The following post was written by Blake Everitt, a Friend the UK and member of the newly-formed Revolutionary Quakers. This essay explores the prophetic and apocalyptic nature of early Quakerism, and sketches out how middle class revisionism took over the Religious Society of Friends.

The Religious Society of Friends: Children of Prophets or Children of Propheticide?

We could use a little momentum. A decade ago, as I was getting started with this, platforms like Facebook took advantage of our desire for a simpler option and used it to silo up our data, lock and key. We lost an exciting blogosphere in the midst of all of this—and the first step towards getting it back is by realizing that ownership should be a first class citizen, whether or not we eventually give away those words, sell them, or keep them close to our chest. A blog that you own, that you pay the hosting bill for? That’s the first step—a form of expression that should be the future (because after all, how awesome is it that anyone can own a printing press?!?) but somehow became the past.

I haven’t been updating this Quaker Daily Read as much as I’d like over the last month or so. That’s partly the result of an early December vacation and then the chaos of late December holidays with the family. I’m sure I’ve missed some great posts that I should have shared but there’s also days when I run through my RSS collection (I use Feedly to follow about a hundred or so blogs) and find nothing particularly fresh or interesting. I’d love to see more of us trading the Facebook dopamine-rush immediacy for some more thoughtful writing and conversation.

https://tedium.co/2019/01/01/2019-independent-blogging-trends/

As I am working on a revision of my book on the Quaker ministry, I am revisiting historical accounts of times when a minister was given guidance (eldering, oversight, nurture, discipline). As part of that work, I will from time to time post “case studies” on this blog.

Nuturing ministers: Case studies, Intro

• 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 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 sign³ or it may be a statistical phantom.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.

Superposters tend to be “more opinionated, more extreme, more engaged, more everything,” said Andrew Guess, a Princeton University social scientist. When more casual users open Facebook, often what they see is a world shaped by superposters like Mr. Wasserman. Their exaggerated worldviews play well on the algorithm, allowing them to collectively — and often unknowingly — dominate newsfeeds. “That’s something special about Facebook,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up getting a lot of time on the feed, you are influential. It’s a difference with real life.”

A great many general-interest Facebook groups that I see are dominated by trollish people whose visibility relies on how provocative they can get without being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Facebook prioritizes engagement and nothing seems to get our fingers madly tapping more than provocation by someone half-informed.

Formal membership in a Quaker meeting is a considered process; for many Quaker groups, public ministry is also a deliberated process, with clearness committees, anchor committees, etc. On Facebook, membership consists of clicking a like button; public ministry, aka visibility, is a matter of having a lot of time to post comments. Public groups with minimal moderation which run on Facebook’s engagement-inducing algorithms are the public face of Friends these days, far more visible than any publication or recognized Quaker body’s Facebook presence. I written before of my long-term worry that with the rise of social media gatekeeping sites, we’re not the ones writing our story anymore.

I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some useful ways of thinking about these phenomena.

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests (Published 2018)

Towns where people use Facebook more also had more attacks on refugees, building on suspicions that the platform…

www.nytimes.com

The help we want to give — the showy, busy, selfless work — is rarely the help that is needed. And the help that is needed is often boring, with no glamour to it. So, what is to be done? I don’t know. I want to continue my spiritual journey towards/with God; however, I am worried that maybe the Quakers aren’t the home for me that I want.

The post’s title is a response Mike gave in which he channeled his mother’s voice. It’s so spot-on that I can almost hear her say it (I have never met Mike or any of his family but have friends who could deliver that kind of a line with such under-the-radar nuance that more clueless listeners might miss the acres of shade in the tone.

https://small-wire.com/2018/08/15/i‑guess-ill-read-my-bible-elsewhere/

I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is foreign to me. This is essentially a webcam vlog post but the lighting and hair and costuming is meticulous. Her notes include affiliate links for the dress she’s wearing ($89 and yes, they ship internationally), a 8 1/2 minute video tutorial about curling you hair in her vintage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you follow her on Instagram and Twitter you’ll soon have enough details on  lipstick and shoe choices to be able to fully cosplay her.

But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self presentation tips, Kellgren-Fozard tackles really hard subjects–growing up gay in school, living with disabilities–in ways that are approachable and intimate, funny and instructive. And with a quarter million YouTube followers, she’s reaching people with a message of kindness and inclusion and understanding that feels pretty Quakerly to me. Margaret Fell liked herself a red dress sometimes and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTuber today.

Bonus:  Jessica Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quakerism this coming Monday. If I’m calculating my timezones correctly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.

The archival material in the Library relating to William Penn includes property deeds relating to land in Pennsylvania, such as the one pictured below. There are also letters from William Penn amongst other people’s papers. One notable example, dated 13th of 11th month 1690 (13 January 1691, in the modern calendar), is a letter from him to Margaret Fox, formerly Margaret Fell, telling her of the death of her husband, George Fox.

William Penn: commemorations and curios

It sounds like there have been lots of momentos made from the elm tree under which William Penn is said to have signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1683. The Penn Treaty Park museum has stirring accounts of the storm that tore the tree from its roots in 1810. There were so many relic hunters hacking off pieces of the fallen tree that the owners of the property owners hired a guard. Their solution was the obvious capitalist one: chop the remainder up and sell it.

According to an article on the Haverford College site, cuttings of the original tree were taken in its lifetime and trees have been propagated from its lineage for a few generations now. Haverford recently planted a “great grandchild” of the original treaty elm on its campus to replace a fallen grandchild. Newtown Meeting in nearby Bucks County has a great great grandchild.

The idea of Quaker relics and trees imbued with special properties because of a lineage of placement doesn’t really jive very well with many Friends’ ideas of the Quaker testimonies. But I’m glad that the treaty is remembered. The tree had served as a sort of memorial; with its demise, a group came together to more properly remember the location and commemorate the treaty.