Look­ing back at Friends’ responses to the Chris­t­ian Peace­maker hostages

When four Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers were taken hostage in Iraq late last Novem­ber, a lot of Quaker orga­ni­za­tions stum­bled in their response. With Tom Fox we were con­fronted by a full-on lib­eral Quaker Chris­t­ian wit­ness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic wit­ness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many orga­ni­za­tions that couldn’t man­age any­thing beyond the boil­er­plate social jus­tice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in cap­tiv­ity but through­out the ordeal I was mad at the exposed frac­ture lines between reli­gious wit­ness and social activism.

When­ever a sit­u­a­tion involv­ing inter­na­tional issues of peace and wit­ness hap­pens, the Quaker insti­tu­tions I’m clos­est to auto­mat­i­cally defer to the more polit­i­cal Quaker orga­ni­za­tions: for exam­ple, the head of Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence told staff to direct out­siders inquir­ing about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a com­mit­ted vol­un­teer. The Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee and Friends Com­mit­tee on National Leg­is­la­tion have knowl­edge­able and com­mit­ted staff, but their insti­tu­tional cul­ture doesn’t allow them to talk Quak­erism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving peo­ple. I appre­ci­ate that these orga­ni­za­tions have a strong, vital iden­tity and I accept that within those con­fines they do impor­tant work and employ many faith­ful Friends. It’s just that they lack the lan­guage to explain why a gro­cery store employee with a love of youth reli­gious edu­ca­tion would go unarmed to Badg­dad in the name of Chris­t­ian witness.

The wider blo­gos­phere was totally abuzz with news of Chris­t­ian Peace­maker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hun­dreds of posts and com­ments, includ­ing long dis­cus­sions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost every­one won­dered why the CPT work­ers were there and while the opin­ions weren’t always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive ide­al­ists or disin­geneous ter­ror­ist sym­pa­thiz­ers), even the doubters were moti­vated by a pro­found curios­ity and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blo­gos­phere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and expla­na­tion? The AFSC responded by pub­li­ciz­ing the state­ments of mod­er­ate Mus­lim lead­ers (call­ing for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a sug­ges­tion about list­ing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meet­ing put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was tar­geted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of infor­ma­tion of course, and there were plenty of sto­ries on the lefty-leaning sites like Elec­tron­i­cI­raq and the UK site Ekkle­sia. But Friends explain­ing this to the world?

The Quaker blog­gers did their part. On Decem­ber 2 I quickly re-jiggered the tech­nol­ogy behind Quak​erQuaker​.org to pro­vide a Chris­t­ian Peace­maker watch on both Non​vi​o​lence​.org and Quak­erQuaker (same list­ings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audi­ences, announced on the post It’s Wit­ness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage sit­u­a­tion and included many posts from the Quaker blog­ger com­mu­nity that had recently congealed.

But here’s the inter­est­ing part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blog­ging com­mu­nity. We already had gath­ered together as a group of Friends who were will­ing to write about spir­i­tu­al­ity and wit­ness. Our con­ver­sa­tions had been small and inti­mate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I some­times get painted as some sort of fun­da­men­tal­ist Quaker, but the truth is that I’ve wanted to build a com­mu­nity that would wres­tle with these issues, fig­ur­ing the wrestling was more impor­tant than the lan­guage of the answers. I had already thought about how to encour­age blog­gers and knit a blog­ging com­mu­nity together and was able to use these tech­niques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.

Two other Quak­ers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his per­sonal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethe​cap​tives​now​.org site was put together impres­sively fast and con­tained a lot of good links to news, resources and com­men­tary. But like me, they were over-worked blog­gers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is direc­tor of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).

After an ini­tial few quiet days, Tom’s meet­ing Lan­g­ley Hill put together a great web­site of links and news. That makes it the only offi­cial Quaker orga­ni­za­tion that pulled together a sus­tained cam­paign to sup­port Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what’s up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work hap­pened by vol­un­teers? Johan Mau­rer has a very inter­est­ing post, Are Quak­ers Mar­ginal that points to my ear­lier com­ment on the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers and doubts whether our avoid­ance of “hireling priests” has given us a more effec­tive voice. Let’s remem­ber that insti­tu­tional Quak­erism began as sup­port of mem­bers in jail for their reli­gious wit­ness; among our ear­li­est com­mit­tee gath­er­ings were meet­ings for sufferings–business meet­ings focused on pub­li­ciz­ing the plight of the jailed and sup­port the fam­ily and meet­ings left behind.

I never met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an excep­tional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a wit­ness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I won­der if it was this very whole­ness that made his work hard to cat­e­go­rize and sup­port. Did he sim­ply fall through the insti­tu­tional cracks? When you play base­ball on a dis­or­ga­nized team you miss a lot of easy catches sim­ply because all the out­field­ers think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what hap­pened? And is this what would hap­pen again?