A lot of peo­ple, include Jeanne Burns over on Quak­erquaker, are talk­ing about Mal­colm Gladwell’s lat­est New Yorker arti­cle, “Small Change: Why the Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tweeted”.

Mal­colm Gladwell’s modus operandi is to make out­ra­geously counter-intuitive claims that peo­ple will talk about enough that they’ll buy his boss’s mag­a­zine, books and bobble-head like­nesses. I find him lik­able and divert­ing but don’t take his claims very seri­ously. He’s a lot like Wired Magazine’s Chris Ander­son, his some­times spar­ring part­ner, which isn’t sur­pris­ing as they work for the same mag­a­zine empire, Conde Nast Pub­li­ca­tions.

In his arti­cle, Glad­well takes a lot of pot­shots at social media. It’s easy to do. He picks Clay Shirky, another New York “Big Idea” guy as his rhetor­i­cal straw­man now, claim­ing Shirky’s book “Here Comes Every­body” is the “bible of social-media move­ment.” Read­ing Glad­well, you kind of wish he’d get out of the echo box of circle-jerk New York Big Talk­ers (just get­ting out of the Conde Nast building’s cafe­te­ria would be a good start).

Gladwell’s cer­tainly right in that most of what passes for activism on Twit­ter and Face­book is ridicu­lous. Click­ing a “Like” but­ton or chang­ing your pro­file image green doesn’t do much. He makes an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between “weak ties” (Face­book “friends” who aren’t friends; Twit­ter cam­paigns that are risk-free) and “strong ties.” He cites the Civil Rights move­ment as a strong-tie phe­nom­e­non: the peo­ple who put them­selves on the line tended to be those with close friends also putting them­selves on the line.

What Glad­well misses is strong-tie orga­niz­ing going on in social media. A lot of what’s hap­pen­ing over on Quak­erQuaker is pretty strong-tie–it’s trans­lat­ing to work­shops, arti­cles, and is just one of a num­ber of impor­tant net­works that are form­ing. Peo­ple are find­ing each other and mak­ing real con­nec­tions that spill out into the real world. It’s not that online orga­nizes cre­ates real world changes, or even the reverse. Instead, under the right cir­cum­stances they can feed into each other, with each com­po­nent mag­ni­fy­ing the other’s reach.

One exam­ple of non-hierarchical involved social media is how Quaker blog­gers came together to explain Tom Fox’s motives after his kid­nap­ping. It didn’t have any effect on the kid­nap­pers, obvi­ously, but we did reach a lot of peo­ple who were curi­ous why a Friend might choose such a per­son­ally dan­ger­ous form of Chris­t­ian wit­ness. This was all done by inter-related groups of peo­ple with no bud­get and no orga­ni­za­tional chart. But these things don’t have to be quite so life-and-death.

A more recent exam­ple I’ve been able to see up close is the way my wife’s church has orga­nized against dioce­san attempts to shut it down: a core group of lead­ers have emerged; they share power, divide up roles and have been wag­ing an orga­nized cam­paign for about 2.5 years now. One ele­ment of this work has been the Savest​marys​.org blog. The website’s only impor­tant because it’s been part of a real-world social net­work but it’s had an influ­ence that’s gone far beyond the hand­ful of peo­ple who write for it. One of the more sur­pris­ing audi­ences have been the many staff at the Dioce­san head­quar­ters who visit every day–a small group has taken over quite a bit of men­tal space over there!

It’s been inter­est­ing for me to com­pare Quak­erQuaker with an ear­lier peace project of mine, Non​vi​o​lence​.org, which ran for thir­teen years start­ing in 1995. In many ways it was the big­ger site: a larger audi­ence, with a wider base of inter­est. It was a pop­u­lar site, with many vis­its and a fairly active bul­letin board for much of it’s life. But it didn’t spawn work­shop or con­fer­ences. There’s no “move­ment” asso­ci­ated with it. Dona­tions were min­i­mal and I never felt the sup­port struc­ture that I have now with my Quaker work.

Non​vi​o​lence​.org was a good idea, but it was a “weak tie” net­work. QuakerQuaker’s net­work is stronger for two rea­sons that I can iden­tify. The obvi­ous one is that it’s built atop the orga­niz­ing iden­tity of a social group (Friends). But it also speaks more directly to its par­tic­i­pants, ask­ing them to share their lives and offer­ing real-world oppor­tu­ni­ties for inter­ac­tion. So much of my blog­ging on Non​vi​o​lence​.org was Big Idea thoughts pieces about the sit­u­a­tion in Bosnia–that just doesn’t pro­vide the same kind of imme­di­ate per­sonal entre.

Mal­colm Glad­well min­i­mizes the lead­er­ship struc­ture of activist orga­ni­za­tions, where lead­er­ship and power is in con­stant flux. He like­wise min­i­mizes the lead­er­ship of social media net­works. Yes, any­one can pub­lish but we all have dif­fer­ent lev­els of vis­i­bil­ity and influ­ence and there is a fil­ter­ing effect. I have twenty-five years of orga­nized activism under my belt and fif­teen years of online orga­niz­ing and while the tech­nol­ogy is very dif­fer­ent, a lot of the social dynam­ics are remark­ably similar.

Glad­well is an hired employee in one of the largest media com­pa­nies in the world. It’s a very struc­tured life: he’s got edi­tors, pub­lish­ers, copy­ed­i­tors, proof­read­ers. He’s a cog in a com­pany with $5 bil­lion in annual rev­enue. It’s not really sur­pris­ing that he doesn’t have much direct expe­ri­ence with effec­tive social net­works. It’s hard to see how social media is com­ple­ment­ing real world grass­roots net­works from the 40th floor of a mid-town Man­hat­tan skyscraper.

Related Read­ing:

• What Mal­colm Glad­well Doesn’t Under­stand About Activism and Social Net­works over on Stu​den​tAc​tivism​.net, via @public_historian.
• Friends and Hier­ar­chy and Social Change. Jeanne Burns on QuakerQuaker.
• Make the Rev­o­lu­tion from Anil Dash: “Peo­ple who want to see marches in the streets are often unwill­ing to admit that those marches just don’t pro­duce much in the way of results in Amer­ica in 2010.”
• Social Media for Good and Evil, Strong and Weak Ties, Online/Offline,and Orgs and Net­works from Beth Kantor

In a move sure to be a sur­prise no one, I’m shut­ter­ing up my Non​vi​o​lence​.org site. Sure it’s a great domain, sure it still gets more traf­fic than all of my other sites com­bined, but I just don’t have the time to keep it going in any kind of coher­ent way. It’s always sur­prised me that I could never get sub­stan­tive finan­cial sup­port for a project that has reached mil­lions. It seems par­tic­u­larly ironic to shut it down in the midst of one of the longest wars in U.S. history.

For those want­ing good activist news, the Dave the Quaker Agi­ta­tor is always on top of cur­rent events and the Fel­low­ship of Reconciliation’s new’ish group blog at FOR​Peace​.net is a great addi­tion to the peace blog­ging scene. Archive posts from Non​vi​o​lence​.org have been migrated here to the Ranter.

Back in the late 1980s when I was a Vil­lanova Uni­ver­sity under­grad, sex­ual assault didn’t hap­pen. True story.

It will sur­prise no one to learn that I co-edited an alter­na­tive, “under­ground” weekly junior and senior year. We called it the VACUUM, a name whose acronym changed every issue. Read­ing about an early “date rape” study in my fem­i­nist stud­ies class I extrap­o­lated how many rapes should rea­son­ably be expected to occur on a cam­pus of Villanova’s size. I added a few anec­dotes from my all-male dorm expe­ri­ence and pub­lished it in the VACUUM. A short while later some friends of mine who edited the offi­cial stu­dent paper picked up the story and even cited an anony­mous quo­ta­tion from me in what is prob­a­bly the only offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion of the VACUUM’s exis­tence in the V.U. archives.

Right around this time a female stu­dent brought her alle­ga­tions of an on-campus sex­ual assault to the local police. Cam­pus offi­cials feigned sur­prise and pro­vided the local media with par­roted quotes: “In all my xyz years work­ing here I have never ever heard of an alle­ga­tion of rape.” Chief of Secu­rity, Dean of Stu­dents, etc., all deliv­ered the same line, clearly coached by a pub­lic rela­tions team, with only the years changed to reflect their cam­pus tenure. Thou­sands of stu­dents, dozens of years, hun­dreds of frat par­ties, tanker-fulls of cheap beer and not a hint of impro­pri­ety.
Last night I chanced on my alma mater’s web­site and saw a link right there on the home­page to an arti­cle mys­te­ri­ous titled Recent Cam­pus Inci­dent (generic URL, prob­a­bly designed to dis­ap­pear soon). It doc­u­mented an alleged assault on a female stu­dent by three mem­bers of the foot­ball team last month. The announce­ment reports that the Uni­ver­sity found them in vio­la­tion of the campus’s Code of Con­duct and “rescinded the admis­sion of the three young men.”

A Google News search turns up that this has been exten­sively cov­ered by the media with almost 500 hits. The Delco Times reports that the 1990 Clery Act and its amend­ments have made uni­ver­sity cover-ups ille­gal and required reports and spe­cific pro­to­cols for respond­ing to cam­pus crimes. The cur­rent media spot­light and long-standing fed­eral laws cer­tainly account for much of Villanova’s 2007 enlight­en­ment. What­ever the source of change, it’s nice to see. Even three play­ers from the beloved foot­ball team can get the boot (sorry, have their admis­sions rescinded) for crim­i­nal behav­ior. Bet­ter still, the uni­ver­sity can fess up to the crime and take some respon­si­bil­ity. The times, they have a’ changed.

Just a lit­tle note to every­one that I’ve blogged a cou­ple of posts over on Non​vi​o​lence​.org. They’re both based on “peace mom” Cindy Sheeran’s “res­ig­na­tion” from the peace move­ment yes­ter­day.
It’s all a bit strange to see this from a long-time peace activist per­spec­tive. The move­ment that Sheehan’s talk­ing about and now cri­tiquing is not move­ment I’ve worked with for the last fifteen-plus years. The orga­ni­za­tions I’ve known have all been housed in crum­bling build­ings, with too-old car­pets and fur­ni­ture lifted as often as not from going out of busi­ness sales. Money’s tight and careers poten­tially sac­ri­ficed to help build a world of shar­ing, car­ing and under­stand­ing.
The move­ment Shee­han talks about is fueled by mil­lions of dol­lars of Demo­c­ra­tic Party-related money, with cam­paigns designed to mesh well with Party goals via the so-called “527 groups”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/527_group and other indi­rect mech­a­nisms. Big Media likes to crown these orga­ni­za­tions as _the_ anti­war move­ment, but as Shee­han and Amy Good­man dis­cuss in today’s “Democ­racy Now interview”:http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07%2F05%2F30%2F1343232, cor­po­rate media will end up with much of the tens of mil­lions of dol­lars can­di­dates are now rais­ing. Shee­han makes an impas­sioned plea for peo­ple to sup­port those grass­roots cam­paigns that aren’t sup­ported by the “peace move­ment” but this rein­forces the notion that its the mon­eyed inter­ests that make up the move­ment. I’m sure she knows bet­ter but it’s hard to work for so long and to make so many sac­ri­fices and still be so casu­ally dismissed–not just me but thou­sands of com­mit­ted activists I’ve known over the years.
There are a few peace orga­ni­za­tions in that happy medium between toad­y­ing and poverty (nice car­pets, souls still intact) but it mys­ti­fies me why there isn’t a broader base of sup­port for grass­roots activism. I myself decided to leave pro­fes­sional peace work almost a decade ago after the my Non​vi​o​lence​.org project raised such piti­ful sums. At some point I decided to stop whin­ing about this phe­nom­e­non and just look for better-paying employ­ment else­where but it still fas­ci­nates me from a soci­o­log­i­cal perspective.

Three thou­sand faces of Amer­i­can mil­i­tary casu­al­ties. Is the world safer yet. Our prayers for the fam­i­lies of the dead of all nationalities.

A new poll out there shows that only 64% of Amer­i­cans believe that “the National Secu­rity Agency (NSA) should be allowed to inter­cept tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions between ter­ror­ism sus­pects in other coun­tries and peo­ple liv­ing in the United States”:http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/NSA.htm. One won­ders what the num­bers would have been if “peo­ple liv­ing in the United States” were replaced by “Amer­i­cans.” Even so, 64% approval is pretty low in these fear of ter­ror­ism times.

Some ran­dom chat­ter on the blogs: Americablog’s “New domes­tic spy­ing poll num­bers are very bad for Bush”:http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-domestic-spying-poll-numbers-are.html, Ezra Klein’s “Trust, But Verify”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/trust_but_verif.html & Stephen Kaus at Huffington’s “Pop­ping the Wrong Question”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-kaus/popping-the-wrong-questio_b_12982.html, Instapundit’s cryp­tic “I guess Kaus was right”:http://instapundit.com/archives/027738.php and Michelle Malkin’s “Sorry NYTimes: Amer­ica is OK with the NSA”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004176.htm.

Hi Quak­er­Ran­ter friends: I’ve been busy today cov­er­ing the Quaker response to the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers Teams hostages. Two sites with a lot of over­lap­ping content:

• Quaker Blog Watch page focused on the hostages
• “Non​vi​o​lence​.org state­ment and list of responses

Both of these fea­ture a mix of main­stream news and Quaker views on the sit­u­a­tion. I’ll keep them updated. I’m not the only busy Friend: Chuck Fager and John Stephens have a site called Free the Cap­tives — check it out.

It’s always inter­est­ing to see the moments that I explictly iden­tify as a Friend on Non​vi​o​lence​.org. As I saythere, it seems quite appro­pri­ate. We need to explain to the world why a Quaker and three other Chris­tians would need­lessly put them­selves in such dan­ger. This is wit­ness time, Friends. The real deal. We’re all being tested. This is one of those times for which those end­less com­mit­tee meet­ings and boil­er­plate peace state­ments have pre­pared us.

It’s time to tell the world that we live in the power that “takes away the occa­sion for war and over­comes our fear of death” (well, or at least mutes it enough that four brave souls would travel to dan­ger­ous lands to wit­ness our faith).

The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony is one of the pop­u­larly well-known out­ward expres­sions of Quaker faith. But have we for­got­ten its source?

In a meet­ing for wor­ship I attended a few years ago a woman rose and spoke about her work for peace. She told us of let­ters writ­ten and meet­ings attended; she cer­tainly kept busy. She con­fessed that it is tir­ing work and she cer­tainly sounded tired and put-upon. But she said she’d keep at it and she quoted early Friends’ man­date to us: that we must work to take away the occa­sion of war.

Read con­tem­po­rary Friends lit­er­a­ture and you’ll see this imper­a­tive all over the place. From one brochure: “We are called as Friends to lead lives that ‘take away the occa­sion of all wars.’ ” Yet this state­ment, like many con­tem­po­rary state­ments on Quaker tes­ti­monies, is taken out of con­text. The actor has been switched and the mes­sage has been lost. For the peace tes­ti­mony doesn’t instruct us to take away occasions.

The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony: Liv­ing in the Power

The clas­sic state­ment of the Quaker peace tes­ti­mony is the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion. Eng­land was embroiled in war and insur­rec­tion. A failed polit­i­cal coup was blamed on Quak­ers and it looked like Friends were going to be per­se­cuted once more by the civil author­i­ties. But Friends weren’t inter­ested in the polit­i­cal process swirling around them. They weren’t tak­ing sides in the coups. “I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occa­sion of all wars,” George Fox had told civil author­i­ties ten years before and the sign­ers of the dec­la­ra­tion elab­o­rated why they could not fight: “we do earnestly desire and wait, that by the Word of God’s power and its effec­tual oper­a­tion in the hearts of men, the king­doms of this world may become the king­doms of the Lord.”

For all of the over-intellectualism within Quak­erism today, it’s a sur­prise that these state­ments are so rarely parsed down. Look at Fox’s state­ment: many mod­ern activists could agree we should take away occas­sion for war, cer­tainly, but it’s a sub­or­di­nate clause. It is not refer­ring to the “we,” but instead mod­i­fies “power.” Our instruc­tions are to live in that power. It is that power that does the work of tak­ing away war’s occasion.

I’m not quib­bling but get­ting to the very heart of the clas­sic under­stand­ing of peace. It is a “tes­ti­mony,” in that we are “tes­ti­fy­ing” to a larger truth. We are acknowl­edg­ing some­thing: that there is a Power (let’s start cap­i­tal­iz­ing it) that takes away the need for war. It is that Power that has made peace pos­si­ble and that Power that has already acted and con­tin­ues to act in our world. The job has actu­ally been done. The occa­sion for war has been ended. Our rela­tion­ship to this Power is sim­ply to live in it. Around the time of the Dec­la­ra­tion, George Fox wrote a let­ter to Lord Pro­tec­tor Oliver Cromwell :

The next morn­ing I was moved of the Lord to write a paper to the Pro­tec­tor, Oliver Cromwell; wherein I did, in the pres­ence of the Lord God, declare that I denied the wear­ing or draw­ing of a car­nal sword, or any other out­ward weapon, against him or any man; and that I was sent of God to stand a wit­ness against all vio­lence, and against the works of dark­ness; and to turn peo­ple from dark­ness to light; and to bring them from the causes of war and fight­ing, to the peace­able gospel.

The peace tes­ti­mony is actu­ally a state­ment of faith. Not sur­pris­ing really, or it shouldn’t be. Early Friends were all about shout­ing out the truth. “Christ has come to teach the peo­ple him­self” was a early tagline. It’s no won­der that they stretched it out to say that Christ has taken away occa­sion for war. Hal­lelu­jiah!, I can hear them shout. Let the cel­e­bra­tion begin. I always hear John Lennon echo­ing these cel­e­brants when he sings “War is over” and fol­lows with “if we want it.”

Obvi­ously war isn’t over. Peo­ple must still want it. And they do. War is rooted in lusts, James 4:1–3 tells us. Mod­ern Amer­i­can greed for mate­r­ial things with ever more rapac­ity and blind­ness. We drive our S.U.V.s and then fight for oil sup­plies in the Per­sian Gulf. We worry that we won’t be pop­u­lar or loved if we don’t use teeth-whitening strips or don’t obsess over the lat­est T.V. fad. We aren’t liv­ing in the Power and the Deceiver con­vinces us that war is peace.

But the Power is there. We can live in that Power and it will take away more than occa­sions for war, for it will take away the lusts and inse­cu­ri­ties that lead to war.

Speak­ing Faith to Power

When you’ve acknowl­edge the Power, what does faith become? It becomes a tes­ti­mony to the world. I can tes­tify to you per­son­ally that there is a Power and that this Power will com­fort you, teach you, guide you. Early Friends were pros­e­lytis­ing when they wrote their state­ment. After writ­ing his let­ter to Cromwell, Fox went to visit the man him­self. Cromwell was undoubt­edly the most pow­er­ful man in Eng­land and any­thing but a paci­fist. He had raised and led armies against the king and it was he who ordered the behead­ing of King Charles I. And what did Fox talk about? Truth. And Jesus.

George Fox stood as a wit­ness just as he promised, and tried to turn Cromwell from dark­ness to light, to bring him from the cause of war to the peace­able gospel. By Fox’s account, it almost worked:

As I was turn­ing, he caught me by the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, “Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other”; adding that he wished me no more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged his own soul; and admon­ished him to hear­ken to God’s voice, that he might stand in his coun­sel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would keep him from hard­ness of heart; but if he did not hear God’s voice, his heart would be hard­ened. He said it was true.

This then is the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony. I don’t think it can be divorced from its spir­i­tual basis. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, many lead­ing Friends tried to dilute the Quaker mes­sage to make it more under­stand­able and palat­able for non-Friends. A line of George Fox was taken out of con­text and used so much that most Friends have adopted “that of God in every­one” as a uni­fied creed, for­get­ting that it’s a mod­ern phrase whose ambi­gu­ity Fox wouldn’t have appre­ci­ated. When we talk about peace, we often do so in very sec­u­lar­ized lan­guage. We’re still try­ing to pros­e­ly­tize, but our mes­sage is a ratio­nal­ist one that war can be solved by tech­no­cratic means and a more demo­c­ra­tic appor­tion­ment of resources. Most con­tem­po­rary state­ments have all the umph of a floor speech at the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion, with only throw-away ref­er­ences to “com­mu­ni­ties of faith,” and bland state­ments of “that of God” hint­ing that there might be some­thing more to our message.

The free­dom of liv­ing the Power

We actu­ally share much of the peace tes­ti­mony with a num­ber of Chris­tians. There are many Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians who read­ily agree that there’s a Power but con­clude that their job is just to wait for its return. They define the power strictly as Jesus Christ and the return as the Sec­ond Com­ing. They fore­see a worldly Armaged­don when peace will fail and thou­sands will die.

That’s not our way. Friends pulled Chris­tian­ity out of the first cen­tury and refused to wait for any last cen­tury to declare that Jesus is here now, “to teach his peo­ple him­self.” We keep con­stant vigil and rejoice to find the returned Christ already here, deep in our hearts, at work in the world. Our way of work­ing for peace is to praise the Power, wait for its guid­ance and then fol­low it’s com­mands through what­ever hard­ship await us. When we’re doing it right, we become instru­ments of God in the ser­vice of the Spirit. Christ does use us to take away the occa­sions for war!

But the wait­ing is nec­es­sary, the guid­ance is key. It gives us the strength to over­come over­work and burn-out and it gives us the direc­tion for our work. The slick­est, most expen­sive peace cam­paigns and the most dra­matic self-inflating actions often achieve much less than the sim­ple, hum­ble, behind-the-scenes, year-in, year-out ser­vice. I sus­pect that the ways we’re most used by the Spirit are ways we barely perceive.

Quaker min­istry is not a pas­sive wait­ing. We pray, we test, we work hard and we use all the gifts our Cre­ator has given us (intel­li­gence, tech­nolo­gies, etc.). There are prob­lems in the world, huge ones that need address­ing and we will address them. But we do so out of a joy. And through our work, we ask oth­ers to join us in our joy, to lift up the cross with us, join­ing Jesus metaphor­i­cally in wit­ness­ing to the world.

The modern-day Pres­i­dent order­ing a war suf­fers from the same lack of faith that George Fox’s Cromwell did. They are igno­rant or impa­tient of Christ’s mes­sage and so take peace-making into their own hands. But how much do faith­less politi­cians dif­fer from many con­tem­po­rary peace activists? When I block­ade a fed­eral build­ing or stand in front of a tank, am I try­ing to stop war myself? When I say it’s my job to “end the occa­sion for war,” am I tak­ing on the work of God? I feel sad for the woman who rose in Meet­ing for Wor­ship and told us how hard her peace work is. Each of us alone is inca­pable of bring­ing on world peace, and we turn in our own tracks with a quiet dis­pair. I’ve seen so many Quaker peace activists do really poor jobs with such a over­whelmed sense of sad­ness that they don’t get much sup­port. Detached from the Spirit, we look to gain our self-worth from oth­ers and we start doing things sim­ply to impress our worldly peers. If we’re lucky we get money but not love, respect but not a new voice lifted up in the choir of praise for the Cre­ator. We’ve given up hope in God’s promise and despair is our ever-present companion.

Our tes­ti­mony to the world

It doesn’t need to be this way. And I think for many Friends it hasn’t been. When you work for the Power, you don’t get attached to your work’s out­come in the same way. We’re just foot­sol­diers for the Lord. Often we’ll do things and have no idea how they’ve affected oth­ers. It’s not our job to know, for it’s not our job to be sucess­ful as defined by the world. Maybe all the work I’ve ever done for peace is for some exchange of ideas that I won’t rec­og­nize at the time. We need to strive to be gra­cious and grounded even in the midst of all the undra­matic moments (as well as those most dra­matic moments). We will be known to the world by how we wit­ness our trust in God and by how faith­fully we live our lives in obe­di­ence to the Spirit’s instructions.

Related Read­ing

Again, the link to the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion is the first stop for those want­ing to under­stand Friends’ under­stand­ing on peacemaking.

Quaker His­to­rian Jerry Frost talked about the peace tes­ti­mony as part of his his­tory of twen­ti­eth cen­tury Quak­erism (“Non-violence seemed almost a panacea for lib­eral Friends seek­ing polit­i­cally and socially rel­e­vant peace work”). Bill Samuel has writ­ten a his­tory of the peace tes­ti­mony with a good list of links. Lloyd Lee Wil­son wrote about being a “Chris­t­ian Paci­fist” in the April 2003 edi­tion of Quaker Life.

If wars are indeed rooted in lust, then non­vi­o­lent activism should be involved in exam­i­nat­ing those lusts. In The Roots of Non­vi­o­lence (writ­ten for Non​vi​o​lence​.org), I talk a lit­tle about how activists might relate to the deeper causes of the war to tran­scend the “anti-war” move­ment. One way I’ve been explor­ing anti-consumerism in with my re-examination of the Quaker tra­di­tion of plain dress.

For rea­sons I can’t under­stand, peo­ple some­times read “Liv­ing in the Power: the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony Reclaimed” and think I’m “advo­cat­ing a retreat from directly engag­ing the prob­lems of the world” (as one Friend put it). I ask those who think I’m posit­ing some sort of either/or dual­ity betwen faith vs. works, or min­istry vs. activism, to please reread the essay. I have been a peace activist for over fif­teen years and run non​vi​o​lence​.org [update: ran, I laid it down in 2008), a promi­nent web­site on non­vi­o­lence. I think some of the mis­un­der­stand­ings are generational.