Johan Maurer brings up a question in a post about what was the London Yearly Meeting’s book of Christian Faith and Practice. He asks whether our practices should be treated as models we’d expect other Christians to follow.
I suppose that in either case, Christian or Quaker, the prevailing assumption was that these books are for internal use among Friends. This is who we are, more or less. But what I like about the title Christian Faith and Practice is another interpretation entirely, one I have no permission or evidence to propose: this way of faith and life is not just for us; it’s recommended for all Christians.
I’d argue a strong yes to this. When I think about what ancient Quaker oddities might still be relevant, one of the questions I ask myself is whether we could argue that the whole church should also adopt the practice (however unlikely that might be in reality). If it’s just some Quaker canard, we can toss it into an antiquity dustbin. But if all Christians should be following the practice, then let’s set the example.
I like Thomas Clarkson’s historical account of Friends particularly because he’s not writing for a Quaker audience. I get the feeling he’s holding our practices up for scrutiny, as if to say that maybe everyone should be following them and indeed, his pacifism and abolitionism were greatly influenced by the Friends he met in his work.
Of course this witness to other Christians sort of falls apart if we don’t consider ourselves Christian. If online discourse is any indication, there are large numbers of Quakers who are rather oblivious that almost all of our Quaker identity has a biblical basis (selective, of course, and also interpreted, debated and changing). Quakerism is seen as something that just randomly popped up in the world. None of the early Friends would have thought that.
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.1
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.2. 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.3
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).4 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.5
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.
This week I talked with my old Friend Anthony Manousos about the [waves hand in the air] political situation we’re in. I’ve known Anthony for over 28 years now, back when we were part of a conference to try to kick-start what later was reborn as Quaker Voluntary Service (spoiler: our attempt failed for what I think were mostly generational issues). Anthony is still protesting and witnessing to make a better world. I loved hearing his story of coalition work and the joy of organizing with music. His article, “We Have No King,” appears in this month’s Friends Journal.
I asked him what Quakers bring to protests:
One of the important things that we bring is our way of worship. And our way of worship helps to bring the temperature down. I think what the current regime wants is a violent movement opposing them. That plays out what they want (and certainly the assassination of Charlie Kirk plays into that scenario). What Quakers bring is a commitment to peaceful protest. And when we’re around, we can be that strong, committed, peaceful presence. And that’s important.
I also asked him a follow-up question of what we need to do to get out of the way and accept the leadership of others in social change. You can listen to his answers or read them in the show notes.
I don’t think Quakers’ historical memory always serves us very well. In 1656, George Fox wrote a letter from Launceston Gaol, a portion of which is quoted in every edition of Faith and Practice. It’s been reproduced as giant posters and the key phrase has become one of the go-to elevator pitches for modern Friends. It tells us to “be patterns” and “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you: then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour, and a blessing.”
We’ve taken one paragraph from one letter as a mission statement and now we get people wringing their hands trying to reconcile this Pollyanna-style niceness with the horror we see in the world. You get Friends valiantly trying (and mostly failing) to see “that of God” in ICE agents, terrorists, or authoritarian political leaders.
I think a big part of the problem is that Quakers have overall been a comfortable, well-off people for a long time. We’ve spent much of the last 300 years mostly remembering the happy-feeling stuff. Fox and his fellow early Friends were wary of “the world,” seeing it as a fallen place that we could transcend only with the guidance and healing powers of the Living Christ. Yes, he talked about being patterns in that letter, but way down. The letter actually started off in a thunderous manner that quite frankly, I think perhaps speaks more clearly to our time:
Dwell in the power of life and wisdom, and dread of the Lord of life, and of heaven and earth, that you may be preserved in the wisdom of God over all, and be a terror and a dread to all the adversaries of God, answering that of God in them all, spreading the truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding the deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, into the covenant of light and peace with God. Let all nations hear the sound by word or by writing. Spare no place, spare no tongue, nor pen; but be obedient to the Lord God. Go through the work, and be valiant for the truth upon earth; tread and trample down all that is contrary.
None of this is practical advice for what to do if you see secret police jump out of unmarked van to kidnap someone off the street. But what if our editions of Faith and Practice all advised us to a terror and dread and to walk the earth treading and trampling on all that is contrary to divine love? Toward the end of the letter, Fox advised us to “be obedient to the power, for that will save you out of the hands of unreasonable men and preserve you over the world to himself.” May it be so.
Update: in the Reddit discussion KeithB said that he wondered if there were Quakers out there looking for justification to tangle it up with ICE officers. Pretty much as we were talking, word came out that the son of well-known Philly-area Quaker family being arrested at his home in Portland, Oregon, on suspicions of participating in violent anti-ICE protests a few weeks ago.
The prosecutors have released a bunch of pictures of violent activity being perpetrated by someone who looks like the accused, with a similar arm tattoo. That protestor used a stop sign as a battering ram, and then threw a brick at an ICE agent that hit his head, drew blood, and required medical attention. I sure hope it’s not a Quaker in those photos and that his defense attorneys can prove it. Tread and trampling is not a license for assault.
Joy was my guidepost through my transition,” Willa reflects. “I realized that at the age of 70, I was too old to postpone joy. I realized shortly after that that at four years old, I was too old to postpone joy, but I didn’t know it then.
Willa was one of the regular Quaker bloggers back in the day6. I had mostly lost touch, only hearing third hand of the transition somewhere. I’m glad she’s doing well and still witnessing to the Truth as revealed to her.
I carry a ministry that forms a recurring theme in this blog: that our social witness minutes ought to express our Quaker faith explicitly as the heart of our testimonial rhetoric. In my experience, they rarely do. Instead they use the mindset and rhetoric of social change nonprofits. They employ arguments from science and social science, and use statistics, rather than a straightforwardly moral argument. Very often, you would never know a religious organization had written them, let alone a Quaker meeting.
In his post he rewrites a recent minute on climate change. It’s an interesting experiment.
I must admit I’ve rolled my eyes more than once over minutes. I remember one some years back that went into detail about proposed missile systems and the minutia of global nuclear deterrence policy (my memory is that it was written by a high school math teacher but that might be an embellishment). I had no qualms about the minute’s arguments, which I thought were quite sound and well-reasoned. But I seriously wondered who the audience was supposed to be. Did the Friends approving the minute really think this was going to go up the chain of command to to upper echelons of the Pentagon, the House Committee on Defense, etc? “General, sir, we have a minute from some Quakers you must read right away!”
I’ve written political blogs and I like analyzing policies. I can make informed secular arguments about climate change and militarism. Staying on top of scientific changes and understanding the effects of governmental policies is important for us. But it’s not the source of our collective power as Friends. People look to us for our moral clarity, which (when we actually possess it) is a result of our spiritual grounding. Missiles are wrong because threatening to kill people is wrong. Designing weapons capable of war crimes is wrong because mass murder is wrong. These are simple statements. They are sure to be considered naive by those who only think of policies. But they can speak to others (“speak to that of God in them”) who can feel their truth in their heart.
Johan Maurer starts with “it’s complicated” and goes on from there. A passage I find particularly interesting is his explanation of why looking at large-scale state-level atrocities like the stealing of native land or the kidnapping of millions of Africans is not just something to be done out of guilt:
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.
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?
