Craig Barnett on UK meetings that are attracting newcomers:
Newcomers need to be made welcome, including children. They need to find people who enjoy spending time together, who are open about their spiritual experience, and willing to share the riches of the Quaker way with them. They need to experience Quaker worship that is expectant and gathered, where people take the risk of openness to the Spirit that leads to deep and vulnerable spoken ministry.
Obviously the biggest Quaker news this week is a number of Quaker bodies (including my own Philadelphia Yearly Meeting) suing the Department of Homeland Security over policy changes that allow immigration agents to go into house of worship. The suit is being widely reported in mainstream media (NBC News, Axios, The New Republic, Reuters, Breitbart, NYPost, Channel 6 Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer).
The newest Friends Journal issue is out, looking at how we use money. It’s perhaps not the sexiest topic but it speaks to what we value as a body of believers. Are we focused on our internal group or on the world outside our walls? Sometimes the discussions around money are tedious and our decisions self-evident. I think it’s possible for a meeting to spend too much time focused on its own self-management. But there are times when discussions of resource use brings out surprising inspiration.
First up in our features is Joann Neuroth’s “Putting Our Money Where Our Hearts Are,” a look at how her meeting in Lansing, Michigan, took seemingly tiny steps that have grown into signifiant community outreach and investment.
When we catch our breath to add it all up, we realize that the volunteers who “feed the pantry” daily have put $11,000 of food in that box each year. It feels a bit like loaves and fishes! Where did it come from, one grocery bag at a time? We are pretty sure anyone proposing an $11,000 program back in 2020 would have been quickly set straight about limits to our capacity. But one can of soup at a time, we have truly surprised ourselves.
Fascinating and disturbing account of an outspoken Quaker* UK anti-trans activist named Emma Roberts who has started a video podcast interviewing prominent Friends. Most of the episodes have nothing to do with gender and sexuality but some do.
The asterisk up is there because the podcaster apparently renounced their membership in the Society of Friends when Britain Yearly Meeting passed a minute on trans inclusion. I appreciate someone disagreeing with a yearly meeting resolution and even staying in the fold despite the opposition. But when an affirming minute that doesn’t actually affect you (just your ideology) is such a burden that you leave… well then the question is why you would put such effort into a podcast of your ex-religion. it doesn’t seem like a project borne in good faith.
Clair does a great job bringing the receipts and explaining the context (I haven’t been following the details of the UK back-and-forth on this).
New Friends Journal article on some of the Quaker groups leaving Twitter/X this week, following Friends World Committee’s Monday announcement.
There’s been a little pushback, on X and Reddit, along the lines that Quakers should be represented everywhere. Our article quotes Alistair McIntosh, who posted on X:
I prefer it when Quakers bring an alternative presence to conflict zones. Has God not already got sufficient angels in heaven? Can we not, as our 1947 Nobel Peace Prize citation quotes it, act “to build up in a spirit of love what has been destroyed in a spirit of hatred.”
I get it but I don’t think the metaphor holds. No one is trapped on a social network.
One problem with this line of reasoning is that it fails to take into account the time and resources that it takes to be on a social platform. Facebook, X, Threads, Bluesky, Discord, Tiktok, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit, Mastodon… There are so many social networks and you can’t be everywhere. As a publisher, you have to choose where you place your attention. X has shot itself in the foot time and time again since Musk came in. He has no idea how to run a social network.
The quality of discourse at X had turned to shit. Much of the audience is gone. Posts with links are downgraded in the algorithm, giving publishers little incentive to stay. For most publishers, the main purpose of social networks is to get people to their websites (hopefully to sign up for email lists). X is following the lead of Meta (Facebook, Threads, Instagram), whose networks have become increasingly useless as they’ve downgraded posts with links.
Many pubs are reporting they’re now getting more referral visitors from Bluesky than X, even with fewer followers. For me, this announcement is less about politics than it is a recognition that X isn’t Twitter and that the enshittification of the network is such that it’s no longer worth our limited resources or attention.
When Friends World Committee’s World Office came to us and said that a bunch of Quaker orgs were organizing to leave X en masse, I responded with a shrug. It hasn’t felt worth it to stay on X. This is as good a time as ever to leave. Friends Journal has been on Bluesky for over a year and the discourse is simply better.
Neiman Lab is a great group that studies journalism and they’ve come out with a “Predictions for Journalism, 2025″ list. Whitney Phillips has a great entry, “Religious-sounding language will be everywhere in 2025” that looks at the current vocabulary being promoted by so-called Christian Nationalists:
this language often centers, instead, on hatred of an amalgamated, shape-shifting, ultimately invented liberal devil that maps, as convenient, onto “the left,” the Democratic Party, “elites” somehow aligned with Marxism, and what Project 2025 describes as “the Great Awokening.” Spreading the Christian faith isn’t the point; fighting the liberal devil is. This devil is ultimately secular, based on things like DEI initiatives and the existence of trans people, and is also the quasi-religious antagonist in a decades-old cosmic showdown between the ultimate good of “real” America and the ultimate evil of leftists hell-bent on tearing it asunder.
Much of the worldview of these groups has little resemblance to the humility and meekness of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and I appreciate Phillips’s framing of it as “religious-sounding.” The nomination of the eminently unqualified train wreck that is Pete Hegseth has brought some of this to the forefront. A lot of the vitriol is based on classic antisemitic tropes; the absolutely bizarroworld claim that pets being eaten could have been lifted right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “Religious freedom” is a rallying cry, and while I agree that it’s always a challenge to balance personal religious with civic norms, a lot of the complaints are rather petty. Some of these folks have latched onto Quaker figures, especially William Penn, to the point where I feel I need to fact check sources whenever I read anything about him any more.
It’s also very much the case that some of the people with deeply Christian worldviews are very decent, well-meaning people who would never think to do harm. Part of our work is to try to disentangle this all as best we could. This is far from the first time bad actors have sought to weaponize Jesus’s faith.
Hat tip Julie Peyton on Bluesky.
Graham Taylor with a well-cited article on the proto-socialism of early Friends. There’s a bit of anachronistic thinking going on here, which he admits to. But it’s also the case that a lot of Quaker history is viewed through the lens of later Quakers and often ignores what was happening outside of Quakerism at the time. This can lead to bad histories. I’m not sure I buy some of Taylor’s arguments but it’s a good exercise and Fox certainly did talk about economics as part of his call for justice.
December’s Friends Journal is online and looks at “Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism.” I wrote the opening column this month and explained why I wanted to see Quakers tackle this. It seems to me that hope and pessimism are attitudes that transcend typical religious and political divisions. Pick a topic or dissect a social group and you can usually find among them people who are undaunted by the challenges ahead and others worried to the point of paralysis. Our reactions to Covid these past five years have exposed these fault lines, as is our responses to the recent presidential election. I wrote:
Has there ever been an age in human history in which we could be purely optimistic or purely pessimistic? Quaker founder George Fox wrote that his ministry arose “when all my hopes in [preachers and experienced people] were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do.” He famously found inspiration, guidance, and courage in “one, even Christ Jesus,” who could speak to his condition. What keeps us going today in a world always ready to implode or blossom?
