The question of where this ubiquitous acronym came from, and when, regularly comes up in Quaker discourse (mostly recently on Reddit here). I sometimes answer with the bits I’ve dug up but rather than reinventing the wheel each time, I thought I’d write it all down. I invite people to add what they know in comments and I’ll edit this.

1940s

Howard Brinton was the inventor of our modern idea of a “testimony” in the 1940s, and his original list was community, harmony, equality, and simplicity. He was the Philadelphia-area born Friend who helped organize unprogrammed Friends on the U.S. West Coast in the early part of the twentieth century. Brinton had a knack for simple explanations that expressed the emerging consensus of a new generation of Friends who were healing from the nineteenth-century schisms. Finding new ways of talking about our commonalities was a central part of the work of reconciliation. From his tour de force 1952 masterpiece, Friends for 300 Years:

The meaning of the group in Quaker practice can be suggested by a diagram. Light from God streams down into the waiting group. This Light, if the way is open for it, produces three results: unity, knowledge, and power. As a result we have the kind of behavior which exists as an ideal in a meeting for worship and a meeting for business. Because of the characteristics of the Light of Christ, the resulting behavior can be described in a general way by the four words Community, Harmony, Equality, and Simplicity.…

He included a chart, which honestly doesn’t help much with my understanding of the metaphysics of it all.

1975

Reader Tomas Mario Kalmar sent me a paper called Learning Community prepared by the Education Commission of Australian Yearly Meeting that lists six “characteristics that distinguished Quaker education”: a religiously guarded education, community, non-violence, equality, simplicity, and an experiential curriculum. The list is largely based on Howard Brinton’s work but I include it here because it shows how Friends were remixing and repurposing his list. Learning Community actually looks pretty good and fairly timeless and Tomas gave me permission to repost the PDF here.

1980–90s

In a Reddit thread a few years ago, macoafi wrote: “My in-laws were children in first day school in the 1980s and 1990s, and they learned 4 testimonies, no acronym. (Peace, truth, simplicity, equality).” At some point Brinton’s harmony started being called peace so this is mostly his list except for truth being swapped for community.

1981

Commenter Sharon writes:

I first heard SPICE at the 1981 FGC gathering in Berea KY! At the time it didn’t sit well with me as I found it too glib. I was still working out what God wanted my life to testify too.

This would put it nearly two decades before from any documented instance I’ve seen. It is also well before any instance I’ve seen that included an I for integrity. I admit I’ll remain skeptical until I see further evidence, though it is possible that someone remembered it from the Berea gathering and started reusing it in the last 1990s.¹

1990

Wilmer Cooper was an Ohio Wilburite Friend who went on to become first dean of Earlham School of Religion upon its founding in 1960. Thirty years later he published A Living Faith, which was built on an ESR course called Basic Quaker Beliefs. In the preface he writes: “It is my hope that this work will help Friends gain a fuller understanding of their Quaker heritage and theological roots, while providing for non-Quakers a comprehensive answer to the questions: ‘Who are the Quakers?’ and “What is Quakerism?’ ” In its final chapter Cooper has two lists, which each have four testimonies. His religious testimonies are:

• belief that we can have direct and immediate access to the living God;
• we can no only know the will of God but can, by God’s grace, be enabled to do the will of God.
• the Quaker experience of of community as expressed in the “gathered meeting.”
• the sacramental view of life.

His social testimonies are:

• Peace Testimony
• simplicity
• equality
• integrity

He expands to give a paragraph to each of his eight testimonies but obviously the second list is much pithier.². He does say that this isn’t a canonical list, that different Friends will have different lists, and concludes the section on testimonies by, well, testifying: “Friends believe deeply that if they submit themselves to God and live by the Light of Christ they will be enabled to live by the truth of the Gospel.” It’s worth noting that the later SPICE/S formulation didn’t include any of the religious ones (you could perhaps try to claim community dervices from his religious testimonies list but I don’t generally hear the SPICES C described in the kind of spiritual language Cooper used).

The next year Cooper wrote a Pendle Hill pamphlet that focused on integrity. As far as I’ve seen Cooper is the first to include an I for integrity, setting the stage for our familiar acronym.

Mid-1990s

My wife Julie insists that she remembers talk of SPICE/S back when she was in high school starting to get involved with Friends (circa 1994). She didn’t attend a Quaker school so this would have been in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting circles, probably specifically South Jersey.

Late 1990s

In a comment to this very post, Pendle Hill editor Janaki Spickard Keeler says that when she was working a 2023 pamphlet with Paul Buckley, they tracked SPICE/S to a Friends Council for Education listserv for educators (perhaps E‑Quakes, which was started in 1996 according to a FCE history). Janaki writes: “No one came forward as being the first to come up with the idea, but they shared it along themselves and it spread. They estimate this happened around 1998.” The pamphlet quotes Tom Hoopes, who started as director of education for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1998: “I encountered it in use by one of the monthly meetings of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and I thought to myself, ‘what a great mnemonic device for helping people to remember what we Quakers claim to prioritize, and to try to practice!’” Tom told Janaki and Paul that he didn’t remember the identity of the Friends meeting.

1999

The Summer 1999 edition of Salem Quarter (N.J.) News reports that Woodstown Meeting created a SPICE rap in for a First-day School program which also included songs from Spice Girls. Yes it’s as unique as it sounds:

What’s the word? SPICE!!!! What’s the word? SPICE IS THE WAY TO GO!!!!
Simplicity is simple, and you know it’s right. Squanderin’ money gets ya into a fight.
Peace, it rules, and you know that it’s true. It’s the thing I need to get along with you. Don’t yell and sing those fightin’ songs, when you can help others and right their wrongs.
Integrity is always bein’ true to your word. It’s the most honest testimony I’ve ever heard.
Livin’ and a‑sharin’ all together’s really fun. Community is helpin’, workin’, playin’ all in one.
Equality means everyone is equal, and that’s cool.
Respecting other is what’s right and is the golden rule!!

Note that the article gives a clue on source: “After reading a short article in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting News with the acronym SPICE highlighting the testimonies… [we] were inspired to incorporate this into our First Day School Program at Woodstown MM.” The oldest copy of PYM News available via Archive.org is tantalizingly close—Nov/December 1999. That seems to be when PYM started posting its newsletter.³

2003

Google finds a PDF of a 2003 talk given to a Unitarian Universalist church by Salt Lake City Friend Diana Lee Hirschi in 2003 talking about SPICE.

2004

I myself first complained about SPICE in 2004 (note it hadn’t gotten a second S yet). I complained that this kind of list of secular testimonies were too restrictive. I really was a Quaker Ranter back then; also I was really kind of hard on Brinton, who I appreciate more now.

2006

I like to search the Friends Journal archives to see when new terms show up. New terms are often bandied about by particular Friends or within sub-groups, where they might circulate for a few years without getting into wider usage. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the first reference to SPICES in Friends Journal is a 2006 article by Harriett Heath titled “The Quaker Parenting Project: A Report.” She’s lays it out as an attempt to teach Quaker children without resorting to dogma:

There are several different lists of testimonies. We started with one commonly referred to by the acronym SPICES: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship—but we found that there were other issues not addressed by this list. Service is an integral part of Quakerism in our efforts to live our faith; should it be a testimony? Education has been historically an integral part of Quakersim; should it, too, be included? Where does worship—time set apart—fit in?

Her project eventually picked a different list because they didn’t want to be bound by the dictates of fitting into an acronym. They included conflict and growth and service (which sometimes is listed as the final S).

2007/2008 videos

In 2007, British Friends could produce a video called “The Quaker Testimonies” that didn’t mention SPICE/S and ranged over other non-acronymed testimonies such as one for respect and another against oath-taking. If you listen carefully, I think at least one of the speakers must have heard of SPICE because he seemed to be organizing thoughts around it.

In 2008 I talked about SPICE and spiritually getting deeper with testimonies in a YouTube video and accompanying blog post.

2009

Brinton scholar Anthony Manousos did a deep dive on SPICES. Although Anthony claims Briton invented SPICES per se, I think he just invented the idea of testimonies and the initial list that included three of them (four if you count the harmony/peace change).

2011

Less than two years after Heath’s article, Mark Dansereau and Kim Tsocanos, the co-heads of Connecticut Friends School in Wilton, Conn., published an annotated list of SPICES in Friends Journal, explaining that their school was built on these “Six Quaker Values” (yes, italicized and capitalized) and that they applied and wove them into each activity in their curricula. This might be one of the oldest fully-intact listings still easily available on the web. This has become one of the most visited pages on Friends Journal website.

2012

By this time SPICE/S was becoming ubiquitous. See this blog post from Northwest Yearly Meeting and a video Brent Bill put together to promote an upcoming introductory workshop at his meeting in Indiana.

Paul Buckley gave a talk in 2012 that highlighted the role of Wilmer Cooper, an Ohio Friend perhaps most well remembered for founding Earlham School of Religion in 1960. In 2023, Paul Buckley wrote a pamphlet from Pendle Hill, Quaker Testimony: What We Witness to the World, edited by Janaki Spickard Keeler, during which they determined the late 1990s date.

2013

Someone around 2006 I was standing in a meal line at a Quaker event with California Friend Eric Moon and we started to talk about testimonies. It was the start of a great conversation, cut short by some interruption or another before we even hit the dessert station. When I started as Friends Journal editor I asked him to write something. 2013’s Categorically Not the Testimonies was the result. We also talked in an early Quaker Author Podcast.

So where did the SPICES formulation come from? It ultimately derived from Brinton’s list, with harmony morphing to peace and WIl Cooper’s integrity adding an I. Given its pedagogical nature, it was probably coined by educators. It’s a good teaching tool, easy to remember and something you can easily weave into a multi-week class.

Since there’s nothing particularly religious about the SPICE/S list, it can work in an essentially secular environment that might be allergic to religious-sounding Quaker theology. This would include Friends schools appealing to a non-Quaker audience or a Liberal Friends Meeting that wants something non-controversial to teach the kids. I never hear anyone talk about it being derived from “characteristics of the Light of Christ,” as Brinton did when he introduced it.

In the last few years it’s become pretty ubiquitous on TikTok and other short-form video (Discovering Quakers, _gloyoyo_, itsmekatevee).⁴ If you have five minutes to tell a general audience about Quakers, bite-sized descriptions are important. Also: some of these content creators are probably younger than the term itself. Also: I’ve finally grown into the Old Man Yelling at the Clouds meme. SPICES is here to stay.

Is SPICES all that terrible? No, not really. It can be handy. But it is pretty annoying that we’ve confused a list of generic values for belief. And it’s super annoying that even that list of values is hemmed in by the requirement that every component fit into a silly acronym.⁵

What’s funny about the mystery of this is that there’s a very good chance that the person who first listed out SPICE is still around. There’s a box in someone’s garage packed with late-1990s newsletters, one of which lists it out for the first time in print. Anyone with any information can comment below or email me at martink@martinkelley.com.

Pendle Hill had a practice of asking week-long students to take on a job on Wednesday afternoon. One week my task was to clean/dust and arrange the books in the Upmeads library and in the process I found, high on an upper shelf, a whole series of dusty pamphlets called the William Penn Lectures. Inaccessible? You bet. A few months later I sojourned at Pendle Hill while my late wife was taking a week-long course. During that week I sat with my computer and scanned the text of those pamphlets. My intent was to make that body of literature more accessible to Quakers and others throughout the world on the internet. And recently that goal has been achieved.

I know Jim well from his time on Friends Journal’s board of trustees and making Quaker archives accessible is a great passion of his. He helped us tremendously in getting older articles indexed. That combined with the Haverford College Library’s digitalization of everything going back to 1955 means we’re relatively accessible.

Speaking of archives, it looks like I’ve been remiss sharing another amazing resource: the Salem (NJ) Quarter Tape Archive. Starting in the late 1970s, people started taping long interviews with Friends. They’ve sat gathering dust until they were pulled out an digitized. Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of Rachel Davis DuBois and her interview by Charles Crabbe Thomas (number 13) is absolute gold.

One Year Ago: November 2016

A year ago the shock to the system was Trump’s election. One reaction of mine was a promise to blog more; I set up the system but I’m still not as frictionless about it as I’d like.

Waking Up to President Trump: We do not get to choose our era or the chal­lenges it throws at us. Only some­one with his­tor­i­cal amne­sia would say this is unprece­dent­ed in our his­to­ry. The enslave­ment of mil­lions and the geno­cide of mil­lions more are dark stains indeli­bly soaked into the very found­ing of the nation. But much will change, par­tic­u­lar­ly our naiv­i­ty and false opti­mism in an inevitable for­ward progress of our nation­al sto­ry.

Five Years Ago: November 2012

Five years ago I wrote about how I had been blogging for fifteen years. Do the math: it’s now 20 frigging years since I started blogging.

Fifteen Years of Blogging: I keep double-checking the math but it keeps adding up. In Novem­ber 1997 I added a fea­ture to my two-year-old peace web­site. I called this new enti­ty Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront and updat­ed it week­ly with orig­i­nal fea­tures and curat­ed links to the best online paci­fist writ­ing. I wrote a ret­ro­spec­tive of the “ear­ly blog­ging days” in 2005 that talks about how it came about and gives some con­text about the proto-blogs hap­pen­ing back in 1997.

Ten Years Ago: November 2007

Freelancing and working the overnight shift at Shoprite, I wondered if my Quakerness was hopelessly useless to my new circumstances.

Who are we part one (just what pamphlet do I give the tattooed ex-con?): I love the fel­low who gave the mes­sage and I appre­ci­at­ed his min­istry. But the whole time I won­dered how this would sound to peo­ple I know now, like the friend­ly but hot-tempered Puer­to Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in fed­er­al prison, now work­ing two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and try­ing to stay out of trou­ble. How does the the­o­ry of our the­ol­o­gy fit into a code of con­duct that doesn’t start off assum­ing mid­dle class norms.

Twenty Years Ago: November 1997

Four years before 9/11, I was asking how we could break the cycle of terrorism.

How Come the U.S. Trains All the Terrorists?: It would seem a sim­ple case of U.S. mil­i­tarism com­ing home to roost, but it is not so sim­ple and it is not uncom­mon. Fol­low most trails of ter­ror­ism and you’ll find Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment fund­ing some­where in the recent past.

It’s one of those quotes we frequently hear: that George Fox said a minister’s job was “to bring people to Christ, and to leave them there.” But when I go to Google, I only find secondhand references, sandwiched in quote marks but never sourced. It turns up most frequently in the works of British Friend William Pollard, who used it as kind of a catch phrase in his talks on “An Old Fashioned Quakerism” from 1889. Suspiciously missing is any search result from the journal or epistles of Fox himself. It’s possible Pollard has paraphrased something from Fox into a speech-friendly shorthand that Google misses, but it’s also possible it’s one of those passed-down Fox myths like Penn’s sword.

So in modern fashion, I posed the question to the Facebook hive mind. After great discussions, I’m going to call this a half-truth. On the Facebook thread, Allistair Lomax shared a Fox epistle that convinces me the founder of Friends would have agreed with the basic concept:

I’m guessing it is paraphrase of a portion of Fox’s from epistle 308, 1674. Fox wrote “You know the manner of my life, the best part of thirty years since I went forth and forsook all things. I sought not myself. I sought you and his glory that sent me. When I turned you to him that is able to save you, I left you to him.”

Mark Wutka shared quotations from Stephen Grellet and William Williams which have convince me that it describes the “two step dance” of convincement for early Friends:

From Stephen Grellet: “I have endeavoured to lead this people to the Lord and to his Spirit, and there is is safe to leave them.” And this from William Williams: “To persuade people to seek the Lord, and to be faithful to his word, the inspoken words of the heart, is what we ought to do; and then leave them to be directed by the inward feelings of the mind;”

The two-step image comes from Angela York Crane’s comment:

So it’s a two step dance. First, that who we are and how we live and speak turns others to the Lord, and second, that we trust enough to leave them there.

But: as a pithy catch phrase directly attributed to Fox it’s another myth. It perhaps borrowed some images from a mid-19th century talk by Charles Spurgeon on George Fox, but came together in the 1870s as a central catch phrase of British reformer Friend William Pollard. Pollard is a fascinating figure in his own right, an early proponent of modern liberalism in a London Yearly Meeting that was then largely evangelical and missionary. Even his pamphlet and book titles were telling, including Primitive Christianity Revived and A Reasonable Faith. He had an agenda and this phrase was a key formulation of his argument and vision.

He is hardly the first or last Friend to have lifted an incidental phrase or concept of George Fox’s and given it the weight of a modern tenet (“That of God” springs to mind). More interesting to me is that Pollard’s work was frequently reprinted and referenced in Friends Intelligencer, the American Hicksite publication (and predecessor of Friends Journal), at a time when London Friends didn’t recognize Hicksites as legitimate Quakers. His vision of an “Old Fashioned Quakerism” reincorporated quietism and sought to bring British Friends back to a two-step convincement practice. It paved the way for the transformation of British Quakerism following the transformational 1895 Manchester Conference and gave American Friends interested in modern liberal philosophical ideals a blueprint for incorporating them into a Quaker framework.

The phrase “bring people to Christ/leave them there” is a compelling image that has lived on in the 130 or so odd years since its coinage. I suspect it is still used much as Pollard intended: as a quietist braking system for top-down missionary programs. It’s a great concept. Only our testimony in truth now requires that we introduce it, “As William Pollard said, a Quaker minister’s job is to…”

And for those wondering, yes, I have just ordered Pollard’s Old Fashioned Quakerism via Vintage Quaker Books. He seems like something of a kindred spirit and I want to learn more.

Essential to this thinking has been Jeanne B’s Social Class and Quakers blog. There are many ways to tease out the way culture and faith work to reinforce and sabotage one another, but class is a good one. If you travel from one theological brand of Friends to another, from one cultural zone to another (e.g, urban vs ex-urban vs rural) you’ll see marked culture differences. Just take a look at the potluck array if you doubt me. Jeanne talks about the urban liberal Quaker stigma against Cool Whip and a great link she turned me on to talks about some of the ways the alterna-lefty culture can unwittingly separate itself from potential allies in social change over tofu (update: more recent work from this organization can be found at classism.org).

Since falling out of the rarefied world of professional Quakerism a year ago, I’ve become more local. I live in a small, largely agricultural town in rural South Jersey roughly equidistant from the region’s skyscraper metropoli (I don’t give its name for privacy reasons) and residents range from multi-generational families to Mexican farmworkers to people who got in trouble up north in NYC and are looking for a quieter place to come clean. I don’t see Quakers in my day-to-day life anymore but I do interact with a more representative sampling of America, people who are all trying to get somewhere other than where they are. Jesus would have been here. Fox would have preached here. But what do modern liberal Friends have to say about this world? As Bill Samuel wrote on Jeanne’s blog issues of safety-net public assistance that seem like do-gooder causes for most well-off liberal Friends are matters of personal practicality for more economically diverse religious bodies (the child care program that President Bush vetoed last month is the same one that let me take my fevered two year old to the doctor last Friday).

Last First Day I heard a good orthodox piece of Quaker ministry couched in a learned language, all talk of justification versus sanctification, with a bit of insider Quaker acronyms thrown in for good effect. I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn’t start off assuming middle class norms. What do our tofu covered dishes and vanilla soy chai’s (I’m so addicted) have to do with living under Christ’s instruction? And just which FGC outreach pamphlet should I be handing my new friend?

Enough for now. More soon.