Make no mistake: Cadbury’s speech is cringeworthy. Some of the quotes as reported by the Times:

You can prove to your oppressors that their objectives and methods are not only wrong, but unavailing in the face of the world’s protests and universal disapproval of the injustices the Hitler program entails.

By hating Hitler and trying to fight back, Jews are only increasing the severity of his policies against them.

If Jews throughout the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his supporters recognition of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the German sense of justice and the German national conscience, I am sure the problem will be solved more effectively and earlier than otherwise.

The idea that we might be able to appease Hitler was obviously wrong-headed. To tell Jews that they should do this is patronizing to the extreme.

But in many ways, all this is also vintage Quaker. It is in line with how many Friends saw themselves in the world. To understand Cadbury’s reaction, you have to know that Quakers of the era were very suspicious of collective action. He described any boycott of Nazi Germany as a kind of warfare. They felt this way too about unionization–workers getting together on strike were warring against the factory owners.

When John Woolman spoke out about slavery in the 1700s, he went one-on-one as a minister to fellow Quakers. During the Civil War, Friends wrote letters one-on-one with Abraham Lincoln urging him to seek peace (they got some return letters too!). Cadbury naively thought that these sorts of personal tactics could yield results against authoritarian twentieth-century states.

Missing in Cadbury’s analysis is an appreciation of how much the concentration of power in industrializing societies and the growth of a managerial class between owners and workers has changed things. Workers negotiating one-on-one with an owner/operator in a factory with twenty workers is very different than negotiating in a factory of thousands run by a CEO on behalf of hundreds of stockholders. Germany as a unified state was only a dozen years old when Cadbury was born. The era of total war was still relatively new and many people naively thought a rule of law could prevail after the First World War. The idea of industrializing pogroms and killing Jews by the millions must have seen fantastical.

Some of this worldview also came from theology: if we have direct access to the divine, then we can appeal to that of God in our adversary and win his or her heart and soul without resort to coercion. It’s a nice sentiment and it even sometimes works.

I won’t claim that all Friends have abandoned this worldview, but I would say it’s a political minority, especially with more activist Friends. We understand the world better and routinely use boycotts as a strategic lever. Cadbury’s American Friends Service Committee itself pivoted away from the kind of direct aid work that had exemplified its early years. For half a century it has been working in strategic advocacy.

Friends still have problems. We’re still way more stuck on racial issues among ourselves than one would think we would be given our participation in Civil Rights activism. Like many in the U.S., we’re struggling with the limitation of civility in a political system where rules have broken down. No AFSC head would give a lecture like Cadbury’s today. But I think it’s good to know where we come from. Some of Cadbury’s cautions might still hold lessons for us; understanding his blind spots could help expose ours.

It profiles Henderson Luelling (1809–1878) and it’s not exactly an academic source. Here’s a snippet:

Luelling had taken up with these groovy Free Lovers, whom he met in San Francisco. From the outset, the journey had complications. “Dr.” Tyler, it turned out, was actually an ex-blacksmith who now professed expertise in water-cures and clairvoyance. One of the men was fleeing financial troubles, and when the ship was searched by police he hid under the hoopskirt of a female passenger.

Luelling’s life follows many common themes of mid-nineteenth century Quaker life:

• He was a horticulturalist, first moving to the Portland, Oregon, area and then to a small town near Oakland, California. Friends had long been interested in botanical affairs. Roughly a century earlier John Bartram was considered one of the greatest botanists of his generation.
• Luelling moved from Indiana to Salem, Iowa in the 1830s and became a staunch abolitionist, even building hideouts for the Underground Railroad in his house. Wikipedia reports he was expelled from his meeting for this.
• He got Oregon fever and moved his operation out there.
• At some point in this he became interested in Spiritualism and its offshoots like the Free Love movement. This was not a Quaker movement but the modern American movement started with the Fox Sisters in Upstate New York and was heavily promoted by Quaker Hicksites Amy and Isaac Post.

If you want to know more about Luelling’s “sex cults,” this article in Offbeat Oregon feels much better sourced: The father of Oregon’s nursery industry and his “Free Love” cult:

The “free love” thing is far from new. Over the years, especially in the American West, at least half a dozen generations have produced at least one “daring” philosopher who calls for a throwing-off of the age-old yoke of marriage and family and urges his or her followers to revert to the mythic “noble savage” life of naked and unashamed people gathering freely and openly, men and women, living and eating and sleeping together with no rules, no judgment and no squabbles over paternity.

He’d also started his very own free-love cult — “The Harmonial Brotherhood.” Luelling’s group made free love the centerpiece of a strict regimen of self-denial that included an all-vegetarian, stimulant-free diet, cold-water “hydropathy” for any medical need, and a Utopian all-property-in-common social structure.

Portland Friend Mitchel Santine Gould has written about some of these currents as well. His LeavesofGrass.org site used to have a ton of source material. Digging into one day it seemed pretty clear that the Free Love movement was also a refuge of sorts for those who didn’t fit strict nineteenth-century heterosexuality or gender norms. Gould’s piece, Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox has a bit of this, with talk of “lifelong bachelors.”

Many of the Spiritualist leaders were young women and their public lecture series were pretty much the only public lectures by young women anywhere in America. If you want to learn more about these developments I recommend Ann Braud’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. These communities were very involved in abolitionist and women’s rights issues and often started their own yearly meetings after becoming too radical for the Hicksites.

And lest we think all this was a West Coast phenomenon, my little unprepossessing South Jersey town of Hammonton was briefly a center of Free Love Spiritualism (almost completely scrubbed from our history books) and the nearby town of Egg Harbor City had extensive water sanitariums of the kind described in these articles.

Capitalization has lots of built-in quirks. In general, we capitalize only when names come from proper nouns and don’t concern ourselves about mismatches. We can write about “frogs and salamanders and Fowler’s toads” or “diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.” Religious terms are even trickier: there’s the Gospel of Luke that is part of the gospel of Christ. In my Quaker work, it’s surprising how often I have to go into a exegesis of intent over whether the writer is talking about a capital‑L divine Light or a more generic lower-case lightness of being. “Black” and “white” are both clearly lowercased when they refer to colors and most style guides have kept it that way for race.

But seriously? We’re talking about more than color when we use it as a racial designation. This is also identity. Does it really make sense to write about South Central L.A. and talk about its “Koreans, Latinos, and blacks?” The counter-argument says that if capitalize Black, what then with White? Consistency is good and they should presumably match, except for the reality check: Whiteness in America has historically been a catch-all for non-coloredness. Different groups are considered “White” in different circumstances; many of the most-proudly White ethnicities now were colored a century ago. Much of the swampier side of American politics has been reinforcing racial identity so that out-of-work Whites (codename: “working class”) will vote for the interests of White billionaires rather than out-of-work people of color (codename: “poor”) who share everything but their melatonin level. All identities are incomplete and surprisingly fluid when applied at the individual level, but few are as non-specific as “White” as a racial designation.

Back in the 1990s we could dodge the question a bit. The style guide for my current publication notes “lc, but substitute ‘African American’ in most contexts.” Many progressive style sheets back in the day gave similar advice. In the ebb and flow of preferred identity nomenclature, African American was trending as the more politically correct designation, helped along by a strong endorsement from Jesse Jackson. Black wasn’t quite following the way of Negro into obsolescence, but the availability of an clearly capitalized alternative gave white progressives an easy dodge. The terms also perhaps subtly distinguished between those good African Americans who worked within in the system from those dangerous radicals talking about Black Power and reparations.

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought Black back as the politically bolder word. Today it feels sharper and less coy than African American. It’s the better punch line for a thousand voices shouting rising up outside the governor’s mansion. We’ve arrived at the point where African American feels kind of stilted. It’s as if we’ve been trying a bit too hard to normalize centuries of slavery. We’ve got our Irish Americans with their green St Paddy’s day beer, the Italian Americans with their pasta and the African Americans with their music and… oh yes, that unfortunate slavery thing (wait for the comment: “oh wasn’t that terrible but you know there were Irish slaves too”). All of these identities scan the same in the big old melting pot of America. African American is fine for the broad sweep of history of a museum’s name but feels coldly inadequate when we’re watching a hashtag trend for yet another Black person shot on the street. When the megaphone crackles out “Whose lives matter?!?” the answer is “Black Lives Matter!” and you know everyone in the crowd is shouting the first word with a capital B.

Turning to Google: The Columbia Journalism Review has a nice piece on the nuances involved in capitalization, “Black and white: why capitalization matters.” This 2000 lecture abstract by Robert S. Wachal flat-out states that “the failure to capitalize Black when it is synonymous with African American is a matter of unintended racism,” deliciously adding “to put the best possible face on it.” In 2014, The NYTimes published Temple University prof Lori L. Tharps ’s convincing argument, “The Case for Black With a Capital B.” If you want to go historical, this thread on shifting terms by Ken Greeenwald on a 2004 Wordwizard forum [sadly gone and unfindable on Archive.org!] is pure gold.

And with that I’ll open up the comment thread.

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What Will Get Us Ready | Friends Journal
By Rufus M Jones Web-only feature Rufus M. Jones’ 1944 lecture for Baltimore Young Friends Yearly Meeting.

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I do a lot of presenting and am spending to much time writing bullet points, creating slides, and practicing what I’m going to say. I think that this puts a stop to creating conversation in the room. I wanted to learn some conversational mechanics — so I could stop talking at people and begin talking with them.

Beth’s main link is to a Google Tech Talk “unpresentation” by Heather Gold. Might be good background listening today. I’m particularly interested in this for two reasons: first, obviously, is that presentations are often very boring and it’s nice to think about more interactive ways of engaging with an audience.

But second, many modern Friends have defaulted to a lecture style in their religious education. I’m not sure it works. I’ve met people who have participated in multiple Quakerism 101 classes and still don’t know basic facts. I myself have rebelled against power point presentations and pre-set curricula to be more engaging but I’m not convinced that this has made me a great presenter. It’s always worth finding new ways to present in a clear and direct and engages them with the issues they experience day to day.

I imagine this would be of interest not only to liberal Friends who give workshops, but pastoral Friends with a concern to stay open to immediate revelation during worship–Cherice B has a great post about this yesterday , a response to part four of Brent Bill’s Modest Proposal series.

Some interesting points from Heather Gold’s presentation on “tummling”

• The best way to tummle is to be a very big version of yourself. Tummle means to make noise.
• If you’re happy, i’m happy. The number one way to do that is to care and to notice them—especially the people who don’t seem that involved.
• I’m noticing [the disengaged person in the back]. if i can involve him a little bit i’m much more likely to involve more of you faster than if i pick the person in the front row with their arm up. a technique to pull everyone in is to go to the fringes. go to the people who seem on the end, who seem like they have lower status in whatever community you’re in (speak less, more nervious, know fewer people) and go up to them.
• Some people will be mad at you. Some people will be schmucks. Some people will want to talk a lot. You have to let all that be okay. Tools and rules will never ever do as good a job as your confidence that you can handle anything. It’s time consuming to run through fifty rules in your mind; it’s not so time consuming to just be there.

One of my favorite sites is the amazing NJChurchscape.com—that’s New Jersey Churchscapes, put together largely through the efforts of Frank L. Greenagel. It’s a true labor of love, a cataloging of church and meeting architecture in New Jersey. It has beautiful photos, great stories, readable essays on architecture. In a state where everything below Cherry Hill often gets ignored, South Jersey gets good coverage and there’s a lot from the old Quaker colony of West Jersey. This month’s feature is on the meetinghouse, a building of endearing simplicity and it raises a lot of questions for me of how we relate to our church buildings.

We modern-day Friends tend to think of the term meetinghouse as uniquely ours, but go back in history and you’ll find just about everyone using the term to describe the non-showy buildings they erected for religious services and town life. Drive around South Jersey and you’ll see old Methodist churches that started out life as meetinghouses and look surprisingly Quaker. Greenagel looks at the style and then asks:

At what point does a structure cease being a meetinghouse and become a church?.. With the rising affluence and increased mobility of the population came a demand for more specialized places to meet, as well as more of the basic comforts and style which heretofore were dismissed as too worldly, so many churches added smaller lecture rooms, classrooms for Sunday school, and other assembly rooms distinct from the main auditorium.

By this measure, how many of our beloved East Coast Quaker meetinghouses should really just be called “churches?” In the nineteenth century the Protestant “Sunday School Movement” was picked up by Gurneyite and Progressive Hicksite Friends, with the classes simply renamed “First Day School” in deference to Quaker sensibilities (I’ve always wondered if the name switch actually fooled anyone, but that’s another story). By the twentieth century, the new modern liberal Friends had picked up the lecture format, which like the First Day School movement had been adopted from educational models via other religious groups. Many of our larger monthly meetings have fellowship halls, classrooms, kitchens, etc. These buildings have become specialized religious worship buildings and many of them sit empty for most of the week. But not all.

Nowadays many Quaker meetings with buildings open them mid-week for use by community groups. Quaker meetinghouses host peace groups, battered women hotlines, yoga classes, religious congregations in need of a temporary home and similar causes. There’s often an element of good works in the group’s charter.

Perhaps this willingness to open our buildings up earns us the right to continue using the meetinghouse name. If so, we should be careful to resist the pressure of the insurance industry to close ourselves up in the name of liability. One uniqueness to our worship spaces is that they are not consecrated and there should be no special rules for their use. They are oversized barns and we should cherish that. We should remember not to get fetishistic about their history and we shouldn’t tie up our business meetings in endless discussions over the color of the new seat cushions. When we turn our buildings over for others’ use, we shouldn’t worry overly much if a chair or clock gets damanged or stolen. Friends know that our religion is not our buildings and that the measure of our spirit is simply how far we’ll follow God, together as a people.

Related Reading:

• There’s a very handsome book about the HABS work on Quaker meetinghouses in the greater Philadelphia area called Silent Witness: Quaker Meeting Houses In The Delaware Valley, 1695 To The Present. (only $10!).
• My friend Bob Barnett has been putting a lot of great work into a new West Jersey website.