Polls and analysts confirm a growing trend for people to tune in almost exclusively to those news sources which reinforce their own opinions and condemn the others — regardless of quality, the use of facts, opinion, bias, and misinformation. Experts call this “source bias.” My straight-talking Quaker mother referred to it as “people trying to sell you a pig in a poke” — people trying to convince you of a point of view by giving you limited or false information, trying to sell you a pig in a bag when you can’t see it or examine it. Communist countries and dictatorships are masters at this.

https://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/news/20190203/faith-freedom-of-press-essential-to-democracy

Spoilers: no wave. Four of the candidates didn’t make it out of the primaries and a fifth was running as an independent in a long-shot candidacy. The one candidate to win major-party primary was the awesome Shawna Roberts¹ of Barnesville, Ohio. Shawna’s one of the most down-to-earth, real, people I know and it was a lot of fun to follow her campaign. Her twitter feed has been a hoot:

Last night, at the BPW forum, my opponent’s statement said his childhood home “didn’t even have indoor plumbing.”

Oh, Bill. Indoor plumbing’s still pending at our old farm house.
You can’t out-hillbilly me. Unless you eat squirrel brains. I draw the line at squirrel brains. pic.twitter.com/hGMJvQ8Yhq

— Shawna Roberts (@RobertsOhioD6) October 20, 2018

Unfortunately Shawna only got about 30 percent of the vote yesterday. This election was not kind to Democrats in rural districts like southeast Ohio’s 6 and she was running against an incumbent. From my vantage point 30 percent seems pretty good, though as my seventh grade math teacher used to intone in his weary baritone, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. ² Still, the prospect of a Mrs Roberts Goes to Washington win had me hoping against the odds. I’d love to see her continue to be involved: 2020 is only two years away.

Stats on everyone’s results are at the updated Quakers in Politics page. For anyone wondering about Quaker politicians, Paul Buckley had a nice overview of our complicated relationship to voting a few years ago.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

• 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 1960s³ 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 ⁴, 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 sign⁵ or it may be a statistical phantom.⁶ 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.

What are our truths? What do we believe as a community? What is our witness in the world today? How are we building the Beloved Kingdom here on Earth? Quakerism is not a do-it-yourself individualistic religion. If it is, why do we even come to Meeting for Worship anymore?

View at Medium.com

When I come to meeting, I arrive early and, a little while later, listen as people begin to enter the meeting room and settle in. I like to hear all the sounds: the coughing, the sniffling, the shuffling of feet. These are cozy human sounds; there’s a warmth in hearing them, like sitting in front of a fire. And then there are the messages: people’s opinions and ideas.

It profiles Henderson Luelling (1809–1878) and it’s not exactly an academic source. Here’s a snippet:

Luelling had taken up with these groovy Free Lovers, whom he met in San Francisco. From the outset, the journey had complications. “Dr.” Tyler, it turned out, was actually an ex-blacksmith who now professed expertise in water-cures and clairvoyance. One of the men was fleeing financial troubles, and when the ship was searched by police he hid under the hoopskirt of a female passenger.

Luelling’s life follows many common themes of mid-nineteenth century Quaker life:

• He was a horticulturalist, first moving to the Portland, Oregon, area and then to a small town near Oakland, California. Friends had long been interested in botanical affairs. Roughly a century earlier John Bartram was considered one of the greatest botanists of his generation.
• Luelling moved from Indiana to Salem, Iowa in the 1830s and became a staunch abolitionist, even building hideouts for the Underground Railroad in his house. Wikipedia reports he was expelled from his meeting for this.
• He got Oregon fever and moved his operation out there.
• At some point in this he became interested in Spiritualism and its offshoots like the Free Love movement. This was not a Quaker movement but the modern American movement started with the Fox Sisters in Upstate New York and was heavily promoted by Quaker Hicksites Amy and Isaac Post.

If you want to know more about Luelling’s “sex cults,” this article in Offbeat Oregon feels much better sourced: The father of Oregon’s nursery industry and his “Free Love” cult:

The “free love” thing is far from new. Over the years, especially in the American West, at least half a dozen generations have produced at least one “daring” philosopher who calls for a throwing-off of the age-old yoke of marriage and family and urges his or her followers to revert to the mythic “noble savage” life of naked and unashamed people gathering freely and openly, men and women, living and eating and sleeping together with no rules, no judgment and no squabbles over paternity.

He’d also started his very own free-love cult — “The Harmonial Brotherhood.” Luelling’s group made free love the centerpiece of a strict regimen of self-denial that included an all-vegetarian, stimulant-free diet, cold-water “hydropathy” for any medical need, and a Utopian all-property-in-common social structure.

Portland Friend Mitchel Santine Gould has written about some of these currents as well. His LeavesofGrass.org site used to have a ton of source material. Digging into one day it seemed pretty clear that the Free Love movement was also a refuge of sorts for those who didn’t fit strict nineteenth-century heterosexuality or gender norms. Gould’s piece, Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox has a bit of this, with talk of “lifelong bachelors.”

Many of the Spiritualist leaders were young women and their public lecture series were pretty much the only public lectures by young women anywhere in America. If you want to learn more about these developments I recommend Ann Braud’s Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. These communities were very involved in abolitionist and women’s rights issues and often started their own yearly meetings after becoming too radical for the Hicksites.

And lest we think all this was a West Coast phenomenon, my little unprepossessing South Jersey town of Hammonton was briefly a center of Free Love Spiritualism (almost completely scrubbed from our history books) and the nearby town of Egg Harbor City had extensive water sanitariums of the kind described in these articles.

But when we share these links, let’s take that extra step and point to original sources.

Example: Someone named Melissa Zimdars has done a lot of work to compile a list of fake news sources, published as a Google Doc with a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to repost it. It’s a great public service and she’s frequently updating it, reclassifying publications as feedback comes in.

The problem is that there are a lot of web publishers whose sites exist mostly to repackage content. They’ll find a funny Reddit list and will copy and paste it as an original post or they’ll rewrite a breaking news source in their own words. The reason is obvious: they get the ad dollars that otherwise would go to the original content creators. They’re not engaging in fake news, per se, but they’re also not adding anything to the knowledge base of humanity and they’re taking the spotlight off the hard work of the original creators.

Back to our example, Zimdars’s updates on this clickbait sites don’t get updated as she refines her list. In some cases, clickbait websites rewrite and repost one another’s ever-more extreme headlines till they bear little reality to the original post (I followed the page view food chain a few years ago after reading a particularly dopey piece about vegans launching a boycott over a TV ad).

So here’s part two of avoiding fake news sites: before you share something on Facebook, take the two minutes to follow any link to the original source and share that instead. Support original content creation.

Eric Moon wrote something that’s stuck with me in his June/July Friends Journal piece, “Categorically Not the Testimonies.” His article focuses on the way we’ve so codified the “Quaker Testimonies” that they’ve become ossified and taken for granted. One danger he sees in this is that we’ll not recognize clear leadings of conscience that don’t fit the modern-day mold.

Moon tells the anecdote of a Friend who “guiltily lament[ed] that he couldn’t attend protest marches because he was busy all day at a center for teens at risk for dropping out of school, a program he had established and invested his own savings in.” Here was a Friend doing real one-on-one work changing lives but feeling guilty because he couldn’t participate in the largely-symbolic act of standing on a street corner.

I don’t think that we need to give up the peace testimony to acknowledge the entanglement of our lives and the hypocrisy that lies all-too-shallowly below the surface of most of our lifestyles. What we need to do is rethink its boundaries.

A model for this is our much-quoted but much-ignored “Quaker saint” John Woolman. While a sense of the equality of humans is there in his journal as a source of his compassion, much of his argumentation against slavery is based in Friends by-then well-established testimony against war (yes, against war, not for peace). Slavery is indeed a state of war and it is on so many levels–from the individuals treating each other horribly, to societal norms constructed to make this seem normal, to the economies of nation states built on the trade.

Woolman’s conceptual leap was to say that the peace testimony applied to slavery. If we as Friends don’t participate in war, then we similarly can’t participate in the slave trade or enjoy the ill-gotten fruits of that trade–the war profit of cottons, dyes, rum, etc.

Today, what else is war? I think we have it harder than Woolman. In the seventeenth century a high percentage of one’s consumables came from a tight geographic radius. You were likely to know the labor that produced it. Now almost nothing comes locally. If it’s cheaper to grow garlic in China and ship it halfway around the world than it is to pay local farmers, then our local grocer will sell Chinese garlic (mine does). Books and magazines are supplanted by electronics built in locked-down Far Eastern sweatshops.

But I think we can find ways to disengage. It’s a never-ending process but we can take steps and support others taking steps. We’ve gotten it stuck in our imagination that war is a protest sign outside Dunkin Donuts. What about those tutoring programs? What about reducing our clothing consumptions and finding ways to reduce natural resource consumption (best done by limiting ourselves to lifestyles that cause us to need less resources).

And Yoder? Wess is disheartened by the sexual misconduct of Mennonite pacifist John Howard Yoder (short story: he regularly groped and sexually pressured women). But what of him? Of course he’s a failure. In a way, that’s the point, even the plan: human heroes will fail us. Cocks will crow and will we stay silent (why the denomination kept it hush-hush for 15 years after his death is another whole WTF, of course). But why do I call it the plan? Because we need to be taught to rely first and second and always on the Spirit of Jesus. George Fox figured that out:

And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do; then, oh! then I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’: and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. …and this I knew experimentally. My desires after the Lord grew stronger, and zeal in the pure knowledge of God, and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book, or writing.

If young Fox had found a human hero that actually walked the talk, he might have short-circuited the search for Jesus. He needed to experience the disheartened failure of human knowledge to be low enough to be ready for his great spiritual opening.

We all use identity to prop ourselves up and isolate ourselves from critique. I think that’s just part of the human condition. The path toward the divine is not one of retrenchment or disavowal, but rather focus on that one who might even now be preparing us for new light on the conditions of the human condition and church universal.