Guatemala

North American Quaker statistics 1937–2017

Martin Kelley — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 16:59:06 +0000

These are numbers of Friends in Canada and the United States (including Alaska, which was tallied separately prior to statehood) compiled from Friends World Committee for Consultation. I dug up these numbers from three sources:

1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quakers World Wide: A History of FWCC by Herbert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWCC’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the relevant chart).
1972, 1992 from Earlham School of Religion’s The Present State of Quakerism, 1995, archived here.
2002 on from FWCC directly. Note: Current 2017 map.

Friends in the U.S. and Canada:

1937: 114,924
1957: 122,663
1967: 122,780
1972: 121,380
1977: 119,160
1987: 109,732
1992: 101,255
2002: 92,786
2012: 77,660
2017: 81,392

Friends in Americas (North, Middle South):

1937: 122,166
1957: 131,000
1967: 129,200
1977: 132,300
1987: 139,200
2017: 140,065

You could write a book about what these numbers do and don’t mean. The most glaring omission is that they don’t show the geographic or theological shifts that took place over time. Midwestern Friends have taken a disproportionate hit, for example, and many Philadelphia-area meetings are much smaller than they were a century ago, while independent meetings in the West and/or adjacent to colleges grew like wildflowers mid-century.

My hot take on this is that the reunification work of the early 20th century gave Quakers a solid identity and coherent structure. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remarkably confident document. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, participatory religious movement that was attractive to people tired of more creedal formulations; mixed-religious parents came looking for First-day school community for their children. Quakers’ social justice work was very visible and attracted a number of new people during the antiwar 1960s¹ and the alternative community groundswell of the 1970s. These various newcomers offset the decline of what we might call “ethnic” Friends in rural meetings through this period.

That magic balance of Quaker culture matching the zeitgeist of religious seekers disappeared somewhere back in the 1980s. We aren’t on forefront of any current spiritual trends. While there are bright spots and exceptions Quaker Voluntary Service after so many years of unsupported effort is a big win for us. The Beliefnet quiz has been a (relatively unearned) source of visibility">², we’ve largely struggled with retaining newcomers in recent years. We’re losing our elders more quickly than we’re bringing in new people, hence the forty percent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good signGoing Viral with Quakerism, for lots of positive examples of current outreach">³ or it may be a statistical phantom.Friends Journal's 2017 articles on the latest chart; tl/dr: everyone counts membership differently. Still, this descent is not merely a methodological drop.">⁴ I’ll be curious to see what the next census brings.

2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some numbers in my original 2018 post and have corrected them above.

Conscientious Objection, After You’re In

Martin Kelley — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 21:38:40 +0000

Here’s a website of “Jeremy Hinzman, a U.S. Army soldier who became a a conscientious objector”:http://www.jeremyhinzman.net/faq.html in the course of his service. His applications denied, he moved to Canada and is seeking political asylum there.
I find I can understand the issues all too well. In only a slightly-parallel universe, I’d be in iraq myself instead of publishing Nonviolence.org. My father, a veteran who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, really wanted me to join the U.S. Navy and attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis. For quite some time, I seriously considered it. I am attracted to the idea of service and duty and putting in hard work for something I believe in.
Hinzman’s story is getting a lot of mainstream coverage, I suspect because the “escape to Canada” angle has so many Vietnam-era echoes that resonate with that generation. I wish Hinzman would flesh out his website story though. His Frequently Asked Questions leaves out some important details that could really make the story–why did he join the Army in the first place, what were some of the experiences that led him to rethink his duty, etc. I’d recommend Jeff Paterson’s “Gulf War Refusenik”:http://jeff.paterson.net/ site, which includes lots of stories including his own:
bq. “What am I going to do with my life?” has always been huge question of youth, and today in the wake of the horror and tragedy of New York September 11th this question has increased importance for millions of young people. No one who has seen the images will ever forget… If I hadn’t spent those four years in the Marine Corps, I might be inclined to fall into line now. Most of the time my unit trained to fight a war against peasants who dared to struggle against “American interests” in their homelands-specifically Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala… Faced with this reality, I began the process of becoming un-American-meaning that the interests of the people of the world began to weigh heavier than my self-interest. I realized that the world did not need or want another U.S. troop…
There are bound to be more stories all the time of service-people who find a different reality when they land on foreign shores. How many will rethink their relationship to the U.S. military. How many will follow Paterson’s example of becoming “un-American”?

John Sayles Looks at “Men with Guns”

Martin Kelley — Fri, 01 May 1998 04:13:35 +0000

John Sayles is one of the most talented independent directors filming today. In movies such as “Brother from Another Planet,” “Matewan” and “Lone Star,” he’s told stories about everyday people as they live their lives, try to build better worlds and find themselves caught in their human frailty. His latest movie, “Men with Guns,” follows a wealthy but dying city doctor as he searches the interior of his country for the students he had trained to treat the indigenous poor. Like Dorothy following the yellow brick road, he collects a caravan of lost souls along the way and learns what his ignorance has wrought, both personally and for the life of his country.

The tale is set in an anonymous Latin American country and the ambiguity serves its purpose well. This is not the story of a particular set of abuses or a specific government or army. It is a tale of what happens when capitalism, military rule, rhetoric and human fallibility come together. It is a story of what happens when good people refuse to confront atrocities being committed in their name and instead opt for a willing naiveté.

In interviews, Sayles said he got the image of “men with guns” when he imagined the lot of Vietnam’s “rice people”, politically-simple peasants who went on harvesting rice for hundreds of years as a succession of “men with guns” came through in waves of terror. It didn’t so much matter if the armies were Chinese, French, American or from North Vietnam: all men with guns rule with what seems an arbitrary brutality. The most that the locals can do is stay out of the way.

At it’s heart, “Men with Guns” is a pacifist and anarchist movie, though assigning such labels diminishes the work and threatens to turn Sayles into another manifesto writer. He’s too interesting for that and uses story-telling to show us the world and how it works. Ultimately, the movie blames everyone for their role in the terror–the soldiers, the rebels, the priests and our good-hearted but naive doctor. But Sayles also absolves them and pulls them from their caricatures as he shows us the larger forces that drove them to their roles.

Last Friday, Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading human rights activist in Guatemala, published a scathing report documenting abuses from Guatemala’s 36-year civil war; two days later he was murdered in his own home by unknown assassins. The real-world model for Sayles’ doctor was Guatemalan and it’s hard not to see Condera’s murder as another incident of brutality by men with guns, figuratively if not literally (his murderer reportedly used a cinder block). Seeing John Sayles’ latest movie would be a fitting tribute to Condera’s work and that of others struggling for justice in the world.