A Testimony of Love—Part 2
February 12, 2023 § 1 Comment
In the previous post, I said that talking like a secular social change nonprofit is wrong for us for several reasons. Here are those reasons.
Arguments against the secularization of our witness
First, it doesn’t work. Research into social change shows that you rarely can change someone’s mind with facts and arguments. People approach social issues emotionally, not intellectually. Facts may be true, but they are not the Truth. The Truth people believe in is a relationship with facts, not the facts themselves. That’s why so many Trump supporters remain Trump supporters despite his lies, cruelty, crudeness, misogyny, racism, and assaults on decency and the law. It’s their relationship with the man and what they believe he stands for that matters to them, the fact that he speaks to their condition in important ways.
People changed their attitudes about civil rights when they saw, and felt, the water cannons and attack dogs in action on the Edmund Pettus Bridbge—when their emotions were engaged. People changed their minds about the war in Vietnam when they saw, and felt, the body bags being taken off of airplanes here at home.
Moreover, facts often have counter-facts, “what-about” arguments that raise other true facts about something only vaguely related or not related at all. Facts cut both ways.
Second, secular language from Quakers makes no new, let alone unique, contribution to the struggle. Somebody else is already saying what we’re saying with this kind of language, and often they are doing a better job. But what are they not saying that we could say?
This is the third and most important argument against secular Quaker witness: it isn’t us, on the one hand, and also it isn’t us, on the other. By this I mean, on the one hand, that we are not a secular organization (in theory), so secular language is not our “indigenous” language; and on the other hand, we do have an indigenous language and it isn’t secular. We do have a natural, traditional, and powerful language that makes a contribution to the struggle that won’t—and couldn’t—come from any other place. Only Quakers could say the powerful things that we could be saying.
With this series, I want to recover an explicitly religious foundation for our witness life. I want to nurture a corporate witness life that instinctively presents our testimony in religious language that carries power because it stems from a leading of the Spirit. And I want to offer a template for expressing our Spirit-led witness that reclaims our testimonial worldview and rhetoric, that brings forward our ancient and powerful tradition as Friends, and that speaks to our audiences in language that speaks to their condition, that might actually change some of their hearts and minds, because it’s religious, moral, and emotional.
The solution, I propose, is a testimony of love. A way of thinking about our testimonies and our witness actions and communications, that is grounded in the Spirit, and that explicitly invokes the commandment of love, which we have from Jesus and which lies at the core of our identity and mission as Friends.
Why a testimony of love? See the next post.
Through the Flaming Sword 
[…] Read the next post in the series here. […]