Guill­ford Col­lege archivist Gwen Gos­ney Erick­son has writ­ten a guest post on C Wess Daniel’s Remix­ing Faith newsletter/blog about Quak­er val­ues and iden­ti­ty.

I bris­tle when folks say a par­tic­u­lar behav­ior or action is not “Quak­er­ly.” I ask what is meant by that and often hear, “Well, it lacks integri­ty.” Rather than using “Quaker-ness” as a mea­sur­ing stick, what is real­ly meant? Is Quak­er the gold stan­dard and based on a list of val­ues drawn from a late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry acronym or assump­tions about a sin­gu­lar Quak­er ethos? Using lan­guage of reli­gious excep­tion­al­ism risks cre­at­ing pow­er dynam­ics that are unhelp­ful. Who gets to play the “Quak­er card”? 

Gwen’s right “Quak­er­ly” is often used as a boundary-setting word. The impli­ca­tion is that the object of the crit­i­cism does­n’t have enough Quak­er­ness for their opin­ion to be valid.

She also talks about how “SPICES” list ¹ of tes­ti­monies sets up a dynam­ic of Quak­er excep­tion­al­ism. There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly Quak­er about lov­ing sim­plic­i­ty, peace, etc. As I’ve writ­ten before, even a world leader launch­ing a war will could claim they’re seek­ing the greater peace. If you read any list of Quak­er tes­ti­monies before the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, they’re tes­ti­monies against spe­cif­ic behav­ior. It’s hard­er to jus­ti­fiy par­tic­i­pat­ing in a war if you have a tes­ti­mo­ny explic­it­ly against war.

The clas­sic Quak­er tes­ti­monies weren’t enshrined on a tablet brought down from on high. They arose slow­ly, often organ­i­cal­ly, as lessons learned by indi­vid­u­als Friends. Over time they became spir­i­tu­al lessons rec­og­nized by the wider Soci­ety of Friends and they changed as the col­lec­tive wis­dom of our Soci­ety grew. Again from Gwen:

His­to­ry is the act of study­ing and engag­ing with the past through those sources. We bring our own times to that process and use objects and mem­o­ries (our own and those of oth­ers) to inform our under­stand­ing of the past. Those sto­ries will like­ly evolve and change through added infor­ma­tion and inclu­sion of nar­ra­tives pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able or ignored. 

We’ve cer­tain­ly been bring­ing in more voic­es, even if slow­ly and some­times real­ly bad­ly. But our reliance on the mil­que­toast SPICES for­mu­la­tion has short-circuited a review of the behav­iors and atti­tudes that might com­prise Quak­er val­ues in our age.

1. Sim­plic­i­ty, Peace, Integri­ty, Com­mu­ni­ty, Equal­i­ty, and Stewardship/Sustainability depend­ing on who you ask. The acronym came about as a learn­ing aid in the mid-twentieth cen­tu­ry and are gen­er­al­ly ascribed to Howard Brinton.