When four Christian Peacemakers were taken hostage in Iraq late last November, a lot of Quaker organizations stumbled in their response. With Tom Fox we were confronted by a full-on liberal Quaker Christian witness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic witness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many organizations that couldn’t manage anything beyond the boilerplate social justice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in captivity but throughout the ordeal I was mad at the exposed fracture lines between religious witness and social activism.

Whenever a situation involving international issues of peace and witness happens, the Quaker institutions I’m closest to automatically defer to the more political Quaker organizations: for example, the head of Friends General Conference told staff to direct outsiders inquiring about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a committed volunteer. The American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation have knowledgeable and committed staff, but their institutional culture doesn’t allow them to talk Quakerism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving people. I appreciate that these organizations have a strong, vital identity, and I accept that within those confines they do important work and employ many faithful Friends. It’s just that they lack the language to explain why a grocery store employee with a love of youth religious education would go unarmed to Badgdad in the name of Christian witness.

The wider blogosphere was totally abuzz with news of Christian Peacemaker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hundreds of posts and comments, including long discussions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost everyone wondered why the CPT workers were there, and while the opinions weren’t always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive idealists or disingenuous terrorist sympathizers), even the doubters were motivated by a profound curiosity and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blogosphere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and explanation? The AFSC responded by publicizing the statements of moderate Muslim leaders (calling for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a suggestion about listing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meeting put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was targeted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of information of course, and there were plenty of stories on the lefty-leaning sites like electroniciraq.net and the UK site Ekklesia. But Friends explaining this to the world?

The Quaker bloggers did their part. On December 2 I quickly re-jiggered the technology behind QuakerQuaker.org to provide a Christian Peacemaker watch on both Nonviolence.org and QuakerQuaker (same listings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audiences, announced on the post It’s Witness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage situation and included many posts from the Quaker blogger community that had recently congealed.

But here’s the interesting part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blogging community. We already had gathered together as a group of Friends who were willing to write about spirituality and witness. Our conversations had been small and intimate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I sometimes get painted as some sort of fundamentalist Quaker, but the truth is that I’ve wanted to build a community that would wrestle with these issues, figuring the wrestling was more important than the language of the answers. I had already thought about how to encourage bloggers and knit a blogging community together and was able to use these techniques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.

Two other Quakers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his personal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethecaptivesnow.org site was put together impressively fast and contained a lot of good links to news, resources and commentary. But like me, they were over-worked bloggers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is director of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).

After an initial few quiet days, Tom’s meeting Langley Hill put together a great website of links and news. That makes it the only official Quaker organization that pulled together a sustained campaign to support Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what’s up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work happened by volunteers? Johan Maurer has a very interesting post, “Are Quakers Marginal?” that points to my earlier comment on the Christian Peacemakers and doubts whether our avoidance of “hireling priests” has given us a more effective voice. Let’s remember that institutional Quakerism began as support of members in jail for their religious witness; among our earliest committee gatherings were meetings for sufferings—business meetings focused on publicizing the plight of the jailed and support the family and meetings left behind.

I never met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an exceptional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a witness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I wonder if it was this very wholeness that made his work hard to categorize and support. Did he simply fall through the institutional cracks? When you play baseball on a disorganized team you miss a lot of easy catches simply because all the outfielders think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what happened? And is this what would happen again?

My predictable post-election essay is over on Nonviolence.org, “Four More Years”. Aside from the politics, I’ve been fascinated how the election was finally framed in terms of “moral issues” and how this measurement somehow translated to support for President Bush.
Friends and other lefty Christians need to take the “moral and faith issues” question as personal and corporate queries. (As usual Beppeblog has a good post about this, “Tough numbers for a fag like me…”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/tough-numbers-for-fags-like-me.html). If someone had come up to me after I voted yesterday and asked me what I thought was the most important issue in this election, I would have replied “the war”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php. The answer would mask the fact that for me war is a moral issue defined by a deep passionate faith (a deep passionate Christian faith). It’s too easy for me to talk around my faith though, and to frame the debate in secular language. I tell myself I’m being more inclusive when I use pragmatic rationales, but in reality I’m hiding from my listeners my true understanding of Christ’s work in the world and our role in His covenant.
A majority of voters are suspicious of us East Coast liberals and they should be. I just talked to a Friend buying a book for a Bush supporter who, she explained, “doesn’t understand the complexity of life.” Talk about judgemental! Would you support someone who thought you were a idiot if you didn’t support Kerry? The Democrats are starting to look at the turn-off of this form of elitism; from today’s _New York Times_ (of course, here _I_ am, quoting from the official publication of elite America):
bq. “Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter got elected because they were comfortable with their faith,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide. “What happened was that a part of the electorate came open to what Clinton and Carter had to say on everything else–health care, the environment, whatever–because they were very comfortable that Clinton and Carter did not distain the way these people lived their lives, but respected them.”
He added: “We need a nominee and a party that is comfortable with faith and values. And if we have one, then all the hard work we’ve done on Social Security or America’s place in the world or college education can be heard. But people aren’t going to hear what we say until they know that we don’t approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment.”
h3. War and tolerance as moral issues
Why am I not more explicit about my faith and my politics? Why don’t I say that I voted against Bush because I question his moral judgement and his faith? Why don’t I say that war is a Christian issue and that all Christians should be against war? Why don’t I say that charity and love is a Christian issue and that all Christians should honor loving same-sex relationships?
The Revealer has an article called Gay Marriage, GOP secret weapon. The author recently wrote a book about religion in America and concluded that the “greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality.” But here’s a telling observation from his interviews of Christians:
bq.. Most of these people are surprisingly abstract in their thinking. There may be a certain disingenuousness to the popular anti-homosexuality mantra, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” but nearly everyone we met really did distinguish their hatred of homosexuality from their dealings with homosexuals.
How do I know? Because many, if not most, thought that Peter and I were a gay couple, by virtue of the facts that we�re writers and had come from New York City. We�re neither a couple, nor gay, but there never seemed to be a polite way to say that, so we didn�t, and still some of the great homosexual-haters of America welcomed us into their homes and their churches and their temples.
p. This does mean the laws are abstract and we shouldn’t worry. I’m sure there were plenty of Germans in the 1920s who could work themselves into a lather against Jews but be good friends with actual Jews. This sort of casual bigotry grows cancerous when government gets involved. When Hitler took power it was all too easy for them to pretend that the obvious wasn’t happening.
In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?
The most striking moment of all three debates came when the top lieutenant of the most loyalty-obsessed administration in modern history said he disagreed with his president on the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage. Vice President Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter and that experience forced him to see the human consequence of these otherwise-abstract laws. Both Cheney and his debate opponent “John Edwards are United Methodists”:http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week745/news.html. What if Edwards had broken the debate rules, walked over to Cheney and asked that they use his ninety second response time as an opportunity to offer up a joint prayer on love and charity? They could have held hands (gasp!) and could have turned the issue around right then. What good is faith if we don’t witness to it when it counts?
h3. Elsewhere on the Net
* “Gary Hart: Why the Personal Shouldn’t be Political”:http://nytimes.com/2004/11/08/opinion/08hart.html
Who would have thought that the Howard Dean of the 1980s would be so incisive about the issues of religion? I didn’t realize how religious a man he is and he explains why: “As a candidate for public office, I chose not to place my beliefs in the center of my appeal for support because I am also a Jeffersonian; that is to say, I believe that one’s religious beliefs — though they will and should affect one’s outlook on public policy and life — are personal and that America is a secular, not a theocratic, republic.… Declarations of “faith” are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy.” Found via “The Revealer”:http://www.therevealer.org/
* “Beppeblogs’s roundup of post-election talk”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/inspiration-about-elections-beyond.html
* “Omri Elisha: God Save the Queen”:http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001162.php
An explanation of Christian Evangelical appeal of Bush, and why for them qualifications aren’t as important as faithfulness (a principle any Quaker should agree with). “The Esther story, and that passage in particular, is read by evangelicals as a sign of the individual�s role in God�s sovereign designs for human history. They see it not as a story of heroism, but of instrumentalism; Esther is a vehicle, a tool. Mordecai�s statement (�Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this�) sounds like grandeur, but for evangelicals it is read as a radical call to self-abnegation.” These are Quaker themes too, and there are possibilities for “Liberal Quakers and Evangelicals to connect on these issus”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/emerging_church.php.
* The Friends Committee on National Legislation has issued a “Minute on Moral Values”:http://www.fcnl.org/legpolcy/moral_109th_printer.htm. It’s kind of the predictable press release you might expect but it’s good to see them weigh in.