Kath­leen Wooten asks Who tells our story

Who tells our sto­ry in this time?  In today’s world of imme­di­ate news, and social media, and every­one hav­ing a twit­ter account and an opin­ion – there’s a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion out there.  Some of it might be dam­ag­ing and out­right manip­u­la­tive.  Some of it might just be mis­in­formed peo­ple, who are con­fus­ing Quak­ers (for exam­ple) with Amish folks, or Shakers.

One of the rea­sons I’ve been so involved in Quak­er media is my long­time con­cern that we’re in increas­ing dan­ger of being defined by out­siders. A main­stream site with a page on Quak­ers can eas­i­ly show up high­er in search results than pages we cre­ate.  For a long time back in the day, an entry on Quak­ers writ­ten by some Uni­tar­i­ans on Reli​gious​tol​er​ance​.com was a top hit. Google and Face­book have long had more say in defin­ing Quak­er beliefs than any of our nation­al orga­ni­za­tions. Even when real-life Quak­ers are involved— in Face­book groups, Wikipedia edit­ing, blog­ging, and the orig­i­nal Quak​er​.org — there was none of the kind of for­mal Quak­er process (for bet­ter and worse) that his­tor­i­cal­ly char­ac­ter­ized Quak­er publishing.

One hap­py irony is that Kath­leen her­self came in through a chan­nel with no Quak­er involve­ment. She writes: ” I had nev­er heard of Quak­ers until I took an inter­net quiz in my mid- thir­ties.” This is almost cer­tain­ly the “Belief-o-Matic” Beliefnet quiz (con­firmed in com­ments). The site was found­ed as a venture-capital-fueled  attempt to win the adver­tis­ing reli­gion mar­ket in the heady years of what we ret­ro­spec­tive­ly call the dot-com bub­ble. The orig­i­nal quiz dates fur­ther back to a still-going site called SelectS­mart, which hosts dozens of quizzes (“Which Bond Vil­lain Are You?,” “What Piz­za Top­ping Are You?,” “Pink Floyd Album Selec­tor”), one of the most pop­u­lar of which is “Belief Sys­tem Selec­tor.” The site is Curt and Lori Ander­son, a husband-and-wife team; he was the techie who pro­grammed the quizzes; she hunt­ed for con­tent. She used online sources and her local library to com­ing up with ques­tions for him to plug in for the belief quiz (read some of the sto­ry here and also here). Beliefnet start­ed host­ing it inde­pen­dent­ly, giv­ing it a UI refresh and renam­ing it Belief-o-Matic. For what­ev­er rea­sons of wonky algo­rithms huge per­cent­ages of peo­ple who took the test came out as “Lib­er­al Quak­er” or “Ortho­dox Quak­er.” No Friends were involved in the quiz, hence the archa­ic names (few Friends have iden­ti­fied as Ortho­dox for generations).

In the 2000s, this quiz was inad­ver­tent­ly far more suc­cess­ful in out­reach than any pro­gram con­ceived by Friends (sor­ry PYM/FGC/Pendle Hill donors). I think we’ve all become bet­ter at media and telling our own sto­ry but Kath­leen’s ques­tion — who tells our sto­ry in this time? — is still a key one. After all, Lori Ander­son­’s check­list of beliefs (on SelectS­mart and Beliefnet) are prob­a­bly one of the most-read def­i­n­i­tions of Lib­er­al Quakerism.

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