I was really looking forward to The Testament of Ann Lee, the biopic of Shaker founder Ann Lee, directed and cowritten by Mona Fastvold and starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular character. My wife and I have read a bunch of books on Shakers over the last few years, including at least one cited by the filmmakers in the end credits. We knew from the trailer that this would be a Hollywood treatment, with Ann Lee played by a lithesome young blonde actress but we figured it might be interesting enough anyway.
Nope. It didn’t feel as if the director really understood either the theology behind Shaker aesthetics or the profound oddness of Mother Ann. Much of the movie leaned heavily on music-video styling, with wall-of sound electronica and well-trained singing voices reworking Shaker hymns, all set to carefully choreographed dance scenes. That would be fine for a Pat Benetarbiopic but the real Shakers were fiercely against musical instruments (they considered them used “to excite lasciviousness, and to invite and stimulate men to destroy each others’ lives”). I’ve always imagined that dancing would have been more of the random repetitive trance of hippy or all-night raver — chaotic, unpredictable, profoundly un-synchronized.
I certainly understand that creators of period dramas sometimes feel the need to go off in ahistorical directions, especially in their use of music, as a way of setting a mood. But the plainness of Shaker music and dance is precisely its point. To make it too perfect is to misunderstand the theology itself.
The Ann Lee in my head canon isn’t a comely figure with a lust for mystical visions, burning truth and kindness for all. She’s short, kind of shapeless, illiterate, but most of all she’s unpredictable, by turns kind and mean, but also batshit and manipulative. The movie only has one scene about her confessions (a tame depiction at that), which is a shame as confessions were a core part of Mother Ann-era Shaker bonding. When people came to join or even visit the Shakers, she would confront them to confess all their sins in great detail. It was a humiliating process and not by accident: personal humiliation is a key tactic for all cults. There’s an implied blackmail, as embarrassing details could be shared publicly of anyone who might change their mind and want to leave. Another common cult tactic is separating individuals from their families, also an essential part of the Shaker experience.
In the movie, we see a dramatic example of townspeople terrorizing the Shakers but we’re never shown why the locals might be so angry. When people joined the Shakers they split up marriages, pulled children from parents, demanded converts give their material goods to the collective, and turned the new believers against their non-Shaker families. There were accusations that they stole wives and children, all detailed in lawsuits. The Shaker model was a profound threat to the familial structures that held together late-eighteenth century New England life. The violence shown the Shakers was inexcusable but also somewhat understandable — well, unless you watched this movie, where it was portrayed as a fear of the unknown.
The details also seriously strayed from history toward the end, depicting later Shaker life as co-existing with Mother Ann. That’s a terrible choice. Shakerism as an organized religion arguably only began shortly after her death, when a new leadership came together, new settlements started, and a social structure constructed that rewarded technical innovation. Pretty much everything we associate with Shaker design — the flat brooms (1798), the efficiently of the round barns (1826), the apple peelers (1830s), even the hymns that this movie sets to modern music (“Song of Summer” is c. 1875) — came later and really could only have come from institutional Shakers. This is the course of most new religious movements: a charismatic leader holding a small band of committed zealots together, followed by a later institutionalization of roles. By smushing these eras together, Mother Lee’s life is sanitized and Shakers presented as an American origin story.12
What’s ironic that the movie itself is beautifully done. The rocked-up ahistorical Shaker songs are stirring. The singing and dancing are beautiful and well choreographed. The cinematography is exceptional. Amanda Seyfried does a great job playing the character she’s been given. If only she had been given Mother Ann!
I recently got around to seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another period movie that profiles a cult in a tumultuous time in American history. It transported me so much more than this one. As I sat in the theater this week, sighing as yet another music video montage powered up, I found myself longing for an auteur with a tiny budget to take on Ann Lee’s story (David Lynch would have understood the essential weirdness of Ann Lee). Less is sometimes more. And it definitely would have been for this production.
If you ask about Quaker beliefs these days, one of the common answers you’ll get is SPICE, a handy acronym that holds together a hodgepodge of values, namely: simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality (and later sustainability to become SPICES). One Quaker school definitively puts it, “Quakers agree to a core set of values, known as testimonies.” I’ve not found SPICES listed before 2000 and even many of the individual components are absent from older books of Faith and Practice.
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.3
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.4. 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.5
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.
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.
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 FriendsJournal 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).6 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.7
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.
I thought that the expose on Earlham College was going to be this week’s Quaker financial melt-down story but Friends United Meeting did the proverbial “hold my beer” and announced it’s in serious financial peril.
Friends United Meeting (FUM) is the largest Quaker membership organization in the world. Simplifying quite a bit, it grew out of the Gurneyites, the more churchy branch of Quakers who often adopted ministry and international missions. Those missions are the reason why there are so many Quakers in places like East Africa and Bolivia. Most of the worldwide body of Friends are part of that movement and many are formal members of FUM.
Theologically, today’s FUM is a “big tent” association that tries to hold together a wildly divergent set of beliefs and cultural norms, with gender and sexuality being the most common lightning point. There’s always corners of FUM threatening to leave or threatening to withhold membership dues. There was serious talk in the 1990s of a “realignment” that would split up FUM along evangelical and universalist lines but somehow that’s never quite happened and the tent has held. To its credit the big tent approach means that FUM has been a key facilitator of cross-branch dialogue among North American Friends.
The financial problem is pretty straightforward, a story as old as nonprofits:
Our audits have not been done in a timely fashion, internal financial controls have been missing, and we did not ensure that good accounting practices were being followed. We have not been careful enough in reviewing financial information given to us or in developing the ability of new board members to understand FUM’s complex financial structure.
I’m genuinely surprised that FUM leadership was this asleep at the wheel but I sympathize. A nonprofit I worked for in the 1990s went through a similar crisis when a few years of backlogged audits came back and showed us we were in far worse shape than we had imagined. The other major U.S. Quaker association, Friends General Conference, went though something similar in the 1980s; the story I’ve heard is that the lawyers told them they were broke to go bankrupt and they figured their way out of the financial hold.
Many nonprofits go through boom and bust cycles but this sounds more than just that. I do hope Friends United Meeting can pull through.
I wrote the introductory column for the June/July issue of Friends Journal, which is devoted to revivals.
It’s my pet theory that Quakerism is always dying and simultaneously always being reborn. It’s been a messy process with lots of hurt feelings. Many people have left Friends, and there are a bewildering number of institutional schisms still dividing us. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
When Francis realized that Theo’s board game based on our home town didn’t include gas stations, he added them in. Francis also moved the incorrectly located bicycle shop. Theo was briefly mad when he saw these unauthorized changes but when he realized the corrections were improvements he made Francis his official fact checker.
2015 looks like it’s shaping up to be the year that online cloud photo services all take a giant leapt forward. Just in the last few months alone, I’ve gone and dug up my ten-plus year photo archive from a rarely accessed backup drive (some 72 GB of files) and uploaded it to three different photo services.
First it was Dropbox, whose Carousel app promised to change everything. For $10/month, I can have all of the digitized photos I’ve ever taken all together. It changed how I access past events. Back in the day I might have taken 20 pictures and posted 2 to Flickr. The other 18 were for all intents inaccessible to me — on the backup drive that sits in a dusty drawer in my desk. Now I could look up some event on my public Flickr, remember the date, then head to Dropbox/Carousel to look through everything I took that day — all on my phone. Sometimes I’d even share the whole roll from that event to folks who were there.
But this was a two-step process. Flickr itself had boosted its storage space last year but it wasn’t until recently that they revealed a new Camera Roll and uploader that made this all work more seamlessly. So all my photos again went up there. Now I didn’t have to juggle between two apps.
Last week, Google finally (finally!) broke its photos from Google+ and the remnants of Picasa to give them their own home. It’s even more fabulous than Flickr and Dropbox, in that its search is so good as to feel like magic. People, places, and image subjects all can be accessed with the search speed that Google is known for. And this service is free and uploads old videos.
Screenshot of Theo (identified by his baby nickname, “Skoochie”) and Julie, December 2003.
I’m constantly surprised how just how emotionally powerful an old photo or video can be (I waxed lyrically about this in Nostalgia Comes Early, written just before our last family vacation). This weekend I found a short clip from 2003 of my wife carrying our newborn in a backpack and citing how many times he had woken us up the night before. At the end she joked that she could guilt trip him in years to come by showing this video to him. Now the clip is something I can find, load, and play in a few seconds right from my ever-present phone.
So what I’ve noticed is this quick access to unshared photos is changing the nature of my cellphone photo-taking. I’m taking pictures that I never intend to share but that give me an establishing shot for a particular event: signs, driveway entrances, maps. Now that I have unlimited storage and a camera always within reach, I can use it as a quick log of even the most quotidian life events (MG Siegler recently wrote about The Power of the Screenshot, which is another way that quick and ubiquitous photo access is changing how and what we save.) With GPS coordinates and precise times, it’s especially useful. But the most profound effect is not the activity logging, but still the emotions release unlocking all-but-lost memories: remembering long-ago day trips and visits with old friends.
On Tuesday, Dec 28 my lovely wife Julie gave birth to our third son. After some dithering back and forth (we’re methodical about baby names) we picked Gregory. Everyone is happy and healthy. Vital stats: 20 inches, 7 pounds 9 oz. The brothers are adjusting well, though Theo’s first response to my phone call telling him it was a boy was “oh no, another one of those.”
That’s 5yo Francis (aka “little big brother”) and 7yo Theo (“big big brother”) meeting their new sibling at the hospital. More pics in the Gregory! and Gregory in the Hospital sets on Flickr.
As you can see, we’ve basically bred triplets spaced over three years apart. As further evidence, here’s Theo and Francis in their first pics (links to their announcement posts):
As I mentioned, we’re methodical about names. When we were faced with Baby #2 I put together the “Fallen Baby Names Chart” – classic names that had fallen out of trendy use. It’s based on the current ranking of the top names of 1900. “Gregory” doesn’t appear on our chart because it was almost unused until a sudden appearance in the mid-1940s (see chart, right). Yes, that would be the time when a handsome young actor named Gregory Peck became famous. It peaked in 1962, the year of Peck’s Academy Award for To Kill a Mockingbird and has been dropping rapidly ever since. Last year less than one in a thousand newborn boys were Gregory’s. While we recognize Peck’s influence in the name’s Twentieth Century popularity, Julie is thinking more of Gregory of Nyssa [edited, I originally linked to another early Gregory]. Peck’s parents were Catholic (paternal relatives helped lead the Irish Easter Rising) and were presumably thinking of the Catholic saint when they gave him Gregory for a middle name (he dropped his first name Eldred for the movies).
