I suppose that in either case, Christian or Quaker, the prevailing assumption was that these books are for internal use among Friends. This is who we are, more or less. But what I like about the title Christian Faith and Practice is another interpretation entirely, one I have no permission or evidence to propose: this way of faith and life is not just for us; it’s recommended for all Christians.

I’d argue a strong yes to this. When I think about what ancient Quaker oddities might still be relevant, one of the questions I ask myself is whether we could argue that the whole church should also adopt the practice (however unlikely that might be in reality). If it’s just some Quaker canard, we can toss it into an antiquity dustbin. But if all Christians should be following the practice, then let’s set the example.

I like Thomas Clarkson’s historical account of Friends particularly because he’s not writing for a Quaker audience. I get the feeling he’s holding our practices up for scrutiny, as if to say that maybe everyone should be following them and indeed, his pacifism and abolitionism were greatly influenced by the Friends he met in his work.

Of course this witness to other Christians sort of falls apart if we don’t consider ourselves Christian. If online discourse is any indication, there are large numbers of Quakers who are rather oblivious that almost all of our Quaker identity has a biblical basis (selective, of course, and also interpreted, debated and changing). Quakerism is seen as something that just randomly popped up in the world. None of the early Friends would have thought that.

Whose faith? Whose practice? (part one)

Political and cultural observations in light of Quaker discipleship.

blog.canyoubelieve.me

I was really looking forward to The Testament of Ann Lee, the biopic of Shaker founder Ann Lee, directed and cowritten by Mona Fastvold and starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular character. My wife and I have read a bunch of books on Shakers over the last few years, including at least one cited by the filmmakers in the end credits. We knew from the trailer that this would be a Hollywood treatment, with Ann Lee played by a lithesome young blonde actress but we figured it might be interesting enough anyway.

Nope. It didn’t feel as if the director really understood either the theology behind Shaker aesthetics or the profound oddness of Mother Ann. Much of the movie leaned heavily on music-video styling, with wall-of sound electronica and well-trained singing voices reworking Shaker hymns, all set to carefully choreographed dance scenes. That would be fine for a Pat Benetar biopic but the real Shakers were fiercely against musical instruments (they considered them used “to excite lasciviousness, and to invite and stimulate men to destroy each others’ lives”). I’ve always imagined that dancing would have been more of the random repetitive trance of hippy or all-night raver—chaotic, unpredictable, profoundly un-synchronized.

I certainly understand that creators of period dramas sometimes feel the need to go off in ahistorical directions, especially in their use of music, as a way of setting a mood. But the plainness of Shaker music and dance is precisely its point. To make it too perfect is to misunderstand the theology itself.

The Ann Lee in my head canon isn’t a comely figure with a lust for mystical visions, burning truth and kindness for all. She’s short, kind of shapeless, illiterate, but most of all she’s unpredictable, by turns kind and mean, but also batshit and manipulative. The movie only has one scene about her confessions (a tame depiction at that), which is a shame as confessions were a core part of Mother Ann-era Shaker bonding. When people came to join or even visit the Shakers, she would confront them to confess all their sins in great detail. It was a humiliating process and not by accident: personal humiliation is a key tactic for all cults. There’s an implied blackmail, as embarrassing details could be shared publicly of anyone who might change their mind and want to leave. Another common cult tactic is separating individuals from their families, also an essential part of the Shaker experience.

In the movie, we see a dramatic example of townspeople terrorizing the Shakers but we’re never shown why the locals might be so angry. When people joined the Shakers they split up marriages, pulled children from parents, demanded converts give their material goods to the collective, and turned the new believers against their non-Shaker families. There were accusations that they stole wives and children, all detailed in lawsuits. The Shaker model was a profound threat to the familial structures that held together late-eighteenth century New England life. The violence shown the Shakers was inexcusable but also somewhat understandable—well, unless you watched this movie, where it was portrayed as a fear of the unknown.

The details also seriously strayed from history toward the end, depicting later Shaker life as co-existing with Mother Ann. That’s a terrible choice. Shakerism as an organized religion arguably only began shortly after her death, when a new leadership came together, new settlements started, and a social structure constructed that rewarded technical innovation. Pretty much everything we associate with Shaker design—the flat brooms (1798), the efficiently of the round barns (1826), the apple peelers (1830s), even the hymns that this movie sets to modern music (“Song of Summer” is c. 1875)—came later and really could only have come from institutional Shakers. This is the course of most new religious movements: a charismatic leader holding a small band of committed zealots together, followed by a later institutionalization of roles. By smushing these eras together, Mother Lee’s life is sanitized and Shakers presented as an American origin story.^{1 2}

What’s ironic that the movie itself is beautifully done. The rocked-up ahistorical Shaker songs are stirring. The singing and dancing are beautiful and well choreographed. The cinematography is exceptional. Amanda Seyfried does a great job playing the character she’s been given. If only she had been given Mother Ann!

I recently got around to seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another period movie that profiles a cult in a tumultuous time in American history. It transported me so much more than this one. As I sat in the theater this week, sighing as yet another music video montage powered up, I found myself longing for an auteur with a tiny budget to take on Ann Lee’s story (David Lynch would have understood the essential weirdness of Ann Lee). Less is sometimes more. And it definitely would have been for this production.

The question of where this ubiquitous acronym came from, and when, regularly comes up in Quaker discourse (mostly recently on Reddit here). I sometimes answer with the bits I’ve dug up but rather than reinventing the wheel each time, I thought I’d write it all down. I invite people to add what they know in comments and I’ll edit this.

1940s

Howard Brinton was the inventor of our modern idea of a “testimony” in the 1940s, and his original list was community, harmony, equality, and simplicity. He was the Philadelphia-area born Friend who helped organize unprogrammed Friends on the U.S. West Coast in the early part of the twentieth century. Brinton had a knack for simple explanations that expressed the emerging consensus of a new generation of Friends who were healing from the nineteenth-century schisms. Finding new ways of talking about our commonalities was a central part of the work of reconciliation. From his tour de force 1952 masterpiece, Friends for 300 Years:

The meaning of the group in Quaker practice can be suggested by a diagram. Light from God streams down into the waiting group. This Light, if the way is open for it, produces three results: unity, knowledge, and power. As a result we have the kind of behavior which exists as an ideal in a meeting for worship and a meeting for business. Because of the characteristics of the Light of Christ, the resulting behavior can be described in a general way by the four words Community, Harmony, Equality, and Simplicity.…

He included a chart, which honestly doesn’t help much with my understanding of the metaphysics of it all.

1975

Reader Tomas Mario Kalmar sent me a paper called Learning Community prepared by the Education Commission of Australian Yearly Meeting that lists six “characteristics that distinguished Quaker education”: a religiously guarded education, community, non-violence, equality, simplicity, and an experiential curriculum. The list is largely based on Howard Brinton’s work but I include it here because it shows how Friends were remixing and repurposing his list. Learning Community actually looks pretty good and fairly timeless and Tomas gave me permission to repost the PDF here.

1980–90s

In a Reddit thread a few years ago, macoafi wrote: “My in-laws were children in first day school in the 1980s and 1990s, and they learned 4 testimonies, no acronym. (Peace, truth, simplicity, equality).” At some point Brinton’s harmony started being called peace so this is mostly his list except for truth being swapped for community.

1981

Commenter Sharon writes:

I first heard SPICE at the 1981 FGC gathering in Berea KY! At the time it didn’t sit well with me as I found it too glib. I was still working out what God wanted my life to testify too.

This would put it nearly two decades before from any documented instance I’ve seen. It is also well before any instance I’ve seen that included an I for integrity. I admit I’ll remain skeptical until I see further evidence, though it is possible that someone remembered it from the Berea gathering and started reusing it in the last 1990s.³

1990

Wilmer Cooper was an Ohio Wilburite Friend who went on to become first dean of Earlham School of Religion upon its founding in 1960. Thirty years later he published A Living Faith, which was built on an ESR course called Basic Quaker Beliefs. In the preface he writes: “It is my hope that this work will help Friends gain a fuller understanding of their Quaker heritage and theological roots, while providing for non-Quakers a comprehensive answer to the questions: ‘Who are the Quakers?’ and “What is Quakerism?’ ” In its final chapter Cooper has two lists, which each have four testimonies. His religious testimonies are:

• belief that we can have direct and immediate access to the living God;
• we can no only know the will of God but can, by God’s grace, be enabled to do the will of God.
• the Quaker experience of of community as expressed in the “gathered meeting.”
• the sacramental view of life.

His social testimonies are:

• Peace Testimony
• simplicity
• equality
• integrity

He expands to give a paragraph to each of his eight testimonies but obviously the second list is much pithier.⁴. He does say that this isn’t a canonical list, that different Friends will have different lists, and concludes the section on testimonies by, well, testifying: “Friends believe deeply that if they submit themselves to God and live by the Light of Christ they will be enabled to live by the truth of the Gospel.” It’s worth noting that the later SPICE/S formulation didn’t include any of the religious ones (you could perhaps try to claim community dervices from his religious testimonies list but I don’t generally hear the SPICES C described in the kind of spiritual language Cooper used).

The next year Cooper wrote a Pendle Hill pamphlet that focused on integrity. As far as I’ve seen Cooper is the first to include an I for integrity, setting the stage for our familiar acronym.

Mid-1990s

My wife Julie insists that she remembers talk of SPICE/S back when she was in high school starting to get involved with Friends (circa 1994). She didn’t attend a Quaker school so this would have been in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting circles, probably specifically South Jersey.

Late 1990s

In a comment to this very post, Pendle Hill editor Janaki Spickard Keeler says that when she was working a 2023 pamphlet with Paul Buckley, they tracked SPICE/S to a Friends Council for Education listserv for educators (perhaps E‑Quakes, which was started in 1996 according to a FCE history). Janaki writes: “No one came forward as being the first to come up with the idea, but they shared it along themselves and it spread. They estimate this happened around 1998.” The pamphlet quotes Tom Hoopes, who started as director of education for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1998: “I encountered it in use by one of the monthly meetings of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and I thought to myself, ‘what a great mnemonic device for helping people to remember what we Quakers claim to prioritize, and to try to practice!’” Tom told Janaki and Paul that he didn’t remember the identity of the Friends meeting.

1999

The Summer 1999 edition of Salem Quarter (N.J.) News reports that Woodstown Meeting created a SPICE rap in for a First-day School program which also included songs from Spice Girls. Yes it’s as unique as it sounds:

What’s the word? SPICE!!!! What’s the word? SPICE IS THE WAY TO GO!!!!
Simplicity is simple, and you know it’s right. Squanderin’ money gets ya into a fight.
Peace, it rules, and you know that it’s true. It’s the thing I need to get along with you. Don’t yell and sing those fightin’ songs, when you can help others and right their wrongs.
Integrity is always bein’ true to your word. It’s the most honest testimony I’ve ever heard.
Livin’ and a‑sharin’ all together’s really fun. Community is helpin’, workin’, playin’ all in one.
Equality means everyone is equal, and that’s cool.
Respecting other is what’s right and is the golden rule!!

Note that the article gives a clue on source: “After reading a short article in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting News with the acronym SPICE highlighting the testimonies… [we] were inspired to incorporate this into our First Day School Program at Woodstown MM.” The oldest copy of PYM News available via Archive.org is tantalizingly close—Nov/December 1999. That seems to be when PYM started posting its newsletter.⁵

2003

Google finds a PDF of a 2003 talk given to a Unitarian Universalist church by Salt Lake City Friend Diana Lee Hirschi in 2003 talking about SPICE.

2004

I myself first complained about SPICE in 2004 (note it hadn’t gotten a second S yet). I complained that this kind of list of secular testimonies were too restrictive. I really was a Quaker Ranter back then; also I was really kind of hard on Brinton, who I appreciate more now.

2006

I like to search the Friends Journal archives to see when new terms show up. New terms are often bandied about by particular Friends or within sub-groups, where they might circulate for a few years without getting into wider usage. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the first reference to SPICES in Friends Journal is a 2006 article by Harriett Heath titled “The Quaker Parenting Project: A Report.” She’s lays it out as an attempt to teach Quaker children without resorting to dogma:

There are several different lists of testimonies. We started with one commonly referred to by the acronym SPICES: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship—but we found that there were other issues not addressed by this list. Service is an integral part of Quakerism in our efforts to live our faith; should it be a testimony? Education has been historically an integral part of Quakersim; should it, too, be included? Where does worship—time set apart—fit in?

Her project eventually picked a different list because they didn’t want to be bound by the dictates of fitting into an acronym. They included conflict and growth and service (which sometimes is listed as the final S).

2007/2008 videos

In 2007, British Friends could produce a video called “The Quaker Testimonies” that didn’t mention SPICE/S and ranged over other non-acronymed testimonies such as one for respect and another against oath-taking. If you listen carefully, I think at least one of the speakers must have heard of SPICE because he seemed to be organizing thoughts around it.

In 2008 I talked about SPICE and spiritually getting deeper with testimonies in a YouTube video and accompanying blog post.

2009

Brinton scholar Anthony Manousos did a deep dive on SPICES. Although Anthony claims Briton invented SPICES per se, I think he just invented the idea of testimonies and the initial list that included three of them (four if you count the harmony/peace change).

2011

Less than two years after Heath’s article, Mark Dansereau and Kim Tsocanos, the co-heads of Connecticut Friends School in Wilton, Conn., published an annotated list of SPICES in Friends Journal, explaining that their school was built on these “Six Quaker Values” (yes, italicized and capitalized) and that they applied and wove them into each activity in their curricula. This might be one of the oldest fully-intact listings still easily available on the web. This has become one of the most visited pages on Friends Journal website.

2012

By this time SPICE/S was becoming ubiquitous. See this blog post from Northwest Yearly Meeting and a video Brent Bill put together to promote an upcoming introductory workshop at his meeting in Indiana.

Paul Buckley gave a talk in 2012 that highlighted the role of Wilmer Cooper, an Ohio Friend perhaps most well remembered for founding Earlham School of Religion in 1960. In 2023, Paul Buckley wrote a pamphlet from Pendle Hill, Quaker Testimony: What We Witness to the World, edited by Janaki Spickard Keeler, during which they determined the late 1990s date.

2013

Someone around 2006 I was standing in a meal line at a Quaker event with California Friend Eric Moon and we started to talk about testimonies. It was the start of a great conversation, cut short by some interruption or another before we even hit the dessert station. When I started as Friends Journal editor I asked him to write something. 2013’s Categorically Not the Testimonies was the result. We also talked in an early Quaker Author Podcast.

So where did the SPICES formulation come from? It ultimately derived from Brinton’s list, with harmony morphing to peace and WIl Cooper’s integrity adding an I. Given its pedagogical nature, it was probably coined by educators. It’s a good teaching tool, easy to remember and something you can easily weave into a multi-week class.

Since there’s nothing particularly religious about the SPICE/S list, it can work in an essentially secular environment that might be allergic to religious-sounding Quaker theology. This would include Friends schools appealing to a non-Quaker audience or a Liberal Friends Meeting that wants something non-controversial to teach the kids. I never hear anyone talk about it being derived from “characteristics of the Light of Christ,” as Brinton did when he introduced it.

In the last few years it’s become pretty ubiquitous on TikTok and other short-form video (Discovering Quakers, _gloyoyo_, itsmekatevee).⁶ If you have five minutes to tell a general audience about Quakers, bite-sized descriptions are important. Also: some of these content creators are probably younger than the term itself. Also: I’ve finally grown into the Old Man Yelling at the Clouds meme. SPICES is here to stay.

Is SPICES all that terrible? No, not really. It can be handy. But it is pretty annoying that we’ve confused a list of generic values for belief. And it’s super annoying that even that list of values is hemmed in by the requirement that every component fit into a silly acronym.⁷

What’s funny about the mystery of this is that there’s a very good chance that the person who first listed out SPICE is still around. There’s a box in someone’s garage packed with late-1990s newsletters, one of which lists it out for the first time in print. Anyone with any information can comment below or email me at martink@martinkelley.com.

The following post was written by Blake Everitt, a Friend the UK and member of the newly-formed Revolutionary Quakers. This essay explores the prophetic and apocalyptic nature of early Quakerism, and sketches out how middle class revisionism took over the Religious Society of Friends.

The Religious Society of Friends: Children of Prophets or Children of Propheticide?

I posted there tonight suggesting that Friends consider a media diet that includes more Quaker media—books and magazines and blogs and videos and in-real-life discussion opportunities. I worry that if Facebook groups become the most visible style of Quaker dialogue, then we will have lost something truly precious.

This message isn’t new to longtime readers of QuakerRanter. I extolled blogging as a hedge against Facebookjust yesterday and in August I wrote about some of the dialogue problems inherent in the Facebook model.

I’ve been figuring out Facebook strategies for Quaker media since it opened up to non-students circa 2006. I appreciate much of the attention it’s provided over the years. Social media like YouTube has also been a useful platform for things like the Quakerspeak projectdespite owner Google’s spotty track record. But it’s becoming hard to deny that social media has reshaped the style of civil discourse and trollish hackery, mostly for the worse. I think it’s really essential that we become more conscious of the sources of our daily media diet.

When my “white” friends said I couldn’t bring my “black” best friend to their lunch table, I shrugged and sat with him at a “black” table. On the minus side, when someone in the school parking lot shouted nigger lover, and my friend wanted to fight, I just told him I didn’t mind the insult. That was probably my first seriously hurtful act of “white color-blindness.” It took me decades to realize, to my shame, that it was he who was being insulted, not me.

https://universalistfriends.org/weblog/three-books-for-white-people

As White searched for graveyard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, clothing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wobbled. And her stomach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reassurance. “You’re out there looking for them, and now they’re showing themselves to you,” she told White. “He’s been waiting a long time.” Historically, Philadelphia Quakers were “inconsistent friends” to Indians, engaged in the same colonizing projects as other faiths while seeing themselves as uniquely able to educate natives.

Inconsistent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been tracing the history of Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: high-minded enterprises that often forcably stripped heritage from their pupils in ways that were as culturally imperial as they were unaware.

Byberry Meeting dates to the 1690s and the meetinghouse grounds are full of abolitionist history. The skull was apparently dug up in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a nearby canal project and is thought to have come to the meetinghouse as part of a collection from a shuttered historical society. Its presence on the shelf represents the attitudes of Friends many decades ago who thought nothing of placing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad subtext that the meeting library is said to be so unused that most of the meeting’s contemporary members had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an outside researcher to notice the skeletons in our display case.

https://www.philly.com/philly/news/483072571.html

Regular revision and being open to new truths is part of who Quakers are as a religious society. Quakers compiled the first of these books of discipline in 1738. Since then, each new generation of Quakers has revised the book. A new revision may help it speak to younger Quakers and the wider world.

This possibility of this revision was the basis for the inaccurate and overblown clickbaity rhetoric last week that Quakers were giving up God. Rewriting these books of Faith and Practice is not uncommon. But it can be a big fraught. Who decides what is archaic? Who decides which parts of our Quaker experience are core and which are expendable? Add to this the longstanding Quaker distrust of creedal statements and there’s a strong incentive to include everybody’s experience. Inclusion can be an admirable goal in life and spirituality of course, but for a religious body defining itself it leads to lowest-common-denominationalism.

I’ve found it extremely rewarding to read older copies of Faith and Practice precisely because the sometimes-unfamiliar language opens up a spiritual connection that I’ve missed in the routine of contemporary life. The 1806 Philadelphia Book of Discipline has challenged me to reconcile its very different take on Quaker faith (where are the SPICES?) with my own. My understanding is that the first copies of Faith and Practice were essentially binders of the important minutes that had been passed by Friends over the first century of our existence; these minutes represented boundaries–on our participation on war, on our language of days and times, on our advices against gambling and taverns. This was a very different kind of document than our Faith and Practice’s today.

It would be a personal hell for me to sit on one of the rewriting committees. I like the margins and fringes of Quaker spirituality too much. I like people who have taken the time to think through their experiences and give words to it–phrases and ideas which might not fit the standard nomenclature. I like publishing and sharing the ideas of people who don’t necessarily agree.

These days more newcomers first find Friends through Wikipedia and YouTube and (often phenomenally inaccurate) online discussions. A few years ago I sat in a session of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in which we were discussion revising the section of Faith and Practice that had to do with monthly meeting reporting. I was a bit surprised that the Friends who rose to speak on the proposed new procedure all admitted being unaware of the process in the current edition. It seems as if Faith and Practice is often a imprecise snapshot of Quaker institutional life even to those of us who are deeply embedded.

Quakers take long hard look at faith

Quakers in Britain are to rewrite their book of discipline that has guided their work and witness across…

Quakers