mid 1950s Posts

Over on One Quaker Take, Timothy is surprised to read a definition of "Convergent Friend" that sounds a lot like a certain flavor of West Coast liberal Quakerism. It doesn't seem so surprising for me as it comes from Gregg Koskela, a pastor at an Evangelical Friends church. It was five years ago this month that I went to a loud pizza shop in Philadelphia to attend a  "Meet-Up" of readers of emerging church blogs and realized I had more common ground with these younger Evangelicals than I would have ever thought:

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all "post" something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There's something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it's finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we're more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it's a great post, but so is Marshall Massey's comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a working theory that a movement of "Convergence" will feel suspiciously liberal in evangelical circles, suspiciously evangelical in liberal circles, and suspiciously worldly in Quaker conservative circles. But that's almost to be expected. The work to be done is different depending on where we're starting from.

I don't think Friends are alone in these kinds of matters. I see this phenomenon in other religious denominations--the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren't Quakers. But Friends might have a better way out of the existential puzzles that arise. For we (generally) believe that our action should be motivated first and foremost by the direct instruction of the risen Christ working on us now. That means we can't rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can't help but think of Howard Brinton. Back in the 1950s his generation managed a reunification of East Coast Quaker factions that had been warring for over a century. One way they did it was hanging out together and then redefining what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brinton argued that tests for membership shouldn't look at one's beliefs or practices. It was a truce and I'm sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong consensus on what Quakerism meant and the fights at the edges over details were distracting. Fifty years later, there's little consensus among Philadelphia Friends and even those in leadership positions are loathe to talk about faith or practice except in a kind of code. I can't think of a single Philadelphia Friend who publicly expresses Quaker belief with the clarity or passion of mid-century figures like Brinton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very liberating for others. Convergence isn't very new. It's just keeping ourselves from ossifying into our own human concepts and staying open to the direct Christ. It's finding a way to maintain that crazy balance between tradition and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

For those who love real-live conspiracies, there's the case of this week's three cut undersea cables.

On Wednesday the anchor of a ship off of Alexandria, Egypt, sliced through two important fiber optic internet cables that serve critical traffic between Western Europe and the Middle East and India. On Friday, a cable off Dubai was cut for still undetermined reasons, one proffered explanation being (yes) an errant anchor. One commentator called it "a national disaster," citing the almost complete loss of communication in Egypt; about 20-30% of Indian's traffic is affected. Here's a cool map of the undersea world from the Guardian.

Apparently some aren't calling these closely-time cuts such a coinkydink. The USS Jimmy Carter nuclear submarine (named after a US Navy submarine officer who later went into politics) is a spy sub specially designed with a kind of underwater "shuttle craft" perfect for installing taps. Can we add large-scale internet failure to the cost of war?

When I was about seven I wrote a school report on the Glomar Explorer, a hugely-expensive deep-sea drilling ship built by eccentric gazillionaire Howard Hughes to extract minerals from the ocean floor. Well, at least that was the cover story. Shortly after my report, the Los Angeles Times uncovered the real story: the Glomar Explorer was a CIA ship built to recover a sunken Soviet sub off of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean (I myself didn't learn about this until only a few years ago).

Then of course there's the true stories of the secret White House, secret Pentagon and secret Congress, three separate underground mini-cities carved inside Appalachian ridges in the 1950s to be used in case of Ruskie attack. The locations are well known now. Interesting Fact #1: if you study maps you'll see underused interstate highways leading from Washington to the secret White House and secret Pentagon, ready for quick escape. Interesting Fact #2: the secret Congress is much further away, has no mysteriously-placed highway and was unknown to most if not all members of Congress; whoops!, no legislative branch! I can't find the websites listing all this very quickly but they're there and it's all pretty much out in the open now. When looking I found Interesting Fact #3: the White House East Wing was built in WWII to hide construction of a underground bunker, the famous "War Room" fictionalized in Doctor Strangelove. Veeery interestink, mein fuhrer, I mean mein President.

For those thinking I'm just busting on the U.S., rest assured. I have one client in a Far East Asian country I won't name who can't access this website, my design site, her internet bank, or any Blogspot-hosted site because the country's leaders have put a firewall around the whole frigging country, blocking off sites they don't like!

MONDAY UPDATE: From Egypt's Ministry of Communication: "A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time." (via Jesse Robbins @ O'Reilly)

Fascinating details coming out about the new U.S intelligence estimate on Iran. It was released two days after a major meeting of world powers in Paris, a meeting where sanctions and Iran were discussed. So what's with the timing? Did Condoleeza just not get it back from Kinkos in time? If you're about to release a major report that will reshape half a decade of U.S.-Iranian relations, maybe you whip up a quick power point presentation for the weekend powwow in Paris?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is touting this as a victory for his country: "This is a declaration of victory for the Iranian nation against the world powers over the nuclear issue." I'm not sure it's exactly a victory but it is a confirmation of what he's been claiming for years: Iran is not building a bomb. The victory is in the Bush Administration implicit acknowledgment that it's not always right. Of course Bush is not the kind of guy who can really ever admit he's wrong and he's still throwing snipes out: Condi "told reporters in the Ethiopian capital Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence report's public release showed the Bush administration was committed to transparent democracy while Iran was not."

Now I actually agree that we can't downplay Iran. The country doesn't have the kind of openness and democracy that should be a basic human right. If it could get the bomb, I'm sure it would. What major regional power wouldn't want it? With all the internationally bullying going around it's not a bad thing to have in your back pocket.  President Bush declared a de facto Cold War against Iraq in his 2002 State of Union "Axis of Evil" speech.

But one thing about Iran is that it's Iraq twenty years later. If Iran's civic structure is broken, then the West is largely to blame. The British and Soviets invaded Iran in 1941 to secure oil supplies and it was they who put in power Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran. When Pahlavi lost power in the early 1950s, the U.S. Central Intelligence agency led a covert operation called Operation Ajax to put him back in power (the project was led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy's grandson). In 1969 the so-called Nixon Doctrine formalized the Shah's Iran as a key American ally. The Iranian Revolution changed all this and along with the brutal Iran-Iraq War created the Iran we know today.

It's easy to forget that we've long supported dictators who promised us a steady supply of oil. Saddam Hussein was our buddy until he threatened Kuwaiti oil fields. If the United States had spent the last thirty years working on building strong democracies in the Middle East then both Iraq and Iran would most likely be peaceful, strong nations without any great strong incentive to put in the massive investment needed to develop weapons of mass destruction. Might oil cost a few dollars more a barrel? Sure. But isn't that worth the thousands of American, Iraqi and Iranian lives that have been destroyed in twenty years of near-constant warfare? 

My friend Peter Blood is part of a group organizing a Young Friends North America camp in Barnesville, Ohio this June and he asked that I help get word out about it. The first few days are a reunion for not-so-young-anymore Friends (YFNA more or less wound down in the late 1990s). The second part is the camp, which hopes "to bring together Friends from all branches of Quakerism, to share what Spirit-led Quakerism is about at its core--and to experience it together." Check out the Camp's schedule for details on what this looks like.

The handy-dandy Friends Historical Dictionary says YFNA started in the mid-1950s. I've heard enough stories (and met some YFNA couples) to know it was a very important touchstone for a few generations of young Friends. I've been involved in a couple of failed YFNA resuscitation attempts over the last few years and can't tell you why none of them took. It could be economics (high gas prices and high college loans keeping most 20-somethings from being too free-range) or simple demographics (too few Gen X Friends). Perhaps other events like the FGC Gathering fulfilled the young Quaker hook-up function well enough.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad to see that reunion is tied into a free-form camp that doesn't seem to be trying to be a YFNA organizing meeting (at this point reviving YFNA has the same empty guffaw punch as the kids now nostalgically calling themselves the new SDS). It seems like there's more Quaker youth organizing going on, which is great, and I hope the camp helps that momentum.

Update: I've put up an YFNA Reunion/Camp page up over in the events section of QuakerQuaker to follow any of the blog chatter about the gathering.

One of the more revolutionary transformations of American Quakerism in the twentieth century has been our understanding of the testimonies. In online discussions I find that many Friends think the "SPICE" testimonies date back from time immemorial. Not only are they relatively new, they're a different sort of creature from their predecessors.

In the last fifty years it's become difficult to separate Quaker testimonies from questions of membership. Both were dramatically reinvented by liberal Gurneyite Friends in the early part of the Twentieth Century and the codified by Howard Brinton's landmark Friends for 300 Years, published in the early 1950s.

Comfort and the Test of Membership

Brinton comes right out and says that the test for membership shouldn't involve issues of faith or of practice but should be based on whether one feels comfortable with the other members of the Meeting. This conception of membership has gradually become dominant among liberal Friends in the half century since this book was published. The trouble with it is twofold. The first is that "comfort" is not necessarily what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first generation of Friends had used Brinton's model there would be no Religious Society of Friends to talk about (we'd be lost in the historical footnotes with the Muggletonians, Grindletonians and the like). One of the classic tests for discernment is whether an proposed action is contrary to self-will. Comfort is not our Society's calling.

The second problem is that comfortability comes from fitting in with a certain kind of style, class, color and attitude. It's fine to want comfort in our Meetings but when we make it the primary test for membership, it becomes a cloak for ethnic and cultural bigotries that keep us from reaching out. If you have advanced education, mild manners and liberal politics, you'll fit it at most East Coast Quaker meetings. If you're too loud or too ethnic or speak with a working class accent you'll likely feel out of place. Samuel Caldwell gave a great talk about the difference between Quaker culture and Quaker faith and I've proposed a tongue-in-cheek testimony against community as way of opening up discussion.

The Feel Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also reinvented the Testimonies. They had been specific and often proscriptive: against gambling, against participation in war. But the new testimonies became vague feel-good character traits--the now-famous SPICE testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. Who isn't in favor of all those values? A president taking us to war will tell us it's the right thing to do (integrity) to contruct lasting peace (peace) so we can bring freedom to an oppressed country (equality) and create a stronger sense of national pride (community) here at home.

We modern Friends (liberal ones at least) were really transformed by the redefintions of membership and the testimonies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our current testimonies are the ancient ones. I think an awareness of how Friends handled these issues in the 300 years before Brinton would help us navigate a way out of the "ethical society" we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for unity was behind the radical transformation of the testimonies. The main accomplishment of East Coast Quakerism in the mid-twentieth century was the reuniting of many of the yearly meetings that had been torn apart by schisms starting in 1827. By end of that century Friends were divided across a half dozen major theological strains manifested in a patchwork of institutional divisions. One way out of this morass was to present the testimonies as our core unifying priciples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Christians (even as post-Christians), our core commandment is simple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40 and Mark 12:30-31, Luke 10:27.

The Quaker testimonies also hang on these commandments: they are our collective memory. While they are in contant flux, they refer back to 350 years of experience. These are the truths we can testify to as a people, ways of living that we have learned from our direct experience of the Holy Spirit. They are intricately tied up with our faith and with how we see ourselves following through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I'm sure that Howard Brinton didn't intend to separate the testimonies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a modern liberal audience. By popularizing them he made them so accessible that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin testimonies of plainness and simplicity. First the ancient testimony of plainness. Here's the description from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world's corrupt language, manners, vain and needless things and fashions, in apparel, buildings, and furniture of houses, some of which are immodest, indecent, and unbecoming. And that they avoid immoderation in the use of lawful things, which though innocent in themselves, may thereby become hurtful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are calculated more to please a vain and wanton mind, than for real usefulness; and let tradesmen and others, members of our religious society, be admonished, that they be not accessary to these evils; for we ought to take up our daily cross, minding the grace of God which brings salvation, and teaches to deny all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his blessing, and be instrumental in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there's nothing in there about the length of one's hem. The key phrase for me is the warning about doing things "calculated to please a vain and wanton mind." Friends were being told that pride makes it harder to love God and our neighbors; immoderation makes it hard to hear God's still small voice; self-sacrifice is necessary to be an instrument of God's love. This testimony is all about our relationships with God and with each other.

Most modern Friends have dispensed with "plainness" and recast the testimony as "simplicity." Ask most Friends about this testimony and they'll start telling you about their cluttered desks and their annoyance with cellphones. Ask for a religious education program on simplicity and you'll almost certainly be assigned a book from the modern voluntary simplicity movement, one of those self-help manuals that promise inner peace if you plant a garden or buy a fuel-efficient car, with "God" absent from the index. While it's true that most Americans (and Friends) would have more time for spiritual refreshment if they uncluttered their lives, the secular notions of simplicity do not emanate out of a concern for "gospel order" or for a "right ordering" of our lives with God. Voluntary simplicity is great: I've published books on it and I live car-free, use cloth diapers, etc. But plainness is something different and it's that difference that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called "SPICE" testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality) and you'll find the modern notions are secularlized over-simplications of the Quaker understandings. In our quest for unity, we've over-stated their importance.

Earlier I mentioned that many of the earlier testimonies were proscriptive--they said certain actions were not in accord with our principles. Take a big one: after many years of difficult ministering and soul searching Friends were able to say that slavery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep communion with God; this is different than saying we believe in equality. Similarly, saying we're against all outward war is different than saying we're in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of casting everything in postitive terms, sometimes we need to come out and say a particular practice is just plain wrong, that it interferes with and goes against our relationship with God and with our neighbors.

I'll leave it up to you to start chewing over what specific actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our ministers and meetings found that a particular practice was against our testimonies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of ministering with them and laboring with them. It would be hard. Feelings would be hurt. People would go away angry.

After a half-century of liberal individualism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is something to Quakerism, that it does have norms and boundaries. We would need all the love, charity and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, especially because it's work with members of our community, people we love and honor. We would have to follow John Woolman's example: our first audience would not be Washington policy makers instead Friends in our own Society.

Testimonies as Affirmation of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, poverty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our values in secular terms. An ability to talk about pacifism with our non-Quaker neighbors in a smart, informed way is essential (thus my Nonviolence.org ministry, currently receiving two millions visitors a year). When we affirm community and equality we are witnessing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we've contributed to the national and international discussions on these topics.

But for all of their contemporary centrality to Quakerism, the testimonies are only second-hand outward forms. They are not to be worshipped in and of themselves. Modern Friends come dangerously close to lifting up the peace testimony as a false idol--the principle we worship over everything else. When we get so good at arguing the practicality of pacifism, we forget that our testimony is first and foremost our proclamation that we live in the power that takes away occassion for war. When high school math teachers start arguing over arcane points of nuclear policy, playing armchair diplomat with yearly meeting press releases to the State Department, we loose credibility and become something of a joke. But when we minister to the Power is the Good News we speak with an authority that can thunder over petty governments with it's command to Quake before God.

When we remember the spiritual source of our faith, our understandings of the testimonies deepen immeasurably. When we let our actions flow from uncomplicated faith we gain a power and endurance that strengthens our witness. When we speak of our experience of the Holy Spirit, our words gain the authority as others recognize the echo of that "still small voice" speaking to their hearts. Our love and our witness are simple and universal, as is the good news we share: that to be fully human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Halleluiah: praise be to God!

Reading elsewhere:

• James Healton has a great piece on the testimonies over on Quakerinfo.com. The One Testimony That Binds Them All Together talks about Christ's role in the testimonies. (Be sure to check out Quakerinfo's list of testimony resources.

I propose a little amendment to the modern Quaker testimonies. I think it's time for a moratorium of the word "community" and the phrases "faith community" and "community of faith." Through overuse, we Friends have stretched this phrase past its elasticity point and it's snapped. It's become a meaningless, abstract term used to disguise the fact that we've become afraid to articulate a shared faith. A recent yearly meeting newsletter used the word "community" 27 times but the word "God" only seven: what does it mean when a religious body stops talking about God?

The "testimony of community" recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was the centerpiece of the new-and-improved testimonies Howard Brinton unveiled back in the 1950s in his Friends for 300 Years (as far as I know no one elevated it to a testimony before him). Born into a well-known Quaker family, he married into an even more well-known family. From the cradle Howard and his wife Anna were Quaker aristocracy. As they traveled the geographic and theological spectrum of Friends, their pedigree earned them welcome and recognition everywhere they went. Perhaps not surprisingly, Howard grew up to think that the only important criteria for membership in a Quaker meeting is one's comfort level with the other members. "The test of membership is not a particular kind of religious experience, nor acceptance of any particular religious, social or economic creed," but instead one's "compatibility with the meeting community." ( Friends for 300 Years page 127).

So what is "compatibility"? It often boils down to being the right "kind" of Quaker, with the right sort of behavior and values. At most Quaker meetings, it means being exceedingly polite, white, upper-middle class, politically liberal, well-educated, quiet in conversation, and devoid of strong opinions about anything involving the meeting. Quakers are a homogenous bunch and it's not coincidence: for many of us, it's become a place to find people who think like us.

But the desire to fit in creates its own insecurity issues. I was in a small "breakout" group at a meeting retreat a few years ago where six of us shared our feelings about the meeting. Most of these Friends had been members for years, yet every single one of them confided that they didn't think they really belonged. They were too loud, too colorful, too ethnic, maybe simply too too for Friends. They all judged themselves against some image of the ideal Quaker--perhaps the ghost of Howard Brinton. We rein ourselves in, stop ourselves from saying too much.

This phenomenon has almost completely ended the sort of prophetic ministry once common to Friends, whereby a minister would challenge Friends to renew their faith and clean up their act. Today, as one person recently wrote, modern Quakers often act as if avoidance of controversy is at the center of our religion. That makes sense if "compatibility" is our test for membership and "community" our only stated goal. While Friends love to claim the great eighteenth century minister John Woolman, he would most likely get a cold shoulder in most Quaker meetinghouses today. His religious motivation and language, coupled with his sometimes eccentric public witness and his overt call to religious reform would make him very incompatible indeed. Sometimes we need to name the ways we aren't following the Light: for Friends, Christ is not just comforter, but judger and condemner as well. Heavy stuff, perhaps, but necessary. And near-impossible when a comfy and non-challenging community is our primary mission.

Don't get me wrong. I like community. I like much of the non-religious culture of Friends: the potlucks, the do-it-yourself approach to music and learning, our curiousity about other religious traditions. And I like the openness and tolerance that is the hallmark of modern liberalism in general and liberal Quakerism in particular. I'm glad we're Queer friendly and glad we don't get off on tangents like who marries who (the far bigger issue is the sorry state of our meetings' oversight of marriages, but that's for another time). And for all my ribbing of Howard Brinton, I agree with him that we should be careful of theological litmus tests for membership. I understand where he was coming from. All that said, community for its own sake can't be the glue that holds a religious body together.

So my Testimony Against "Community" is not a rejection of the idea of community, but rather a call to put it into context. "Community" is not the goal of the Religious Society of Friends. Obedience to God is. We build our institutions to help us gather as a great people who together can discern the will of God and follow it through whatever hardships the world throws our way.

Plenty of people know this. Last week I asked the author of one of the articles in the yearly meeting newsletter why he had used "community" twice but "God" not at all. He said he personally substitutes "body of Christ" everytime he writes or reads "community." That's fine, but how are we going to pass on Quaker faith if we're always using lowest-common-denominator language?

We're such a literate people but we go surprisingly mute when we're asked to share our religious understandings. We need to stop being afraid to talk with one another, honestly and with the language we use. I've seen Friends go out of their way to use language from other traditions, especially Catholic or Buddhist, to state a basic Quaker value. I fear that we've dumbed down our own tradition so much that we've forgotten that it has the robustness to speak to our twenty-first century conditions.

Related Essays

I talk about what a bold Quaker community of faith might look like and why we need one in my essay on the "Emergent Church Movement." I talk about our fear of meeting unity in "We're all Ranters Now."