Here’s a sober­ing fac­toid: one of the more Googled search terms bring­ing peo­ple to Friends Jour­nal is “Why I left the Quakers.”

They find two things. The first match is a 22-year-old arti­cle from Jack Pow­el­son, “Why I am Leav­ing Quak­ers.” He notes the polit­i­cal diver­si­ty of the Quak­ers he joined in the 1940s and bemoans that “over the years, unpro­grammed Quak­ers have nar­rowed their views”:

Back in 1943, as many Repub­li­cans sat in the bench­es as Democ­rats, and meet­ing was a place for the spir­i­tu­al enrich­ment of per­sons of all polit­i­cal beliefs; even sol­diers in uni­form came to meet­ing. If the spir­it of the 1940s exist­ed now, right-to-lifers might today sit next to pro-choicers, each being equal­ly blessed in the eyes of God. With the spir­i­tu­al under-girding of the meet­ing, dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal beliefs would be advo­cat­ed in sec­u­lar organizations.

I think it worth­while to note that when Jack wrote his own obit­u­ary(!), he still iden­ti­fied as a Friend. This is not atyp­i­cal. I can quick­ly think of a half-dozen peo­ple who have pub­licly left Quak­ers but are still active in Quak­er social media spaces. I’m real­ly grate­ful for that, as many of them are per­son­al friends, men­tors, and inspi­ra­tions and I appre­ci­ate their per­spec­tive on the Quak­er dra­mas of the day. Quak­er spir­i­tu­al prin­ci­ples aren’t real­ly that unique and it’s quite pos­si­ble to fol­low them out­side of Quak­er reli­gious bod­ies and these nom­i­nal­ly ex-Quakers show how this can be done.

The sec­ond FJ arti­cle that those search­ing for “why I left Quak­ers” turn up is Bet­sy Blake’s 2013 “Quak­erism Left Me.” I’m a big Bet­sy Blake fan and worked on her as edi­tor on this arti­cle. I know it was brave to write and that she got some seri­ous push­back after pub­li­ca­tion. She too was talk­ing of polarization:

We knew we would be affect­ed by a divi­sive­ness that we did not expe­ri­ence and found con­trary to the for­give­ness and peace­mak­ing that we were being taught. Though younger, we did sym­pa­thize. We too had dealt with con­flicts, fights, bul­ly­ing, and pop­u­lar­i­ty con­tests. We knew enough to know that there was pas­sion and gen­uine care among the adults, mixed in with some­thing that was telling them to cut off their broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ.

Bet­sy of course was­n’t declar­ing that she her­self was leav­ing. The polar­iza­tions she spoke of soon led to schisms in both the Indi­ana year­ly meet­ing of her youth and the North Car­oli­na (FUM) of her teen years. I don’t know Bet­sy’s for­mal mem­ber­ship sta­tus nowa­days but she’s active on Quak­er social media. (Pro­fes­sion­al­ly, she designs web­sites nowa­days and offers a tem­plate for Quak­er meet­ings that looks great. I would total­ly rec­om­mend her if you’re look­ing to revamp your site!)

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Anoth­er data point in all this might be George Amoss Jr.’s recent blog post, “Leav­ing Lib­er­al Quak­erism: What Love Would Have Me Do.”

George talks about by the “exac­er­bat­ed” “self-righteousness” he’s encountered:

The prox­i­mate cause of that alien­ation is the adop­tion among Lib­er­al Friends of sociopo­lit­i­cal ide­olo­gies that I find reduc­tive, dis­hon­est, divi­sive, and destruc­tive, lead­ing even to the defense of vio­lent crime. But that, at least in its cur­rent extreme form, is a recent devel­op­ment, facil­i­tat­ed by the fun­da­men­tal unsound­ness of con­tem­po­rary beliefs.

Friends are a big, messy group of peo­ple with all sorts of opin­ions. While we can agree on broad prin­ci­ples (racism bad, peace good), it’s rare to devel­op a real sense of uni­ty on either analy­sis or strat­e­gy. We should of course thresh out issues; inter­est sub-groups of like-minded indi­vid­u­als can build momen­tum and do a lot of good with­in both our reli­gious soci­ety and in the greater world. If we can tol­er­ate this messy diver­si­ty in our meet­ings, then our shared com­mu­ni­ty can be great incu­ba­tors for some­thing more rad­i­cal than itself. With time and spir­i­tu­al dis­cern­ment the rad­i­cal posi­tion can become main­stream among Friends. 

I do see some Friends nowa­days try­ing to press for more ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty than actu­al­ly exists. The ever-interesting and chal­leng­ing Adria Gulizia has a long com­ment on George’s Amos post about try­ing to rec­on­cile Quak­er beliefs with an antiracism state­ment being con­sid­ered by New York Year­ly Meet­ing. She con­cludes: “But what some of us have learned is that, while the stakes could not be high­er, it is not in vic­to­ry but in the strug­gle itself that we find our bless­ing, that in fac­ing our reck­on­ing with faith and courage, we may be strength­ened and deep­ened and trans­formed, not just as indi­vid­u­als but as a peo­ple of faith.” 

I hope we can con­tin­ue to respect the diver­si­ty and messi­ness of Lib­er­al Friends.

As I see it, the pur­pose of Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty is the spir­i­tu­al and com­mu­ni­ty part of our work. Our spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal lan­guages and analy­ses will evolve and change every decade or so; what I hope will remain con­stant is our desire for truth, our reliance on the Holy Spir­it for guid­ance, and our gen­uine love of neigh­bors in all their con­tra­dic­tions and messi­ness. In 2006 Paul Buck­ley wrote The Temp­ta­tion to Do Some­thing: A Qui­etist Per­spec­tive, that I think speaks to some of this.

I do hope George Amoss finds a way to stay engaged with Friends.