From Steven Davi­son:

I car­ry a min­istry that forms a recur­ring theme in this blog: that our social wit­ness min­utes ought to express our Quak­er faith explic­it­ly as the heart of our tes­ti­mo­ni­al rhetoric. In my expe­ri­ence, they rarely do. Instead they use the mind­set and rhetoric of social change non­prof­its. They employ argu­ments from sci­ence and social sci­ence, and use sta­tis­tics, rather than a straight­for­ward­ly moral argu­ment. Very often, you would nev­er know a reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion had writ­ten them, let alone a Quak­er meeting. 

In his post he rewrites a recent minute on cli­mate change. It’s an inter­est­ing experiment.

I must admit I’ve rolled my eyes more than once over min­utes. I remem­ber one some years back that went into detail about pro­posed mis­sile sys­tems and the minu­tia of glob­al nuclear deter­rence pol­i­cy (my mem­o­ry is that it was writ­ten by a high school math teacher but that might be an embell­ish­ment). I had no qualms about the min­ute’s argu­ments, which I thought were quite sound and well-reasoned. But I seri­ous­ly won­dered who the audi­ence was sup­posed to be. Did the Friends approv­ing the minute real­ly think this was going to go up the chain of com­mand to to upper ech­e­lons of the Pen­ta­gon, the House Com­mit­tee on Defense, etc? “Gen­er­al, sir, we have a minute from some Quak­ers you must read right away!”

I’ve writ­ten polit­i­cal blogs and I like ana­lyz­ing poli­cies. I can make informed sec­u­lar argu­ments about cli­mate change and mil­i­tarism. Stay­ing on top of sci­en­tif­ic changes and under­stand­ing the effects of gov­ern­men­tal poli­cies is impor­tant for us. But it’s not the source of our col­lec­tive pow­er as Friends. Peo­ple look to us for our moral clar­i­ty, which (when we actu­al­ly pos­sess it) is a result of our spir­i­tu­al ground­ing. Mis­siles are wrong because threat­en­ing to kill peo­ple is wrong. Design­ing weapons capa­ble of war crimes is wrong because mass mur­der is wrong. These are sim­ple state­ments. They are sure to be con­sid­ered naive by those who only think of poli­cies. But they can speak to oth­ers (“speak to that of God in them”) who can feel their truth in their heart.