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 Religioustolerance.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 Quaker.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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quakerkathleen.org

Updated July 2018

Over time, these challenges to the BME community became increasingly problematic. Members deleted accounts or stopped posting. By 2015, the main community forum – which used to have hundreds of posts a day – went without a single comment for over six months.

Having predicted many of the web’s functions and features, BME failed to anticipate its own demise.

It’s definitely something I’ve seen in my niche world of Quakers. I started QuakerQuaker as an independent site in part because I didn’t want Google and Facebook and Beliefnet to determine who we are. There’s the obvious problems—Beliefnet hiring a programmer to make a “What Religion Are You?” test based on a few books picked up the library one afternoon.

But there’s also more subtle problems. On Facebook anyone can start or join a group and start talking authoritatively about Quakers without actually being an active community member. I can think of a number of online characters who had never even visiting a Friends meeting or church.

Our tradition built up ways of defining our spokespeople though the practices of recorded ministers and elders, and of clarifying shared beliefs though documents like Faith and Practice. I’ll be the first to argue that this process has produced mixed results. But if it is to be adapted or reformed, I’d like the work to be done by us in a thoughtful, inclusive manner. Instead, the form of our discussions are now invisibly imposed by an outside algorithm that is optimized for obsessive engagement and advertising delivery. Facebook process is not Quaker process, yet it is largely what we use when we talk about Quakers outside of Sunday morning.

I think Facebook has helped alternative communities form. I’m grateful for the pop-up communities of interest I’m part of. And there are sites with more user generated content like Wikipedia and Reddit that hold an interesting middle-ground and where information is generally more accurate. But there’s still a critical role for self-organized independent publications, a niche that I think is continuing to be overshadowed in our current attention ecosystem.

How Facebook – the Walmart of the internet – dismantled online subcultures

Even though Facebook claims to be a global community, its rise has come at the expense of online…

The Conversation

A growing body of research questions the value of the trips abroad, which are supposed to bring hope and Christianity to the needy of the world, while offering American participants an opportunity to work in disadvantaged communities, develop relationships and charge up their faith. Critics scornfully call such trips “religious tourism” undertaken by “vacationaries.”

My brand of religious don’t do this kind of mission work but we are more and more enchanted with long-distance conferences. We now address every issue with a conference but do we ask any “research questions” about their effectiveness? The web is a great tool to extend the conference outward and yet, despite all the content that could be easily ported to the web, most conferences, consultations and gatherings barely exist online.

I know that real life has it’s own value–I was happy to have a visit from individual traveler Micah Bales this weekend, a Friend with a great talent for the good question that stays with you long after his bus departs. I just wish I saw more media coming out of these big events, more ways to bootstrap the volumes of content produced at these events into something we can use for outreach.

If anecdotal evidence is an indication, most of the people who have come to Friends in the last half-decade first encountered us on Beliefnet, a for-profit dot-com with no connection to any Friends body. It’s definitions of “Liberal Quakers” and “Orthodox Quakers” have become more important (de facto) than all of our books of Faith and Practice. Beliefnet, Wikipedia and a site called Religious Tolerance have become the definers of our faith to millions of seekers. Nothing we’re doing comes close to Beliefnet.

And this is part fo the reason I’ve been fascinated by a Youtube video that was made this weekend. It’s an introduction to “liberal Quakers” by someone who’s never been to Quaker worship. While this might sound presumptuous, the real crime is that hers is the only American liberal Quaker introduction on Youtube. What the hell are we doing, Friends? I’ve been corresponding with the Youtuber. She’s 22, a spiritual seeker who cobbled together a spirituality after following a couple of dead-end spiritual paths. She came across the Beliefnet quiz, came out a “liberal Quaker” and started looking for real world Friends. She tried the meeting in her home town but it looked deserted (!) and so started an email correspondence with a Friend she found on another meeting’s website. She did the Youtube video because she couldn’t find any American introductions and wanted to give back, especially to younger seekers that might not respond to a British Youtube series. Yes her video is awkward and a little sketchy on some points of liberal Quaker theology, but it’s honest and doesn’t contain any viewpoints you won’t hear around most meetinghouses.

PS: Since writing this I’ve come across the first video from the just-concluded FGC Gathering. I don’t know if it’ll help with outreach but it is really funny. Thanks Skip, I feel like I was there! 

The way I see it, there’s not really much need for anger on the internet. There’s sure to be something horribly offensive to your spiritual sensibilities right around the next link if only you click. Not only do we have dozens of different definitions of “Quaker,” there’s absolutely no limits over who gets to call themselves a Quaker. If we want to feel embattled or self-righteous we all have blogs we can visit, but is this really the way toward our individual or corporate spiritual growth? Is this the way to build a new movement of Friends?
The web is a land of blurriness. It’s like the open vocal ministry of an unprogrammed meeting taken up a notch or three. We have the new visitors right off the street, seekers who heard about Friends on Wikipedia or Beliefnet and went instantly off to start a blog. There’s those meeting regulars with their particular issues, dare we say hang-ups, over particular topics who get bent out of shape if others minister on them. Out in the corners are the cranky meeting back-benchers, trouble-makers who don’t mind passing on third-hand gossip or spreading half-truths if it will make them the center of someone’s attention. With this kind of mix it’s no surprise there’s conflict.
There will be disagreements. Many times we can share our understandings and grow but sometimes the gap is too large to bridge and we have to shrug our shoulders and agree to disagree. The boundaries of Quakerism have spread out so far that no one is ever going to agree that everyone calling themselves a Friend really has claim for the name. In past centuries this has led to nasty fights that have destroyed our communities. Nowadays we have the “Back” button. One of the disciplines we need to learn is how to use it.
We don’t have to read every post and we certainly don’t need to closely follow every Quaker blog out there. We are what we eat and our Quaker blogosphere is what we let it be. If the Quaker blogs seem too angry then maybe it’s time to trim your blogroll.
Trimming away annoying and time-wasting sites doesn’t mean we keep to like-minded bloggers. I don’t focus on blogs with a particular theology or ones that come out of a particular Quaker tradition. What unites my favorite blogs is the care and discernment that goes into them. These bloggers are open to those who use unfamiliar language, listening to where the words come from, and they’re curious and open to learning and tender with their comments. This is what true ministry looks like, no?
_ps: If you want to confuse people, write a post with an evocative name and then take out the reference. “Wheat” comes from the “parable of the wheat and weeds”:http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013:24–30;&version=31; which LizOpp introduced in the “comments of her post”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2006/08/popcorn-in-q-blogosphere.html and which I elaborated on in an earlier draft of this post._