I’m cur­rent­ly work­ing on an upcom­ing Friends Jour­nal arti­cle that uses Quak­er plain dates: e.g., 9th day of Sixth Month, 2021. I’m going down a bit of a rab­bit hole look­ing up dif­fer­ent Quak­er style guides to fig­ure out a con­sis­tent way of styling them.

I col­lect style guides and the only mod­ern one I’ve found to address it is an early-aughts ver­sion from Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in the late 90s by Bar­bara Hir­shkowitz. Bar­bara more or less taught me every­thing I know about edit­ing when we worked togeth­er at New Soci­ety Pub­lish­ers in the ear­ly 90s. Bits of her per­son­al­i­ty come out in the guide so it’s fun to read it and remem­ber her and lat­er addi­tions by Chel Avery are just as won­der­ful. I miss them both, both as edi­tors and friends¹

Ear­ly Friends were well known for their idio­syn­crasies. They weren’t afraid of look­ing weird for a prin­ci­ple they believed in. They would risk impris­on­ment, ill­ness, and death for these prin­ci­ples. For exam­ple, their rad­i­cal belief in the equal­i­ty of all peo­ple under Christ ² led them to refuse to take off their hats in front of judges. Friends were hauled off to jail just for refus­ing this hat hon­or. Plain lan­guage, dress, and dates all set off Friends as a “pecu­liar peo­ple” who were eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able for stand­ing out. But this was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad weird­ness: it also rein­forced their com­mit­ment to a rad­i­cal integrity.

Suc­ceed­ing gen­er­a­tions of Friends chipped away and even­tu­al­ly dropped many of these pecu­liar­i­ties. Much of this was peer pres­sure I sus­pect: being strange got in the way of assim­i­lat­ing into the wider cul­ture. Anoth­er moti­va­tion, espe­cial­ly among more evan­gel­i­cal­ly mind­ed Friends, was out­reach. If we want to bring in the mass­es we should drop the sil­ly, out­dat­ed mark­ers that are sec­ondary to the core mes­sage — that Christ has come to teach the peo­ple himself.

Anoth­er rea­son for the decline is ossi­fi­ca­tion. It’s per­haps inevitable that every reli­gious tra­di­tion will grad­u­al­ly for­get why they do the things they do and start doing them sim­ply because that is some­thing they’ve always. Kids in Quak­er First-day school will be told we don’t swear oaths or don’t gam­ble or vote in our inter­nal decision-making because Friends don’t engage in those activ­i­ties. For­got­ten in this are the bib­li­cal and his­tor­i­cal the­o­log­i­cal ratio­nales for avoid­ing the prac­tices. Mar­garet Fell described this process when she recount­ed the first time hear­ing George Fox preach: “We are all thieves; we have tak­en the Scrip­ture in words, and know noth­ing of them in our­selves.” I think many Friends have tak­en our tra­di­tions most­ly in words. It’s easy to aban­don a prac­tice you don’t understand.

So I thought I’d share my own per­son­al test for decid­ing whether an old Quak­er pecu­liar­i­ty is worth reviv­ing. I’ve prob­a­bly shared this before (the dan­ger when some­one with maybe twelve inter­est­ing ideas has a twenty-plus year old blog³). Here they are:

Can a pecu­liar­i­ty be explained to an out­sider in a few sen­tences with­out the need to give any his­tor­i­cal context?

Is it a prac­tice that one could argue is applic­a­ble to any Christian?

I real­ize the Bible is a con­test realm but could some­one under­stand it from a straight-forward read­ing of the gospels in par­tic­u­lar and maybe even more par­tic­u­lar­ly the Ser­mon on the Mount , from which so many Quak­er tes­ti­monies arise. One of my favorite Quak­er inter­preters is the Angli­can anti­slav­ery activist Thomas Clark­son. He described Quak­er prac­tice for the edu­ca­tion of his denom­i­na­tion — I think he thought some of the ideas were worth poach­ing. Is an old Quak­er prac­tice found in the gospels and could some­one like Clark­son want to import it into their Chris­t­ian tradition?

What babies in the bath­wa­ter are worth pre­serv­ing with this test? Are there tests you use to think about Quak­er practices?

1. Chel was one of only a few pro­fes­sion­al Quak­ers who called me when I got uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly canned from a Quak­er job in 2006. The kind­ness of the ges­ture and the long-picture advice she gave were very pearls of great price.
2. Until they dis­cov­ered chat­tel slav­ery, ugg.
3. Oh yes, I have talked about this before, 12 years ago!