Over on the Quak­ers red­dit, a post I would­n’t nor­mal­ly share (“Is Quak­erism in decline or thriv­ing in the U.S.?”) except for the snip­pet at the end: “As for me, I left Quak­erism to become East­ern Ortho­dox (Anti­ochi­an) some years ago. A num­ber of the young Quak­ers I grew up with have also con­vert­ed to some fla­vor of east­ern orthodoxy.”

I can’t let an aside like that go. I answered that while it seems to be the norm for kids brought up as Lib­er­al Friends to not be active par­tic­i­pants at meet­ing much into adult­hood, I haven’t seen a ten­den­cy toward East­ern Ortho­doxy.¹ I asked for details and the poster, tarxvzf, gave them:

Punk rock con­vert­ed me to ortho­doxy. More pre­cise­ly, my inner rebel­lious­ness made me love punk rock as a teenag­er moti­vat­ed my move to ortho­doxy. The mod­ern west has embraced ‘you do you’ and ‘if it feels good do it.’. The ideals of tol­er­ance and kind­ness espoused by Quak­erism are the main­stream, to an excess in my opin­ion. The most punk rock thing you can do today is to be an Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian. Fit­ting­ly, many of our church lead­ers in the US are for­mer punk rock­ers or met­al heads.

It’s quite the tale. In the­o­ry one should­n’t have to leave Quak­erism to have a “punk rock” Chris­t­ian expe­ri­ence. My wife and I are re-reading William Pen­n’s No Cross No Crown in the evenings now and it’s bold and opin­ion­at­ed and glo­ri­ous. While Friends may occa­sion­al­ly share a bit of out-of-context Penn (like the ubiq­ui­tous “Let us see what love can do”), you won’t get this kind of bare-knuckle, com­plete­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly (yet still uni­ver­sal­ist) Chris­t­ian Penn² in a lot of Quak­er cir­cles. Quak­erism was found­ed as a very inter­est­ing (dare I say “punk rock”?) take on Chris­tian­i­ty but it’s hard to find much of that in most Quak­er spaces today.

Quak­erism was a kind of qui­et rebel­lious­ness for me when I first walked into a meet­ing­house at age 20. I was look­ing for rad­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties where peo­ple were build­ing counter-cultural lives based on mutu­al coop­er­a­tion and direct ser­vice, an alter­na­tive to late-capitalist com­mer­cial lifestyle I was expect­ed to embrace as a late-80s young adult. I found these com­mu­ni­ties on the mar­gins of Quak­er spaces and it took a long while – years real­ly – for me to real­ize that Quak­ers had a his­to­ry of a the­ol­o­gy and rebel­lious­ness to match this. 

If that part of our per­son­al­i­ty weren’t so hid­den away or inac­ces­si­ble maybe some Quak­er kids and bold seek­ers would stay with us into their 20s, though of course oth­ers would run even faster for the exits. It’s a hard balance. 

1. I should note, how­ev­er, that it’s not too dis­sim­i­lar to the path my wife trav­eled (con­vinced Quak­er at 14, now a mem­ber of a Ukrain­ian Catholic church).
2. Yes, I know Penn was also incon­gru­ous­ly a slave­hold­er and have writ­ten about that and helped oth­ers write about it; No Cross No Crown still rocks.