A Testimony of Love
February 12, 2023 § 1 Comment
This is the first post in a series on what I’m calling a Testimony of Love, an alternative approach to how we write our minutes of conscience and communicate our testimonies.
You can download the full series as a single pdf file here.
The secularism in our witness life
The impulse to make the world a better place is one of the distinctive manifestations of Quaker spirituality. We experience the testimonial life as an essential aspect of the Quaker way, that we should live our lives as outward expression of the truths about right living that have been revealed to us inwardly. And over the centuries, we have confirmed some of these truths so consistently that we now hold them as settled testimonies.
Notwithstanding this foundation in our religious experience, however, we often fail to express this witness impulse in ways that embody its source. We often sound in our minutes of conscience like secular social change nonprofits. Very often we rely on facts and statistics and on reasonable arguments to make our case for peace, justice, earthcare, and so on. One often could read these minutes and never know that they were written by a religious community, let alone by Quakers. Instead, we borrow language from the social and natural sciences and from legal and human rights advocates.
Meanwhile, the Religious Society of Friends is a religious movement. You would think that spiritual, religious, and moral arguments and language would be our forte. Yet we seldom use spiritual, let alone religious, language to explain our motives. We sometimes do refer to our testimonies, but usually not to the promptings of the Holy Spirit that are the foundation of our testimonies and of the testimonial life. We almost never quote Scripture, even though the Bible is the foundation for virtually every one of our testimonies. We do not stand on the language of Fox or Fell or Woolman or Barclay to present a theological argument. And when we do use a moral argument to explain why something is wrong or why the course we recommend is right, we often use secular humanistic language rather than language that is explicitly religious or spiritual.
There is one exception. We tend to rely on one idea that is not actually true: that we work for peace, equality, or whatever, because we believe that there is that of God in everyone. This belief is shared by only a small minority in the wider Quaker movement; saying “we believe” in that of God, when we mean by this a kind of divine spark, is therefore a liberal Quaker conceit. It misrepresents the thinking of George Fox, from which we’ve cadged the phrase. Furthermore, I would argue that, even if we were to assert that this phrase expresses a truth behind our testimonies, it’s not the belief in that of God in another that guides our action, but the experience of God’s within ourselves. But this is a subject for a different essay.
Most of the time, I suspect that we don’t use explicitly religious language in our witness minutes and communications because the writers of the statements have failed to think this way. Sometimes, though, I suppose that they may fear that someone will be likely to object that such language doesn’t speak for them when the matter is brought before the meeting and thus the writers want to avoid a potentially long and divisive discussion on the floor about it.
However, I feel that talking like a secular social change nonprofit is wrong for us for several reasons. The next post lays out those reasons.
Read the next post in the series here.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Steven, You speak my mind, brilliantly and I am grateful.