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!)

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.

Like everyone, we quickly pieced together the horror happening in real time: second plane, jumpers, collapsed. I was publishing Nonviolence.org then, a peace portal, and felt I had to say something, anything, so I rushed to the public computer at the local library. There was a queue of worried patrons wanting to message loved ones. In a few moments I typed out some rushed words:

Today’s terrorist attacks are simply horrendous, thousands of innocents might well lose their lives. Most important now is to sit patiently, to pray and to not call for massive indiscriminant attacks that might only kill thousands more. Our character as a nation is being tested now. We must pray and heal and not respond in a hatred that will only fuel the cycle of war, global injustice

We know how that turned out. Three thousand dead in New York and Western Pennsylvania, followed by hundreds of thousands in Western Asia. Decades of wars in Afghanistan. A second war in Iraq prompted by the flimsiest and most unlikely of excuses. Today, after all the blood, those countries are hostile and unstable. Yet two of the countries co-responsible were U.S. allies, are still U.S. allies. The 9/11 attacks was planned and largely executed by Saudis; Osama bin Laden was finally found living out in the open in Pakistan in an upper class compound a short walk from the gates of the country’s military academy. I’m glad we didn’t invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan but it makes one wonder what the other wars were meant to accomplish.

This week many people are gathering to remember 9/11, as they should. It was a horrific attack. It struck our sense of safety and fueled nightmares and tears. But when do we as U.S. citizens gather to think about how we reacted? When do we remember hundreds of thousands who have died since 9/11 in the name of retribution and a fearful revenge we’ve called freedom?

William Penn’s introduction to George Fox’s Journal (1691) speaks to something very like community:

“Besides these general doctrines, as the larger branches, there sprang forth several particular doctrines, that did exemplify and farther explain the truth and efficacy of the general doctrine before observed, in their lives and examples: as,

Communion and loving one another. This is anoted mark in the mouth of all sorts of people concerning them: They will meet, they will help and stick one to another. Whence it is common to hear some say: Look how the Quakers love and take care of one another. Others, less moderate, will say: The Quakers live none but themselves: and if loving one another. and having an intimate communion in religion, and constant care to meet to worship God, and help one another, be any mark of primitive Christianity, they had it, blessed be the Lord in ample manner.”

This certainly sounds like community to me.

As far as I know, the final settlement in that case was never made public. In a larger sense, the “final settlement” demanded by God’s grace and justice will never be measured in dollars, but there is something satisfying about knowing that money was involved: almost nothing slices through pious misdirection or sophistry like cold cash. But it’s also true that cash doesn’t cut deeply enough.

I’m still unconvinced we’re all doing enough to bring daylight to skeletons in our closets or healing to victims. Lawsuits make everyone clam up, yet they too often seem to be the only mechanism for shedding light on the situation in the first place.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/02/trustworthy-part-one-cost-of-betrayal.html

Penn was a man of paradoxical qualities. He espoused a radically egalitarian Quaker theology, insisting that something divine resided within each individual, yet he owned slaves on his American estate. He praised representative institutions such as parliament and the jury system, but spent years in hiding for his loyalty to an absolutist king. ‘I am like to be an adopted American,’ he wrote shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania in 1682, but spent only four of his remaining 36 years there. And he was chronically incapable of managing money, spending eight months in an English debtors’ prison in his 60s, even while his colony quickly became a commercial success.

https://aeon.co/ideas/hes-not-the-guy-on-quaker-oats-hes-much-more-interesting

I posted there tonight suggesting that Friends consider a media diet that includes more Quaker media—books and magazines and blogs and videos and in-real-life discussion opportunities. I worry that if Facebook groups become the most visible style of Quaker dialogue, then we will have lost something truly precious.

This message isn’t new to longtime readers of QuakerRanter. I extolled blogging as a hedge against Facebookjust yesterday and in August I wrote about some of the dialogue problems inherent in the Facebook model.

I’ve been figuring out Facebook strategies for Quaker media since it opened up to non-students circa 2006. I appreciate much of the attention it’s provided over the years. Social media like YouTube has also been a useful platform for things like the Quakerspeak projectdespite owner Google’s spotty track record. But it’s becoming hard to deny that social media has reshaped the style of civil discourse and trollish hackery, mostly for the worse. I think it’s really essential that we become more conscious of the sources of our daily media diet.

“We wanted our guests to have something to do as they arrived [while] we took pictures with our families, so we planned a kitten hour,” Colleen told POPSUGAR. “We did a cocktail hour with cocktails named after our cats for the reception, but the Quaker meeting house we used for the ceremony doesn’t allow alcohol on premises. I wanted a wedding falcon, but Iz vetoed that, and so we compromised on kittens.”

https://www.popsugar.com/moms/Couple-Has-Kitten-Hour-Wedding-45498151/amp

Whether you believe in an intelligent Satan (along the lines of Peter Wagner’s ideas) or a more impersonal mechanism of demonic evil (Walter Wink), we shouldn’t pretend that such nodes just go away. Their evil persists. The basis for apology and repentance is not white guilt or shame or any form of self-flagellation. Instead, it is to conduct spiritual warfare against the demons of racism and oppression and false witness, to declare them off-limits in the land that we now share, so that we can conduct our future stewardship—and make our public investments— in freedom and mutual regard.

I’m drawn to the old notion of “The Tempter” as a force that leads us to do what’s personally rewarding rather than morally just. I think it explains a lot of internal struggles I’ve faced, even in simple witnesses. As Johan says, these massive injustices can’t just be undone but they need to be recognized for the immensity of their scale. I’ve also seen this weird way in which progressive whites can blithely disregard Native American perspectives on these issues. Listening more and waiting for complicated answers seems essential in my opinion.

Another good deep-dive for Friends interested in this is Betsy Cazden’s Friends Journal 2006 article, Quaker Money, Old Money, and White Privilege. It’s one I turn to every so often to remind myself of some of our monied Quaker norms. Johan gives a pass to William Penn but I think it’s important to remember that his colonial ambitions were deeply enmeshed in at least three different wars and conveniently served the political calculations of two empires, the perfect storm of an opportunity for a group of pacifist idealists.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/11/quakers-and-native-americans-its.html