The claim is that Shaker leader Ann Lee was born a Quaker. The Wikipedia entry says: “Her parents were members of a distinct branch of the Society of Friends (a sect of Quakers) and too poor to afford their children even the rudiments of education.” The source of this is given in the citation: a 1879 encyclopedia article, a copy of which is hosted on Wikisource: “Her parents were members of a distinct branch of the society of Friends, and too poor to afford their children even the rudiments of education.” A source for this claim was never given in the encyclopedia, though later on it does reference Frederick William Evans, a much later Shaker figure.

That is the Tim Gee compiles five pieces of evidence that together feel very convincing.

There are of course influences but that’s to be expected. Every religious movement of the Second Great Awakening had some relationship to Quakers. The Methodists, Mormons, Holiness, Adventists all have some connections. When you tour the “1652 Country” area of England, where George Fox first brought Quakers together, you’ll keep running into signs about John Wesley doing the same for Methodists a century later, and here in South Jersey where I live a whole slew of Quakers became Methodists in the early 1800s. At least one early Mormon evangelist in Ohio essentially went from Quaker town to Quaker town trying to recruit people. The Quaker defense of female leadership and the principle that women can preach obviously rubbed off on the Shakers and other movements.

The idea that the British colonies in America were some pure land where we could reinvent a primitive Christianity was a powerful meme (if you will) at the time and certainly drew Ann Lee to cross over and plant a religious movement here. But Ann Lee picked one of the least Quaker areas to plant her community and drew early members from New England millennialist revivalists. She definitely wanted to build something distinct from Friends.

Ann Lee Was Never a Quaker: Here’s the Evidence

Five reasons why Wikipedia is wrong.

Friends Journal

Trump has surrounded himself by a protective scrum of advisors who spend much of their time keeping him steady and massaging his ego to assure him the people are all behind him. I don’t think he knows how to deal with the size of the opposition so far. He turns to conspiracy theory to try to convince himself that what he wants to be true really would be except for evil “dudes” out there—George Soros hiring actors to protest, millions of undocumented aliens voting, etc., and of course the original Trump conspiracy that refused to think a black American could be a legitimate president.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe

The notion for the “commonplace book” comes from Thomas Jefferson, who used just such a book to capture pretty much anything: passages from books he was reading, notes, sketches, you name it.

Wikipedia takes it further back in its entry on Commonplace books. The name comes from the latin locus communis and the form got its start in a new form of fifteen-century bound journal:

Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.

I really like this idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about workflows recently (and listening to way too many geek podcasts on my commute). I’ve been muddling my way toward something like this. I’m currently using Evernote to log a lot of my life but there’s scraps of interesting tidbits that have no home. An example from half an hour ago: I was listening to Pandora the train when along came an unfamiliar song I wanted to remember for later. A Commonplace book would be a natural place to record this information (First Aid Kit’s Lion’s Roar if you must know, think Bonnie Raitt steps out with Townes van Zandt for a secret assignation at a Stockholm open mic night.)

Of course, being a twenty-first century digital native, my workflow would be electronic. What I imagine is a single Evernote page that holds a month’s worth of the bits that come along. I have something similar with a log, a single file with one line entries (lots of Ifttt automations like logged Foursquare check-ins, along with notes-to-self of milestones like issues sent to press, etc.). I’ll start setting this up.

This morning traveled to Mays Landing, which was scheduled to host a street festival today. A few brave merchants like Brownies Squared opened without power and made the best of it, selling refrigerated goods at half-price. But most of the town was dealing with trees across downed power lines. According to NBC40 Weather 162,000 households are without power–considerably more than were out in last year’s hurricane.

Links:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho
* https://twitter.com/nbc40weather/status/219078662530678784

People sometimes get pretty worked up about convincing each other of an matter of pressing importance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat ourselves loud enough and often enough the obviousness of our position will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we happen to wear down the opposition so much that they withdraw from our companionship or fellowship, all the better, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Religious liberals are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the values we hold when talking about the natural world. There we talk about biodiversity. We don’t cheer when a species maladapted to the human-driven Anthropocene disappears into extinction. Just because a plant or animal from the other side of the world has no natural predators doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Scientists tell us that biodiversity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that satisfies our sense of nostalgia; having wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adaptation is needed in response to massive habitat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual harvest but leave us especially vulnerable when phytophthora infestans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for different religious groups to have different values, both from us us and from one another. There are pressures in today’s culture to level all of our distinctives down so that we have no unique identity. Some cheer this monocropping of spirituality, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our religious values are somehow truer or more valuable than those of other people, then they will eventually spread themselves–not by pushing other bodies to be like us, but by attracting the members of the other bodies to join with us.

God may have purpose in fellowships that act differently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitability that we forget to share ourselves with those with whom we differ.

I don’t know enough of the details of their lives to write the obituary (a Wikipedia page was started this morning) but I will say they always seemed to me like the Forrest Gumps of peace activists—at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos and there’s George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the better analogy: you know how there are entire b‑rate bands that carve an entire career around endlessly rehashing a particular Beatles song? Well, there are whole activist organizations that are built around particular campaigns that the Willoughbys championed. Like: in 1958 George was a crew member of the Golden Rule (profiled a bit here), a boatload of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to disrupt it. Twelve years later some Vancouver activists stage a copycat boat sailing, an act which spawned Greenpeace. Lillian was concerned about rising violence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Night marches. If you’ve ever sat in an activist meeting where everyone’s using consensus, then you’ve been influenced by the Willoughbys!

For many years I lived deeply embedded in communities co-founded by the Willoughbys. There’s a recent interview with George Lakey about the founding of Movement for a New Society that he and they helped create. In the 1990s I liked to say how I lived “in its ruins,” working at its publishing house, living in one of its land-trusted houses, and getting my food from the coop, all institutions that grew out of MNS. I got to know the Willoughbys through Central Philadelphia meeting but also as friends. It was a treat to visit their house in Deptford, N.J.—it adjoined a wildlife sanctuary they helped protect against the strip-mall sprawl that is the rest of that town. I last saw George a few months ago, and while he had a bit of trouble remembering who I was, that irrepressible smile and spirit were very strong!

When news of George’s passing started buzzing around the net I got a nice email from Howard Clark, who’s been very involved with War Resisters International for many years. It was a real blast-from-the-past and reminded me how little I’m involved with all this these days. The Philadelphia office of New Society Publishers went under in 1995 and a few years ago I finally dropped the Nonviolence.org project that I had started to keep the organizing going.

I’ve written before that one of the closest modern-day successor to the Movement for a New Society is the so-called New Monastic movement–explicitly Christian but focused on love and charity and often very Quaker’ish. Our culture of secular Quakerism has kept Friends from getting involved and sharing our decades of experience. Now that Shane Claiborne is being invited to seemingly every liberal Quaker venue, maybe it’s a good opportunity to look back on our own legacy. Friends like George and Lillian helped invent this form.

I miss the strong sense of community I once felt. Is there a way we can combine MNS & the “New Monastic” movement into something explicitly religious and public that might help spread the good news of the Inward Christ and inspire a new wave of lefty peacenik activism more in line with Jesus’ teachings than the xenophobic crap that gets spewed by so many “Christian” activists? With that, another plug for the workshop Wess Daniels and I are doing in May at Pendle Hill: “New Monastics and Covergent Friends.” If money’s a problem there’s still time to ask your meeting to help get you there. If that doesn’t work or distance is a problem, I’m sure we’ll be talking about it more here in the comments and blogs.

2010 update: David Alpert posted a nice remembrance of George.

August 2013 updates from the pages of Friends Journal: The Golden Rule Shall Sail Again and Expanding Old Pine Farm.

If it’s a cultural difference, I suspect it’s less geographic than functional. I was speaking of the class of professional Friends (heavy in my parts) who purposefully obscure their language. We’re very good at talking in a way that sounds Quaker to those who do know our specific language but that sounds generically spiritual to those who don’t. Sometimes this obscurantism is used by people who are repelled by traditional Quakerism but want to advance their ideas in the Religious Society of Friends, but more often (and more dangerously) it’s used by Friends who know and love what we are but are loathe to say anything that might sound controversial.

I’ve told the story before of a Friend and friend who said that everytime he uses the word community he’s meaning the body of Christ. Newcomers hearing him and reading his articles could be forgiven for thinking that community is our reason-for-being, indeed: what we worship. The problem is that ten years later, they’ll have signed up and built up an identity as a Friend and will get all offended when someone suggests that this community they know and love is really the body of Christ.

Liberal Friends in the public eye need to be more honest in their conversation about the Biblical and Christian roots of our religious fellowship. That will scare off potential members who have been scarred by the acts of those who have falsely claimed Christ. I’m sorry about that and we need to be as gentle and humble about this as we can. But hopefully they’ll see the fruits of the true spirit in our openness, our warmth and our giving and will realize that Christian fellowship is not about televangelists and Presidential hypocrites. Maybe they’ll eventually join or maybe not, but if they do at least they won’t be surprised by our identity. Before someone comments back, I’m not saying that Christianity needs to be a test for individual membership but new members should know that everything from our name (“Friends of Christ”) on down are rooted in that tradition and that that formal membership does not include veto power over our public identity.

There is room out there for spiritual-but-not-religious communities that aren’t built around a collective worship of God, don’t worry about any particular tradition and focus their energies and group identity on liberal social causes. But I guess part of what I wonder is why this doesn’t collect under the UUA banner, whose Principles and Purposes statement is already much more syncretistic and post-religious than even the most liberal yearly meeting. Evolving into the “other UUA” would mean abandoning most of the valuable spiritual wisdom we have as a people.

I think there’s a need for the kind of strong liberal Christianity that Friends have practiced for 350 years. There must be millions of people parked on church benches every Sunday morning looking up at the pulpit and thinking to themselves, “surely this isn’t what Jesus was talking about.” Look, we have Evangelical Christians coming out against the war! And let’s face it, it’s only a matter of time before “Emergent Christians” realize how lame all that post-post candle worship is and look for something a little deeper. The times are ripe for “Opportunities,” Friends. We have important knowledge to share about all this. It would be a shame if we kept quiet.