Reviving Quakerism in the New Millennium
What are our truths? What do we believe as a community? What is our witness in the world today? How are we building the Beloved Kingdom here on Earth? Quakerism is not a do-it-yourself individualistic religion. If it is, why do we even come to Meeting for Worship anymore?
Chris Venables spent a year working with Quakers in Britain (see update below) and now asks Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?
The nature of religion has changed, within Quakers we have seen the numbers of young people engaging in our community fall as the effects of economic insecurity have taken hold. And perhaps more importantly, because ‘young adults’ have no time for institutions that often seem arcane and irrelevant, and which have failed to engage with the realities of life for the vast majority of people in our society.
I wish I could share more of his enthusiasm. I’m not seeing anything particularly game-changing in his article. Half of it is generic cliches about millennial preference with extrapolation that they should align with decontextualized Quaker values. He cites a few happening young adult Quaker scenes in the UK and a promising Young Quakers podcast five episodes old; he’s fond of American Emily Provance’s blog. Good stuff to be sure, but you could pick pretty much any year in recent memory and point to similar evidence and imagine an imminent surge. It’s 2018 and we’re still saying “hey this could happen!” It could but it hasn’t so why hasn’t it and what can we do about it?
Also in these contexts “radical faith” sometimes sounds like buzzwords for non-faith. Is the Quaker meetinghouse just a quiet empty room for participants to BYOF (bring your own faith)?
Update: Chris chimed in via Twitter to add that his piece’s observations aren’t just from the year of working with BrYM Friends:
Ah, I’ll take a read of yours too — but those thoughts come from my experience of being around Quakers over the last 8 years, inc setting up a new young adult group (Westminster!), visiting Qs across Britain, and interviewing many of our community over the last year!
Sam Barnett-Cormack is a prolific non-theist British Friend. His latest post, Doing It Ourselves, has some thoughts on community discernment that I find interesting.
Quakerism “done right” is not “do it yourself” in either sense… No task is done by one person alone; it is always the work and responsibility of the community, though we might not always clearly see the support and assistance we are given. Some would say that we are “upheld in prayer,” a term that does not speak to my experience, but we are certainly upheld by the love and nurture of our community – unless our community is failing.
Whereas the young man heretofore has been given to be something wild, he of late years was become more somber, it was proposed by friends to the young man and woman:
Whether he did believe yet was the truth which we professed and walked in according to our measure — further shewing that if wee did not walk in the truth according to our measure given us, we were but a community of men and women, and not a Church of Christ.
Well this one hits home for me. The new QuakerSpeak talks to Oregon social worker Melody George in the topic of Quakers and Mental Health:
I really see mental diversity as a gift to a community, and that the folks that I serve and that I’ve worked with are very resilient. If they tell you their stories about how they’ve gotten through their traumatic situations and what’s helped them to keep going, faith is a huge part of that. And we have a lot to learn from their strength and resilience.
My family has had very avoidable and out-of-nowhere conflicts at two religious spaces — one a Friends meeting and the other a Presbyterian church — over easy accomodations for my son Francis. It seems like many of the dynamics that we’ve seen are not dissimilar to those that keep others out of meeting communities. Who are we willing to adapt for? Is comfort and familiarity our main goal?
Melody also wrote for Friends Journal a few years ago, Imagining a Trauma-informed Quaker Community.
UK Friend Craig Barnett describes changes in Friends in evolutionary terms. It’s a bit of a “On the one hand/On the other hand” argument that points out the strengths of both Quaker tradition and Quaker innovation. I want my have my cake and eat it too, to both honor the divine and work toward radical neighborliness here on Earth using techniques bootstrapped on classic Quaker insights. Craig lays out where we are:
This evolutionary change towards a pluralist and post-Christian movement is not straightforwardly better or worse. It has certainly been a useful adaptation for enabling many people to find a home in a spiritually welcoming community, while at the same time producing a loss of shared religious experience and language
transitionquaker.blogspot.comWhen this latest school gun massacre took place in a school called Stoneman Douglas I only paused at the unusual name as I continued to read however many details of the horror I could stomach. But Stoneman Douglas was a person, an early environmental activist who helped raise awareness of the Everglades as a natural treasure. She might have gotten some of that gumption and care from her father, a Quaker from Minnesota:
The family found a community of Quaker friends in the small town, of which Stoneman Douglas wrote, “It may have been a ‘frontier town,’ but there was strict tradition to guide him, the tradition of ‘Yea and nay,’ the tradition of plain living and clear and independent thinking, and there were family stories to point up the stiff-backed breed. They may have been plain people but they were colorful.”
— Read on m.startribune.com/namesake-at-school-of-latest-massacre-was-a-minnesota-native-born-in-1890/475206053/
An interesting profile of a niche community affected by the shift of attention from community-led sites to Facebook, “How Facebook – the Wal-Mart of the internet – dismantled online subcultures.”
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.