour all our worldly fears and guilt into, so that we think all the world's troubles must come from him. Whatever the reason, the results are a kind of mass hysteria. Seven our of ten Americans believe in a conspiracy theory so divorced from any evidence that history surely prepares to mock us. every so often I'll read of the outlandish conspiracy theories running through the Arab world--like the one that the planes were manned by Israelies and that all the Jews who worked in the towers were warned not to come to work--and I'll wonder how a people could live in such a state of unreality. But then I see American's myths: just as incredible, just as based on our own demons. We have based a war and a foreign policy on the boogie-men of our subconsciences. We have killed for our fears. What if we were to wake up to reality: could we still justify the war and occupation of Iraq with the imperiousness and surety that we've shown so far?

In the New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that the Iraq war was a giant bait-and-switch in his article, Other People's Sacrifice. bq. Mr. Bush and his officials portrayed the invasion of Iraq as an urgent response to an imminent threat, and used war fever to win the midterm election. Then they insisted that the costs of occupation and reconstruction would be minimal, and used the initial glow of battlefield victory to push through yet another round of irresponsible tax cuts. Would Bush have gotten his war or his tax cuts if the American people had been given all the information straight-up, with no "spin" and no "sexing up"? Will Iraq be an even more dangerous breeding ground for terrorists? The U.S. occupation now labels any armed resisters to U.S. rule as terrorists and perhaps the line is blurring. Perhaps we've insured that Iraqi nationalists will attack Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. even Iraqis opposed to Saddam Hussein don't necessarily want U.S. rule, (especially when the "occupying forces are running the place with ex-Saddam loyalists":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000130.php, "see here also":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000027.php). One poll says "More Americans think the Iraq War will increase terrorism":http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&e=22&u=/ap/20030909/ap_on_re_us/attacks_polls_2. Like most wars, the War on Terrorism simply feeds future wars and gives job security to military industries around the world.

A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.

Reading now (Ninth Month 2003): "The Younger Evangelicals" by Robert E. Webber. Webber looks at the cultural and generational shifts happening within the Christian Evangelical movement.At the bottom of this page is a handy chart of the generational differences in theology, ecclesiastical paradigm, church polity. When I first saw it I said "yes!" to almost each category, as it clearly hits at the generational forces hitting Quakerism.

Unfortunately many Friends in leadership positions don't really understand the problems facing Quakerism. Well, that's not true: they do, but they don't understand the larger shifts behind them and think that they just need to redouble their efforts using the old methods and models. The Baby Boom generation in charge knows the challenge is to reach out to seekers in their twenties or thirties, but they do this by developing programs that would have appealed to them when they were that age. The current crop of outreach projects and peace initiatives are all very 1980 in style. There's no recognition that the secular peace community that drew seekers in twenty years ago no longer exists and that today's seekers are looking for something deeper, something more personal and more real.

When younger Friends are included in the surveys and committees, they tend to be either the uninvolved children of important Baby Boom generation Quakers, or those thirty-something Friends that culturally and philosophically fit into the older paradigms. It's fine that these two types of Friends are around, but neither group challenges Baby Boomer group-think. Outspoken younger Friends are ostracized and usually leave the Society in frustration after a few years.

It's a shame. In my ten years attending Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, I easily met a hundred young seekers who cycled through, attending for periods ranging from a few months to a few years. I would often ask them why they stopped coming. Sometimes they were just nice and said life was too busy, but of course that's not a real answer: you make time for the things that are important and that feed you in some way. But others told me they found the Meeting unwelcoming, or Friends too self-congratulatory or superficial, the community more social than spiritual. I went back to Central Philly one First Day after a two year absence and it was depressing how it was all the same faces. This is not a knock on Central Philly in particular, since the same dynamics are at work in most of the "Liberal" Meetings I've attended, both in the FGC and FUM worlds--it's a generational cultural phenomenon. I have never found the young Quaker seeker community I know is out there, though I've glimpsed its constituent faces a hundred times: always just out of reach, never gelling into a movement.

I'm not sure what the answers are. Luckily it's not my job to have answers: I leave that up to Christ and only concern myself with being as faithful a servant to the Spirit as I can be (this spirit-led leadership style is exactly one of the generational shifts Webber talks about). I've been given a clear message that my job is to stay with the Society of Friends, that I might be of use someday. But there are a few pieces that I think will come out:

A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends

What babies were thrown out with the bathwater by turn-of-the-century Friends who embraced modernism and rationalism and turned their back on traditional testimonies? This will require challenging some of the sacred myths of contemporary Quakerism. There are a lot that aren't particularly Quaker and we need to start admitting to that. I've personally taken up plain dress and find the old statements on the peace testimony much deeper and more meaningful than contemporary ones. I'm a professional webmaster and run a prominent pacifist site, so it's not like I'm stuck in the nineteenth century; instead, I just think these old testimonies actually speak to our condition in the twenty-first Century.

A Desire to Grow

Too many Friends are happy with their nice cozy meetings. The meetings serve as family and as a support group, and a real growth would disrupt our established patterns. If Quakerism grew tenfold over the next twenty years we'd have to build meetinghouses, have extra worship, reorganize our committees. Involved Friends wouldn't know all the other involved Friends in their yearly meeting. With more members we'd have to become more rigorous and disciplined in our committee meetings. Quakerism would feel different if it were ten times larger: how many of us would just feel uncomfortable with that. Many of our Meetings are ripe for growth, being in booming suburbs or thriving urban centers, but year after year they stay small. Many simply neglect and screw up outreach or religious education efforts as a way of keeping the meeting at its current size and with its current character.

A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment

Religion in America has become yet another consumer choice, an entertainment option for Sunday morning, and this paradigm is true with Friends. We complain how much time our Quaker work takes up. We complain about clearness committees or visioning groups that might take up a Saturday afternoon. A more involved Quakerism would realize that the hour on First Day morning is in many ways the least important time to our Society. Younger seekers are looking for connections that are deeper and that will require time. We can't build a Society on the cheap. It's not money we need to invest, but our hearts and time.

I recently visited a Meeting that was setting up its first adult religious education program. When it came time to figure out the format, a weighty Friend declared that it couldn't take place on the first Sunday of the month because that was when the finance committee met; the second Sunday was out because of the membership care committee; the third was out because of business meeting and so forth. It turned out that religious education could be squeezed into one 45-minute slot on the fourth Sunday of every month. Here was a small struggling meeting in the middle of an sympathetic urban neighborhood and they couldn't spare even an hour a month on religious education or substantive outreach to new members. Modern Friends should not exist to meet in committees.

A renewal of discipline and oversight

These are taboo words for many modern Friends. But we've taken open-hearted tolerance so far that we've forgotten who we are. What does it mean to be a Quaker? Seekers are looking for answers. Friends have been able to provide them with answers in the past: both ways to conduct oneself in the world and ways to reach the divine. Many of us actually yearn for more care, attention and oversight in our religious lives and more connection with others.

A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

Too much of Quaker culture is still rooted in elitist wealthy Philadelphia Main Line "Wasp" culture. For generations of Friends, the Society became an ethnic group you were born into. Too many Friends still care if your name is "Roberts," "Jones," "Lippencott," "Thomas," "Brinton." A number of nineteenth-century Quaker leaders tried to make this a religion of family fiefdoms. There was a love of the world and an urge for to be respected by the outside world (the Episcopalians wouldn't let you into the country clubs if you wore plain dress or got too excited about religion).

Today we too often confuse the culture of those families with Quakerism. The most obvious example to me is the oft-repeated phrase: "Friends don't believe in proselytizing." Wrong: we started off as great speakers of the Truth, gaining numbers in great quantities. It was the old Quaker families who started fretting about new blood in the Society, for they saw birthright membership as more important than baptism by the Holy Spirit. We've got a lot of baggage left over from this era, things we need to re-examine, including: our willingness to sacrifice Truth-telling in the name of politeness; an over-developed intellectualism that has become snobbery against those without advanced schooling; our taboo about being too loud or too "ethnic" in Meeting.

Note that I haven't specifically mentioned racial diversity. This is a piece of the work we need to do and I'm happy that many Friends are working on it. But I think we'll all agree that it will take more than a few African Americans with graduate degrees to bring true diversity. The Liberal branch of Friends spends a lot of time congratulating itself on being open, tolerant and self-examining and yet as far as I can tell we're the least ethnically-diverse branch of American Quakers (I'm pretty sure, anyone with corroboration?). We need to re-examine and challenge the unwritten norms of Quaker culture that don't arise from faith. When we have something to offer besides upper-class liberalism, we'll find we can talk to a much wider selection of seekers.

Can we do it?

Can we do these re-examinations without ripping our Society apart? I don't know. I don't think the age of Quaker schisms is over, I just think we have a different discipline and church polity that let us pretend the splits aren't there. We just self-select ourselves into different sub-groups. I'm not sure if this can continue indefinitely. Every week our Meetings for Worship bring together people of radically different beliefs and non-beliefs. Instead of worship, we have individual meditation in a group setting, where everyone is free to believe what they want to believe. This isn't Friends' style and it's not satisfying to many of us. I know this statement may seem like sacrilege to many Friends who value tolerance above all. But I don't think I'm the only one who would rather worship God than Silence, who longs for a deeper religious fellowship than that found in most contemporary Meetings. Quakerism will change and Modernism isn't the end of history.

How open will we all be to this process? How honest will we get? Where will our Society end up? We're not the only religion in America that is facing these questions.

See also:

On Quaker Ranter:

• It Will Be There in Decline Our Entire Lives. There's a generation of young Christians disillusioned by modern church institutionalism who are writing and blogging under the "post-modern" "emergent church" labels. Do Friends have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism?
• Post-Liberals & Post-Evangelicals?, my observations from the November 2003 "Indie Allies" meet-up.
• Sodium Free Friends, a post of mine urging Friends to actively engage with our tradition and not just selectively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a seventeen century Thich Nhat Hanh. "We poor humans are looking for ways to transcend the crappiness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world and Quakerism has something to say about that."
• Peace and Twenty-Somethings: are the Emergent Church seekers creating the kinds of youth-led intentional communities that the peace movement inspired in the 1970s?

Elsewhere:

• From Evangelical Friends Church Southwest comes an emergent church" church planting project called Simple Churches. I love their intro: "As your peruse the links from this site please recognize that the Truth reflected in essays are often written with a 'prophetic edge', that is sharp, non compromising and sometimes radical perspective. We believe Truth can be received without 'cursing the darkness' and encourage you to reflect upon finding the 'candle' to light, personally, as you apply what you hear the Lord speaking to you."
• The emergent church movement hit the New York Times in February 2004. Here's a link to the article and my thoughts about it.
• Orthodox Twenty-Somethings, a great article from TheOoze, and my intro to the article Want to understand us?
• The blogger Punkmonkey talks about what a missional community of faith would look like and it sounds a lot like what I dream of: "a missional community of faith is a living breathing transparent community of faith willing to get messy while reach out to, and bringing in, those outside the current community."

	Traditional Evangelicals 1950-1975	Pragmatic Evangelicals 1975-2000	Younger Evangelicals 2000-
Theological Commitment	Christianity as a rational worldview	Christianity as therapy Answers needs	Christianity as a community of faith. Ancient/Reformation
Apologetics Style	Evidential Foundational	Christianity as meaning-giver Experiential Personal Faith	Embrace the metanarrative Embodied apologetic Communal faith
Ecclesial Paradigm	Constantinian Church Civil Religion	Culturally sensitive church Market Driven	Missional Church Counter cultural
Church Style	Neighbourhood churches Rural	Megachuruch Suburban Market targeted	Small Church Back to cities Intercultural
Leadership Style	Pastor centred	Managerial Model CEO	Team ministry Priesthood of all
Youth Ministry	Church-centred programs	Outreach Programs Weekend fun retreats	Prayer, Bible Study, Worship, Social Action
Education	Sunday School Information centred	Target generational groups and needs	Intergenerational formation in community
Spirituality	Keep the rules	Prosperity and success	Authentic embodiment
Worship	Traditional	Contemporary	Convergence
Art	Restrained	Art as illustration	Incarnational embodiment
Evangelism	Mass evangelism	Seeker Service	Process evangelism
Activists	Beginnings of evangelical social action	Need-driving social action (divorce groups, drug rehab	Rebuild cities and neighborhoods

Okay, so the justification for the war on Iraq was the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had ready to use against the U.S.. The U.S. knew where the weapons were and a war would find them. Well, the war came and no weapons were found. So the story changed. The U.S. attacked Iraq because Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which he would then surely use against the U.S. The U.S. knew where the weapons were being developed and they would be uncovered any day now. But five months of inspectors combing Iraq have found nothing. So now a new story. The U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control tells us that whether Hussein had the weapons "isn't really the issue." But the war is still justified because "Saddam had scientists who might someday work on a weapons program that might someday build a weapon that might someday be used against the U.S. or one of its allies":www.abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20030904_2224.html bq. Bolton said that Saddam kept "a coterie" of scientists he was preserving for the day when he could build nuclear weapons unhindered by international constraints. I'm personally just waiting for the next level of Bush Administration retreat. Wait for Bolton to announce next month that it didn't matter if Saddam didn't actually have any trained nuclear scientists, as occupation inspectors had uncovered evidence that North Badgdad High taught calculus for its eleventh graders. "They might go on to work on a weapons program someday, we had to invade before Saddam could teach them Calc II." The excuses just get more pathetic as the truth becomes harder to ignore: the Bush Administration lied to the American people. The only winners in this war are the energy companies rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure with U.S. taxpayer dollars. It's time to connect the dots, to stop paying investigators to comb Iraq for the non-existant weapons. The inspectors should be recalled to Washington to investigate the very real bamboozle (dare I say "conspiracy"?) that foisted a war on the American people. We've been played for chumps.

The _Times_ today looks at the "Bush Administration back-tracking on Iraq and North Korea":www.nytimes.com/2003/09/05/international/middleeast/05ASSe.html. Military firepower and bullying intimidation have only gone so far and diplomacy is gaining an upper hand. bq. "The question is whether the world is ready to pick the United States up off the floor and dust them off," said a senior Western envoy involved in discussions on Iraq. "A lot of people aren't ready yet."

Pictures of Baby Theodore Kelley Heiland!