We were coming after 8:30 Mass at Julie’s church and arrived a few minutes before the worship service while they were doing their religious education program. But the distinction between religious ed and worship was minimal, almost non-existent. Attendance at both was near-universal (about 110 total) and much of the worship itself was religious education. There was a series of 15 minute’ish sermons (delivered by various men), broken up by some four-part a capella singing (beautiful), recitations from a Bible verse they were memorizing and kneeling prayer (a surprise the first time, as they all spin around suddenly to face the back, kneel and pray).

It’s probably one of the most religiously conscientious communities I’ve seen. A lot of the service involved reviewing belief structure. Their book of discipline is very slim, not much more than a tract, but it’s something they use and they spent part of the time reading from it. Much of the worship hour was meant to reinforce who they were, why they were and how they were–to explain over and over why they led their distinctive life. Theirs is a voluntary association for those who agree to follow the authority of the group’s teachings. I suspect that every adult in the room could give a detailed presentation on conservative Mennonite faith and give detailed answers about points of doctrine. At the risk of inserting my own opinion I will venture that the worship service felt a bit dry (as Julie said, there wasn’t a ounce of mysticism in the whole proceeding) but I don’t think the members there would feel offended by this observation. Exciting the senses is less important than reviewing the values and living the moral life.

Visually, the group is striking. Every man in the room wore a long-sleeved white dress shirt buttoned all the way up, dark pants and black shoes; all had short hair and only one or two had facial hair. I was more distinctively plain in my broadfalls and suspenders but the effect of sixty-or-so men and young boys all dressed alike was visually stunning. Like a lot of plain peoples, the women were more obviously plain and all but one or two wore lightly-colored cape dresses and head coverings (I later learned that the exceptions were newcomers who weren’t yet members). Seated was segregated, women on the left, men on the right. Gender roles are very clear. There were kids–lots of kids–all around, and a big focus of the sermons was family living. One extended sermon focused on discerning between providing well for one’s family vs. greed and the balance between working hard for your family vs. giving up some things so you can spend time with them. Kids were present throughout the service and were relatively well behaved.

The church itself was called a meetinghouse and was plain–no crosses of course. People sat in pews and there was a raised area up front for ministers and elders. The building doubled as a schoolhouse during the week and its schoolrooms had a lot of Rod and Staff books, familiar from our own home schooling. A member described the school as one leg of the three-legged stool, along with church and family. If any one part of the equation was lacking in some way, the other two could help insure the child’s moral welfare. School was free for church members but was open on a tuition basis to non-Mennonites. These outsiders were required to make certain lifestyle choices that would insure the school stayed relatively pure; the most important requirement was that the family not have a television at home.

My regular readers will have one question on their mind right about now: did anyone invite us to lunch? Why yes they did! We didn’t even have to prompt it. We knew a couple there–M and J, who run a restaurant in the local farmer’s market, a favorite Saturday morning stop for us. They took us under their wing when they recognized us, sitting with us during worship and then showing us the school. J said that if we came back again we could come over for lunch. Then she backtracked and offered that we could come now, explaining that the church had had recent discussions over whether it was too pushy to ask first-time attenders to lunch or whether they should restrain themselves and invite them on the second visit. Wow, a church that thinks about this?!

So we followed them to their place for lunch. It was a wonderful opportunity to ask more questions and get to know one another. Meals are important. Julie and I had wondered why there were Mennonites in Vineland NJ of all places–and two Mennonite churches at that! Short story is that there had been a civilian public service facility in Vineland for conscientious objectors and Lancaster-area Mennonites decided that “the boys” stationed there needed the grounding of a local church community (apparently other C.O. camps were scenes of debauchery–Mennonite drag racing in Colorado Springs was cited). This became Norma Mennonite Church, which still exists and is another local church I’ve been meaning to visit for years (hi Mandy!). In the 1960s, there was a great round of liberalization among Mennonites, an unofficial abandonment of the distinctives codified in their books of disciplines. Many churches split and the Vineland Church was formed by those members of Norma who wanted to maintain the discipline.

This probably explains the strong focus on the rules of the discipline. For those wanting more of the histories, I commend Stephen Scott’s excellent “An Introduction to Old Order and Conservative Mennonite Groups” along with anything else Stephen Scott has written. The Vineland congregation is part of the Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonite Church conference, profiled on pages 173–176. A lot of the Mennonite issues and splits are echoed among Friends and we’d do well to understand these cousins of ours.

The result is a church that’s big on group practice: the dress, the lifestyle. M. told me that they don’t believe in theology but in Biblicism. He explained that they don’t think the Bible contains the word of God but instead that it is the Word of God and he paused to let the distinction sink in. The Bible is not to be interpreted but read and followed, with special attention given the gospels and the letters of Paul.

So no, I’m not going to go Conservative Mennonite on you all. I have a TV. My profession is web design (they’re not into the internet, natch). I’m married to a praciticing Catholic (I don’t know how they would bend on that) and at this point my brain is wired in a curious, outward way that wouldn’t fit into the normative structures of a group like this. Doctrinally-speaking, I’m a Friend in that I think the Word of God is the Inward Christ’s direct spirit and that the Bible needs to be read in that Light. There’s a lot of people who wouldn’t fit for various reasons, people who I would want in my church (they maintain a hard line against remarriage after divorce and I didn’t even ask about gay issues). But I have to admit that the process and structure puts together a really great community of people. They’re hard-working, kind, charitable and not nearly as judgmental as you might imagine–in practice, less judgmental than a lot of progressive religious people I know. Non-resistance is one of the pillars of their practice and they were genuinely interested in Julie’s Catholic church and my experiences among Friends and we talked a fair bit about Islam.

Normally I’d give a big thanks to the church and M & J here, except I know they won’t read this. I am grateful to their kindness in sharing their church, beliefs and family meal with us.

Let’s talk Friends and music. The cartoon Quaker in our historical imagination glares down at us with heavy disapproval when it comes to music. They’re squares who just didn’t get it.

Getting past the cartoons

Thomas Clarkson, our Anglican guide to Quaker thought circa 1700, brings more nuance to the scruples. “The Quakers do not deny that instrumental music is capable of exciting delight. They are not insensible either of its power or of its charms. They throw no imputation on its innocence, when viewed abstractly by itself.” (p. 64)

“Abstractly by itself”: when evaluating a social practice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tempations? Quakers are engaged in a grand experiment in “christian” living, keeping to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral living. The warnings against certain activities are based on observation borne of experience. The Quaker guidelines are wikis, notes compiled together into a collective memory of which activities promote–and which ones threaten–the leading of a moral life.

Clarkson goes on to detail Quaker’s concerns about music. They’re all actually quite valid. Here’s a sampling:

• People sometimes learn music just so they can show off and make others look talentless.
• Religious music can become a end to itself as people become focused on composition and playing (we’ve really decontextualized: much of the music played at orchestra halls is Masses; much of the music played at folk festival is church spirituals).
• Music can be a big time waster, both in its learning and its listening.
• Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won’t say any of these are absolute reason to ban music, but as a list of negative temptations they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very consciously has music as a centerpiece. It’s very beautiful, but I always appreciate the pastor’s reminder that the music is in service to the Mass and that no one had better clap at some performance! Like with Friends, we’re seeing a deliberate balancing of benefits vs temptations and a warning against the snares that the choice has left open.

Context context context

In section iv, Clarkson adds time to the equation. Remember, the Quaker movement is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of early Quakers] was principally in the hands of those, who made a livelihood of the art. Those who followed it as an accomplishment, or a recreation, were few and those followed it with moderation. But since those days, its progress has been immense… Many of the middle classes, in imitation of the higher, have received it… It is learned now, not as a source of occasional recreation, but as a complicated science, where perfection is insisted upon to make it worth of pursuit. p.76.

Again we see Clarkson’s Quakers making distinctions between types and motivations of musicianship. The laborer who plays a guitar after a hard day on the field is less worrisome than the obsessed adolescent who spends their teen years locked in the den practicing Stairway to Heaven. And when music is played at large festivals that lead youth “into company” and fashions, it threatens the religious society: “it has been found, that in proportion as young Quakers mix with the world, they generally imbibe its spirit, and weaken themselves as members of their own body.”

Music has changed even more radically in the suceeding two centuries. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it’s ubiquitious and often involuntary (you can’t go shopping without it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of isolated listenership. Then, what about DIY music and singalongs. Is there a distinction to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between arenas and coffeehouse shows? And move past music into the other media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, computers, glossy magazines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsessing over American Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion?

Does a social practice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral center? What if we turned off the mediated consumer universe and engaged in more spiritually rewarding activities–contemplative reading, service work, visiting with others? But what if music, computers, radio, is part of the way we’re engaging with the world?

How to decide?

Finally, in Clarkson’s days Friends had an elaborate series of courts that would decide about social practices both in the abstract (whether they should be published as warnings) and the particular (whether a particular person had strayed too far and fallen in moral danger). Clarkson was writing for a non-Quaker audience and often translated Quakerese: “courts” was his name for monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting structures. I suspect that those sessions more closely resembled courts than they do the modern institutions that share their name. The court system led to its own abuses and started to break down shortly after Clarkson’s book was published and doesn’t exist anymore.

We find outselves today pretty much without any structure for sharing our experiences (“Faith and Practice” sort of does this but most copies just gather dust on shelves). Monthly meetings don’t feel that oversight of their members is their responsibility; many of us have seen them look the other way even at flagrantly egregious behavior and many Friends would be outraged at the concept that their meeting might tell them what to do–I can hear the howls of protest now!

And yet, and yet: I hear many people longing for this kind of collective inquiry and instruction. A lot of the emergent church talk is about building accountable communities. So we have two broad set of questions: what sort of practices hurt and hinder our spiritual lives in these modern times; and how do we share and perhaps codify guidelines for twenty-first century righteous living?

Went to the opening of “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s”:http://www.pym.org annual sessions yesterday. It’s hard to get too excited about it. It was the same people talking about the same issues. I really like and respect so many in the yearly meeting: the current clerk is always friendly and open to the spirit and the general secretary talks about all the right issues. But try as I might, I can never imagine this group on _fire._ It’s always so focused on itself, its personalities, its structures. Over 99% of the yearly meeting members weren’t there, are never there. The great people still to be gathered aren’t inside that meetinghouse wall.
For a yearly meeting hoping that “community”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000264.php might be the glue that holds it together, I felt pretty out of place. There were maybe half-a-dozen people under forty in the room. Two had presentations but not surprisingly they were both the children of prominent parents, young adults whose last names had gotten them to the podium. Both had been sent on trips as PYM representatives; smart money would bet that neither attends a Meeting regularly. It’s genuinely depressing to once again see token young adult children of prominent Friends held up as the future of Quakerism, even if they’re uninvolved, even if they’re only semi-coherent. No one ever seems to notice that the “future” is eternally twenty years old.
March 25 was not only the first day of PYM sessions. On the Catholic calendar, it’s the “Feast of the Annunciation”:http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01542a.htm, the day the angel Gabriel visited a teenage girl of undisguished parents in a dusty corner of the Roman empire to tell her she was to be the mother of God. Two thousand years ago the Word was made flesh and the son of God was conceived in a miracle. I skipped the evening session of PYM to join Julie at Mass. I needed some religion. While Friends don’t mark our calendars we do share the story. When Gabriel told Mary ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” she responded “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” despite knowing her life plans and agendas would be forever altered. Friends testify that “Jesus has come to teach the people himsef.” What would it mean for us to scrap our plans and agendas to follow His?

And, a few perhaps obvious disclaimers: 1) there are deeply faithful people who grew up in Young Friends programs; 2) there are religious ed instructors who are worried about the message we’re giving our young people and fret as I do; 3) there are a lot of members of the RSoF who just don’t think teaching distinctly Quaker faithfulness is important and wouldn’t agree that there’s a problem.

I don’t think it’s useful to read this without also looking to my early article, The Lost Quaker Generation, which mourns the friends I’ve seen drop out of Quakerism (many of them “birthright,” i.e., born into Quaker families), and We’re all Ranters Now, which argues that our society of seekers needs to become a society of finders if we are to be able to articulate a faith to transmit.
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On June 30, 2000, Julie and I met at a national gathering of Quakers. Fourteen months later we were married at the Woodstown Friends Meetinghouse under the care of the Atlantic City Area Friends Meeting. Roughly fourteen months later, when the sparkles in our eyes were meeting with an approving nod from God and our baby was conceived, I was co-clerk of Atlantic City Area Meeting and Julie was clerk of its Outreach Committee. Ten months later, our infant son Theo was baptized at Mater Ecclesiae Roman Catholic Church in Berlin, N.J. It’s Julie’s new church; I myself remain Quaker, but without a Meeting I can quite call home. What happened?

I don’t want to try to speak for Julie and why she left Friends to return to the faith she was brought up in. But I do have to testify that the reverence, spirit and authenticity of the worship at Mater Ecclesiae is deeper than that in most Friends Meetinghouses. It’s a church with a lot of members who seem to believe in the real presence of Christ. A disclaimer that Mater Ecclesiae is unusual, one of the few churches in the country that uses the traditional Tridentine Mass or Roman Rite, and that it attracts ardent followers who have self-selected themselves, in that they’re not going to their local parish church. I don’t think it’s the Catholicism alone that draws Julie–I think the purposefulness of the worshipers is a large piece. Despite all the distractions (chants, Latin, rote confessions of faith: I’m speaking as a Friend), the worship there is unusually gathered. But more: there’s a groundedness to the faith. In a one-on-one conversation the priest explained to me the ways he thought Quakerism was wrong. I wasn’t offended–quite the contrary, I loved it! It was so refreshing to meet someone who believed what he believed, (Hey, if I didn’t believe in the degeneration of the Roman Catholic Church or the empty professions of hireling priests, I might join him. I also feel comfortable predicting that he would welcome my jousting here.)

What I can talk about is my misgivings about the prospect of raising up Theo as a Quaker in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The weakest element of the Religious Society of Friends is its children’s religious education. This is something I’ve seen manifested in two different kinds of ways: content and results.

Quakers have remarkably few expectations of their children. It’s considered remarkable if older children spend a whole ten minutes in Meeting for Worship (I’ve heard adult birthright Friends boast that they’ve never sat through a whole hour of Quaker worship). Quakers are obsessed about listening to what children have to say, and so never share with them what they believe. I’ve known adults birthright Friends who have never had conversations with their parents about the basis of their faith.

Quaker religious education programs often forgo teaching traditional Quaker faith and practice for more faddish beliefs. The basement walls of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting youth center is painted over with dancing gods, while of the big events of the Young Friends’ annual calendar is a “Quaker sweat lodge”. A culture of touch and physicality (“cuddle puddles”, backrubs) is thought charming and immodest dress is considered a sign of rebellious individuality. Quaker schools publish brochures saying Meeting for Worship is all about “thinking, with God given little notice.” When Quakers want to have “intergenerational” worship, they feel they have to program it with some sort of attention-keeping playtime activity (Mater Ecclesiae echoes Quaker tradition here: “intergenerational” means children sitting through and participating in Mass with the adults).

Too many of the people my age and Julie’s who were brought up at Friends are ignorant of basic Quaker beliefs and are unaware of Quaker traditions (FUM, EFI, Conservatives) outside the easy-going East Coast liberalism they were raised in. For them being a Friend is acting a certain way, believing a certain brand of political philosophy and being part of a certain social group. Too many Young Adult Friends I’ve known over the years are cliquish, irreligious, and have more than their share of issues around intimacy and sexuality.

Don’t get me wrong: these kids are often really good people, children to be proud of, doing great things in the world. Many of them are open-hearted, spiritually-sensitive, and in deeply grounded relationships. But only a very few are practicing Quakers. And when I look at the religious education they get, I can’t say I’m surprised. If I were to raise Theo as a Quaker, I would have to “home school” him away from most of the religious education programs offered locally. When all the kids scramble out of worship after ten minutes I’d have to say “no” and tell him to keep sitting–how weird would that be?

Theo has a better chance of sharing the traditional Quaker values of the presence of Christ, of Holy Obedience, and of bearing the cross by being raised as a Catholic in a traditionalist church. It’s more likely he’ll turn out Quaker if he’s baptised at Mater Ecclesiae. Julie and I will be teaching him reverence by example. I’ll share my Quaker faith with him. I’m sure he’ll participate in Quaker events, but consciously, selectively, guardedly (in the old Quaker sense).

If Friends believe they have a faith worth holdling, they should also believe they have a faith worth passing on. Do we?

Related Reading

• Beckey Phipps conducted a series of interviews that touched on many of these issues and published it in FGConnections. FGC Religious Education: Lessons for the 21st Century asks many of the right questions. My favorite line: “It is the most amazing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quaker] leadership programs–they’ve disappeared.”
• I touch on these issues from the other side in The Lost Quaker Generation, which is about the twenty- and thirty-something Friends that have drifted away