For many of us, our predicament today seems most like the soil with the thorns: We want to draw closer to God and walk in God’s ways, but there is so much bad news, so many obligations, so many distractions. We can be led astray, sometimes without even knowing it. The founder of our movement, George Fox, once said that “whatever ye are addicted to, the Tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trouble you, then he gets advantage over you, and then ye are gone.” We can be addicted to many things: not just, say, alcohol or gambling, but ideas, both about the world and about ourselves.

Alone, none of us can do much to change the world. But we can allow ourselves to be instruments of peace, reconciliation, love. It’s easy to get stuck and tempting in those times to get defensive or look toward others. I’ve found the old Quaker take on “The Tempter” to be personally very useful. I’ve learned to question and go inward whenever I feel too much pride in something or find myself part of a group that seems self-satisfied with its work.

Good soil

Most yearly meetings recommend that everyone who works with young people should have a background check. Most local meetings I have been a part of resist this, saying that “But we know that person – they have belonged here for years!” Requiring a background check feels to some Friends like an invasion of privacy, or that it goes against the openness and trust which they value in a Quaker meeting.

I have personally known of three respected Friends who turned out to be serial child rapists. Two were pillars of their meeting. None of the people in the monthly meeting knew learned about it because of outside legal action and investigations.

There were times when these individuals were around my children, though I was near-enough nearby that I’m not worried anything happened. Still, one of the cases involved rapes in a camper in the perpetrator’s backyard and I remember my eldest thinking it looked cool and trying the door handle. We also had a close call with a Boy Scout leader and respected local historian whose file was published when an Oregon judge ordered the national BSA to release decades of secret pedophile records.

One the affected meetings in particular is near and dear to me heart and have some warm and faithful Friends. I know it was a shock and ongoing trauma for them that this happened in their community. I understand that we were all a bit naive about these matters 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. But we’ve all been educated about just how common this is and just how charming pedophiles can be.

Even recently, I’ve had people assure me their Friends meetings are safe and that they don’t need to do background checks. I make a mental note to avoid those meetings. We are not immune. And we are not magically better about discerning this stuff than any other faith community.

Straight talk on preventing child abuse

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

• The completely unnecessary commando-style dive-and-roll that introduces Corporal Eric Casebolt. Some reports describe it as a trip but to me it looks like he’s playing a Hollywood action hero stunt double. Has he just been watching too many of the police videos he’s been collecting on YouTube?
• That none of the other officers saw his derring-do and said “yo Eric, stand down.” Is this something cops just don’t do? And if not, why not? We all know what it’s like to be hopped up on too much adrenaline. I know people do weird stuff when their reptilian brain fight-or-flight mechanism cuts in. It seems that officers should be on the lookout for just this sort of overreaction and have some sort of safe word to tell one another to take a chill.
• The videographer was a “invisible” white teenager. He walked nearby–and occasionally through–the action without being questioned. At one point Casebolt seems to purposefully step around him to put down his dark-skinned friends. The videographer told news reporters that he felt his whiteness made him invisible to Casebolt.

I never quite realized all the race politics behind the switch from public pools vs private pool clubs. I grew up in a Philly suburb with two public pools and very much remember the constant worry that Philadelphia kids might sneak in (“Philadelphia” was of course code for “black”). The township did have a historically African American neighborhood so the pools were racially integrated but I’m sure every dark-skinned township resident was asked to show town ID a lot more than I was. And it’s hard to think it was entirely coincidental that both public pools were located on the opposite ends of the township from the black neighborhood.

There are no public pools in the South Jersey town where I live. A satellite view picks out thirteen private pools on my block alone. Thirteen?!? There’s one private pool club across town. There’s a lot of casual racism around here, primarily directed at the mostly-Mexican farmworkers who double the town population every summer. If there was a town pool that reflected the demographics of the local Walmart parking lot on a Friday night in July, we’d have mini-riots I’m sure—which is almost surely why we don’t have a municipal pool and why wealthy families have poured millions of dollars into backyards.

(My family has joined the Elmer Swim Club, a pool located about half an hour away. While the majority of members are super nice and I haven’t heard any dodgy racial code phrases. The pool is diverse but is mostly white, reflecting the nearby population. That said, I’ve read enough Ta-Nehisi Coates to know we can rarely take white towns for granted. So.)

My 9 year old was reading the passage of Jesus’s temptation in the desert found in Matthew 4. I find it such a relatable story. No, no one with pointy ears and a red tail has offered me a kingdom lately, but there are a number of normal human elements nonetheless.

To start with, Jesus is fasting and living without shelter for forty days. I know I become less of the person I want to be when I’m hungry, tired, and stressed. The tempter also proffers a test to see if God cares. That too is familiar: how often do we want something from close family and friends but hold back to see if it’s offered. “Oh, if they really cared I wouldn’t have to remind them.” We do this with God too, confusing changing states of fortune with divine favor rather than welcoming even hard times as a opportunity for growth and understanding.

One of my favorite parts of the Lord’s Prayer is the plea that we not even be led to temptation. There’s a certain humility to that. Jesus might be able to resist the sweet promises of the tempter even when cold and hungry, but I’d rather skip the tests.

It’s hard enough living in this world in a state of humility and cooperation. None of us are perfect, starting with me, and we all certainly have plenty of room to grow. But it’s nice to know that we don’t have to face the tempter alone. God knows just how hard it can be and has our back.

Of course we don’t. Who would? Like any group if people in the modern world, we assemble without question and leave the premises. But why? Because of shared language and testimonies.

A ringing bell does not, by itself, constitute a call to action. Power up your time machine and bring your battery-powered alarm system back a few thousand years and set it off. People would look around in confusion (and might be afraid if the alien sound), but they wouldn’t file out of a building. We do it because we’ve been socialized in a language of group warning.

Ever since our schooldays, we have been taught this language: fire alarms, flashing lights, fire pull boxes. We don’t need to discern the situation because we already know what the alarm means: the likelihood of imminent danger.

Our response also needs little discernment. We might think of this as a testimony: a course of action that we’ve realized is so core to our understanding of our relation to the world that it rarely needs to be debated amongst ourselves.

I must have participated in a hundred fire drills in my lifetime, but so far none of the alarms have been fires. But they have served a very real purpose.

When we do media in an advocacy sense, most of our time is spent developing and reinforcing shared language and obvious courses-of-action. We tell stories of previous situations and debate the contours of the testimonies. We’re readying ourselves for when we will be called to action.

The restaurant chain Red Robin recently made a fifteen-second TV ad whose joke is that its veggie-burgers are perfect for customers whose teenage daughters are “going through a phase.” It’s had rather limited airplay (it’s the 450th or so most run ad in the past 30 days) but still, Business Insider ran a piece on it which claimed that “the chain managed to insult all potential vegetarian and vegan customers” with the ad. For evidence, it cited three mild comments on Red Robin’s Facebook page. Fair enough.

But then the page-view-whores at Huffington Post saw the BI piece and wrote that Red Robin is “under fire for dissing vegetarians,” still citing just those Facebook comments. Under fire? For three comments?

Sensing fresh (veggie?) meat, Phillymag links to HuffPost to claim that ”vegetarians and vegans far and wide are freaking out” and that a boycott has been declared. The author tells us that “‘Offended’ gets tossed around so rapidly” and it must be true, right?, as she uses it three more times just in her opening paragraph. It’s a pity that none of the three Facebook commenters were considerate enough to actually use the words “outrage” or “boycott.” One described the ad as “disappointing” (ouch!). Another used the word “dissatisfied” (zing!), though he was speaking not about the ad per se but rather a recent visit to the restaurant.

Seems like if there is an epidemic of offended-ness going on, we might take a look at the desperation of what passes for modern journalism these days. Offended-ness must get page views, so why not be offended at being offended? (I imagine some hack further down the pageview food chain is right now reading the Phillymag piece and typing out a headline about the worldwide vegan army issuing a fatwa on the teenage daughters of Red Roof executives.) Is this really the kind of crap that people like to share on Facebook? Do Internet users just not follow links backward to judge if there’s any truth to outrage posts on outrage? I usually ignore this kind of junk even to read past the ridiculous headline. But the phenomenon is all too ubiquitous on the interwebs these days and is really so unnecessarily divisive and stereotype-perpetuating.

“There’s a lot of bad ‘isms’ floatin’ around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism. Make a buck, make a buck.”
–Alfred, Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Did Thanksgiving even happen? Walking around the neighborhood and scanning the store circulars it seems more like some blip between Halloween candy and Christmas toys. In 1947, Alfred’s Christmas ism was a fast-footed sprint launched by Santa’s appearance at the end of the Thanksgiving parade (though with all due respect for Mr Macy, for us old time Philadelphians the finale will always be a red-coated fireman climbing into Gimble’s fifth floor).

What was a six week sprint for Christmas sales in 1947 has stretched out to the leisurely half-mile jog through the autumn months. Treacly remakes of holiday standards have been playing in malls for weeks. Box store workers who might have preferred to spend time with their family on Thanksgiving were pressed into service for pre-Black Friday sales (fed by the hype of artificial scarcity, it feeds the gambler gene’s need for the big win). And today, server farms around the country are overheating to meet the demands of the latest retail gimmick, the seven-year-old Cyber Monday (proof that capitalism hasn’t forgotten how to dream up more “make a buck” isms).

And all for what? Most of us middle class Americans have everything we need. What we lack isn’t the stuff that line the shelves of Walmart superstores and Amazon distribution centers, but the us that we’re too busy to share with one another.

I love the purity of earlier generations of Quakers. They pointedly ignored Christmas, working and opening their schools on the 25th. They would have undoubtedly skipped the commercialism of the modern consumer holiday. But I’m not willing to go that far. In our family Thanksgiving and Christmas is a time of togetherness and seasonal habits–tagging the Christmas tree, Sweetzel’s spiced wafers, making cookies and pies, visiting family. When I was young, my mother made a framed collage of my annual photos with Santa, and while it once fascinated me as a document of Santa variations, now the interest is watching myself grow up. Today, our family’s Flickr collection of Christmas routines shows that same passage of time. None of us need fall into the HalloThanksMas season of make-a-buck-ism to find joy in togetherness.