During that time the domain registration for QuakerQuaker turned due. I must have missed the deluge of email that its domain registrar usually sends. I’ve paid the domain bill for another two years and it should be back up for everyone.

Helen Drewery, Head of Witness and Worship for Quakers in Britain, welcoming all to Friends House, said, “We are pleased to be hosting an event which honours all those – including Quakers who put the Kindertransport into effect. Their endeavours are being echoed today by nearly 100 Quaker meetings across Britain which have identified themselves as Sanctuary Meetings and are supporting people who have fled from danger in their home countries. We are glad that these Meetings and the people they are supporting are represented at today’s event. We join them in pressing for more safe passages.”

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/27200

The reports gathered from the Jewish community in Germany by Quakers were of influence when Quakers accompanied the Jewish delegation who went to see Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare to plead the case for allowing immigration of children into Britain without the usual visa restrictions. They swayed the government and this planned immigration of German and Austrian Jewish children became known as the Kindertransport. Around 10,000 children were evacuated from Germany and Austria to Britain between 1938 and 1939.

What I find most fascinating is the detail that the Friends library in London doesnt have a lot of records of this work. It was so much in line with other refugee assistance Friends were doing in Europe that they evidently considered it just another day on the job, so to speak. I shared a piece on the related Quakerspeisungen a few days ago.

Kristallnacht, Kindertransport, and help for refugees

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