“That of God in everyone” – Again, Again

November 2, 2025 § Leave a comment

“Can we not say a little more?”

Here is another quote from Brian Drayton’s Messages to Meetings, this one about the phrase “that of God in everyone”, which my regular readers know is a regular theme of mine; I posted about it just two weeks ago. This is from letter 20 in Brian’s book: “That of God in every one : Can we not say a little more?”

The whole letter is worth reading and speaks my mind, but it is too long to quote in full here. But I do want to share its first few paragraphs. I quote Brian (pages 74–75):

Friends meetings, in making statements on a variety of social issues, often found their rationale upon the assertion that the divine Light is accessible to everyone, typically citing as our core belief that “there is that of God in every one.” This article of faith is so widely cited that it is rare for us to question its use or what we actually mean by it. In what follows, I do not suggest that we stop using it! However, in this yearly meeting season, with minutes and epistles being crafted and circulated, I’d like to encourage Friends to examine what this phrase actually means for them and to also suggest that we can’t rely on this alone as the theological basis for our social witness. Can’t we say a little more?

“That of God”—what can it mean?

It sometimes seems that when Friends say “there is that of God in every one,” it is really meant as the equivalent for a statement that “each individual is of value and has inalienable rights.” This is a valuable thing to say, and I have no objection to it, as far as it goes. I would claim, however, that if it means this and no more, then it is really not a theological statement at all, that is, it is not a statement that reflects in any obvious way our experience of the living God. It is a sentiment that is well suited to a pluralistic democracy or as a universal statement on human rights. To claim that individuals must be treated with equal respect before the law and have equitable access to the necessities of life (including those that make culture and society possible) is a liberal and just sentiment.

But do we Friends bring God into our statements out of habit? If so, then this invocation of the Deity seems more like other conventional references to God that decorate political documents and public expressions than an indication of some imperative that drives us, that is rooted in our spiritual life.

I am not comfortable to remain at that level when using the phrase. Perhaps a further exploration of what we intend by the phrase might help bring other meanings of it to the surface, and these might in turn enhance the richness of our witness and our search.

World Quaker Day of Witness

August 14, 2025 § Leave a comment

Dear Readers

In the last couple of days, “a deep exercise hath attended my mind,” as John Woolman wrote in his Journal, and I am hoping that you my readers will share this leading with your meetings and with other Friends, if you feel so led yourself.

This is my leading: to invite all Friends and all Quaker meetings and institutions in North America to discern whether they might be led, as individuals, or groups, or meetings, to raise their voices in action against the anti-democratic movement that is rising in America and around the world, to do this on October 5, which is World Quaker Day. I imagine a host of local actions in whatever manner local meetings and Friends feel led.

World Quaker Day is an effort being organized by Friends World Committee for Consultation, which I think they do more or less annually. This year’s theme for World Quaker Day is Love Your Neighbor, which seems a very apt handle to me, and FWCC is already focused on these issues.

Here are my ideas for what to do and how to do it. This is just my personal statement of exercise and of my own intentions for your consideration:

  1. Let’s gather, if we feel so led, on October 5 in the largest numbers we can, in the most public places we can manage, preferably in front of a local office of one of the anti-democratic organizations, like your county or state Republican Party headquarters, or an ICE detention facility, or an Avela airport. And bring along your families and whatever friends and fellow-travelers are willing to join you,
  2. Contact other Friends. Contact at least all the meetings in your region and whoever handles meeting and media communications in your yearly meeting to invite them to this worldwide witness.
  3. Send public notices of your intended action to
    1. as many relevant media sources as possible, and 
    2. using whatever social media networks you are active in, and 
    3. to your representatives in local, state, and federal government.
  4. Coordinate with as many other resistance movement groups as you can identify, especially those in your regions and neighborhoods, to let them know what you’re up to, to invite them to join you, and to help broadcast your intended actions in their own networks.
  5. Challenge any specific organizations and political leaders in your region who support this turn toward tyranny to meet with you and then challenge their policies and actions on religious and moral grounds; see below.
  6. Minutes of conscience. Encourage your meeting to write and approve a minute of conscience. I realize that time for that is very short and Quaker discernment of this kind often takes a good while. But this is a classic form of Quaker discernment and witness, and it might be worth a try. It will at least start a conversation. And it can still be publicized after October 5, whenever it is approved. You can download a minute that I have drafted here, which says what I would say in such a message.
  7. But act! For God’s sake—and I mean that literally—don’t wait to get approval from the meeting before you act; you don’t need a minute from the meeting to act as individual Friends; you don’t even need a minute to act as a group of Friends. The meeting itself will need a sense of the meeting to act as a meeting. But the meeting doesn’t need to fuss over the wording of a specific minute of conscience in order to act collectively. It could simply minute support for any members and attenders who choose to show up that day. Or it could just spread the word. And for God’s sake, also, don’t write a minute that any progressive social change nonprofit could have written. Rather . . .
  8. Use the unique Quaker understanding of the testimonial life in your minute, in your communications, on your placards, etc. We are mystics and activists. We are practical and witness-oriented mystics who know that the Holy Spirit calls us to address the sufferings of the least of us and to speak truth to power, as individuals and as a people of God. We do not witness to the truth because we have some testimony to which we should adhere or at least aspire. We witness because we are led to do so by the Holy Spirit. Therefore . . .
  9. Use explicitly religious and moral language and arguments to challenge the irreligious and immoral acts of the emerging American anti-democratic project and leave to the secular social change nonprofits the secular worldview, arguments, and vocabularies that they already do so well, and which we so often borrow from them, while we so often abandon our own rich religious tradition. Let them borrow a moral argument from us for a change. Also . . .
  10. Please quote the Bible in the hope that your language will appeal directly to the faith and moral compass of the oppressors to whom we’re speaking, assuming that they do have a faith and a moral compass; most of them probably do, somewhere in a closet of their heart. Also, a very large number of them are Christian nationalists who have abandoned the gospel of Jesus. They deserve to hear the gospel truth and they need to repent, to turn their actions around. We should not be afraid to challenge the religious oppressors and their churches and institutions in their own language and on their own ground, as we did in the 1650s. We are the ones who know God’s true message of love in this time, are we not? So most important: 
  11. Live the gospel of love yourselves. Do not be afraid to be in their face with the truth, but speak, write, and act in love to the degree that you are able, and in an invitational mode of engagement. 

This is the most important thing. I want us to be everywhere. I want us to be loud and unavoidable, and on the evening news. I want to be on Rachel Maddow’s show; she has been reviewing resistance efforts around the country every week for weeks. I want these people to see us and hear us and either answer us or reveal their cowardice and shame. But this is our third way: not their way of oppression through force; not the revolutionary’s way of resistance to oppression through force. but a third way of resistance in love and truth.

I want the World Quaker Day of Witness to be a witness to truth and divine love, not just in our message, but more importantly, in our demeanor. I want to appeal to those whom we address, and to the people who might see us on the evening news. I want all of them to know our righteous anger, but also to feel our love and concern—the two can exist side by side. And I want them to hear our truth, a truth that we believe comes from the Holy Spirit, from God’s love. I want them to hear it loud and clear, clear to the Light in their conscience. I want to answer that of God within them.

Britain Yearly Meeting Minute on Gaza

June 3, 2025 § 2 Comments

At their annual gathering recently, Quakers in Britain became the first British church to state their belief that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. (Download a pdf of the minute here.) I happen to agree with their discernment and pray that their minute was approved in a truly gathered meeting.

However, I really don’t like the minute itself. Like almost all of the minutes of conscience I’ve seen approved by meetings in the “liberal” branch of Quakerism, most of this minute reads as though it were written by a secular social change nonprofit. (But at least these minutes are being drafted and approved; we almost never hear from the evangelicals.) 

Here’s a synopsis: The minute mentions previous action by their Meeting for Sufferings (without explaining to non-Quaker readers what that is). It describes collective horror at the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza. It reviews the problems with a declaration of genocide. It offers two tenets of Quakerism as rationale for their stand. And it makes some appeals to action.

Here are those statements of Quaker faith given as rationale:

Central to Quakerism is the experience that there is that of God in everyone. From this belief – that all people are unique, precious, children of God – all others follow. We therefore abhor racism, including antisemitism, in all its forms. 

. . .

It is also a tenet of Quakerism that violence can never be the answer. That the means are just as important as the ends. This is our peace testimony that has led us for more than 350 years to eschew all war and all violence at all times.

That’s 87 “religious” words out of a total of 944, less than ten percent of the minute. 

I have problems not with its message, but with how it represents the Religious Society of Friends and our testimonies and with the weakness of its moral argument.

Integrity and misrepresentation

Central to Quakerism

The minute presents “the experience that there is that of God in everyone” as the foundation from which all our other beliefs follow. This simply is not true. it is not central to Quakerism. It might be central to a lot of Quakers in the so-called liberal branch of the movement, but it certainly is not central to the much larger evangelical branches, or to Conservative Friends. We shouldn’t be speaking of “Quakerism” with such a broad brush.

Nor is it central even to “liberal” Quakerism, except as a kind of unreflective doctrinal drift. We’ve been saying this kind of thing for decades now without any meaningful corporate discernment. It’s been slipping into our books of faith and practice and getting approved, much like a sly amendment to a massive legislative bill that most representatives haven’t noticed. Meanwhile, no meeting has actually carefully unpacked and considered the meaning or standing of this phrase “that of God in everyone” on its own. We think George Fox said it so now we can say it, too; meanwhile, George Fox never actually did say it. 

Moreover, there are still quite a few of us “liberal” Friends who do know that Fox never said it that way and wouldn’t have ever said it, and we would never say that it’s the foundation of our religious faith and experience as stated. We might be in the minority in a lot of meetings, but if a meaningful discernment process actually took place in our yearly meeting’s revision of their faith and practice, we would stand in the way. Well, I would, anyway.

That of God in everyone 

And anyway, what does “that of God in everyone” mean? The minute does not explain. What do we mean by “that of”? What or who do we mean by “God”? And what does “that of God” mean? And how do we experience it, or say we do, in “everyone”? We can say we believe it’s in everyone, but can we experience it in everyone? I can’t.

I suppose this statement tries to express what I agree is perhaps the central experience of Friends, that we humans can commune directly with God (however we experience the Divine), personally, inwardly, immediately. But why and how would this experience lead us to “abhor racism”? Because, in that experience, God’s anointing Spirit, the spirit of the christ, awakens and guides us to love and compassion, to truth and service. That’s the real message here: we are led into love and compassion by the Spirit, whatever each of us might mean by that, not by the “experience” of some abstract notion about our nature as humans.

What’s missing

This is what’s missing in this minute—religious and moral appeal, especially to love and compassion. I suppose it’s worth something to be the first church in Britain to call Israeli action in Gaza genocide; it will get attention. But I’m not sure it’s the most powerful thing we can say. The unique and powerful thing we as Quakers have to offer is our religious and moral message and appeal and our guidance from the Spirit. The secular activists are not going to talk like that, or appeal to the people for whom religious and moral appeal might be appealing. 

That means speaking from our religious tradition. Specifically, we should use the prophetic voice of Hebrew and Christian scripture, because it’s a powerful voice and a powerful message, and it might appeal to the hearts and souls of people who are inured to political polemic, especially those who at least claim to be people of faith. And I would use queries, not declarations.

For instance: With their horrific actions and policies, are you the Israeli government and your military loving God with all your hearts and souls and strength, as God demanded in Deuteronomy? Are you loving your neighbors as yourselves, as God demanded in Leviticus? 

Or: You want to be a “Christian nation”, you American Christian conservatives in government and other institutions of power who support and supply these atrocities? What about Jesus’ commandment of love? Is American military support loving one another even as we have been loved? Is helping to slaughter and starve children, who are “the least of these”, not re-crucifying Christ all over again? Is killing them inviting these “little children” to come unto him?

Well, now I’ve slipped into an American focus. This minute comes from Britain Yearly Meeting. I’m not sure whether Britain has a comparable Christian nationalist element, like we do here. But Britain does still have a national church. If I were a British Friend, I would be in challenging dialogue with the Church of England about this situation—unless they are already in unity with a Prince of Peace message. Then I would join with our religious fellow travelers.

I would be moral and religious, prophetic and traditional, in both voice and message.

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