Jared is an athe­ist YouTu­ber whose schtick is vis­it­ing dif­fer­ent church­es. I’ve watched him before so was thrilled to see he’s now vis­it­ed Friends.

He’s very good at observ­ing and under­stand­ing and explain­ing what he’s seen. There’s no sub­stan­tive inac­cu­ra­cies here. He had a deeply mov­ing expe­ri­ence that he says he won’t forget.

That said, he felt dis­ap­point­ed that the meet­ing he vis­it­ed wasn’t more dis­tinct­ly Quak­er, call­ing it a “bait and switch almost.” The only min­istry was polit­i­cal and while he does a good job defend­ing the speaker’s com­pas­sion he says that it felt “solemn but not sacred” to him, which I think is a fas­ci­nat­ing way of putting it:

I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in the hand­ful of peo­ple who feel like they’ve touched God. I don’t, but It’s still a pro­found thing to talk to some­body who’s don’t that.

He grew up Pen­te­costal and knew that there was a lot of crossover with ear­ly Friends. That’s what he was look­ing for. I think his obser­va­tions on this was prob­a­bly pret­ty fair for most Lib­er­al Friends meet­ings today. I think there are oth­er seek­ers like him want­i­ng to expe­ri­ence some­thing more dis­tinc­tive­ly and reli­gious­ly Quak­er. Over­all, an awe­some video, very recommended.