Through the Flaming Sword

Radical witness today?

I think the liberal, committee-based approach to Quaker witness has run its race.

The liberal approach: Study the problem, find the causes, develop a program, fund it with public money and action—we’ve been doing this since the New Deal, but since the 1960s, this approach has become increasingly impotent.

The committee-based approach: Someone feels led to engage some new concern—say, earthcare—so you form a working group. If you get enough people behind the concern, form a standing committee. Then spend half your time developing a budget, spend the rest of your time seeking unity over your direction, negotiating your leading with Friends who are maybe led in some other direction within the concern, or who have no direction at all; resort to brainstorming or visioning sessions when the group can’t find its corporate direction; call the seven minutes you sit in silence at the beginning of your meetings “worship”; hope nominating committee can find enough people to keep you going, linger on after the fire has died out because some Friend in the wider body can’t imagine your meeting without an [xyz] committee, become a zombie committee. X years later some Friends feel a new leading for the concern, the committee gets a defibrillator, and the cycle starts over again.

We may be standing today on the cusp of a new stage in the evolution of Quaker witness. I hope so.

We have awakened to the total integration of oppression across all areas of life, culture, economics, and politics. All of our problems are interrelated. The whole system is corrupt. Nothing less than a total social-cultural-economic-political-constitutional revolution will do. Civilization itself must change. How do you do that?

We are paralyzed by the enormity of the challenge. We are bereft of a prophetic vision that could take on this kind of monolithic global evil. We are chipping away at things here and there, and with some remarkable success. But a sense of helplessness and dread often looms over our efforts, as we seem to be losing ground on a number of really important fronts, especially ecologically. The human race seems bent on following the passenger pigeon into oblivion. It is as though the Book of Revelation has become our playbook.

Quaker witness now needs to recover the genius of all four stages of our witness history at once. We still need liberal activism and programs that alleviate the sufferings of the people and the planet. We still need the government—legislative reform and executive regulation and enforcement. We still need the truth and intelligence of science and the leverage of technology. We still need to threaten pharaoh in his own court with the prophecy of the plagues he is bringing upon us all.

But we also need a new evangelism, a message of good news that can bring individual people to the altar of light and life with a new consciousness. And that good news needs to be more than just the truth of salvation from sin in Christ.

And we need to recover, adapt, and embrace the faith and practice of spirit-led Quaker ministry, to rebuild a culture that is adept at recognizing and supporting G*d’s call to prophetic action, as we had in the 18th century. Now that we’ve expanded our understanding of ministry to include witness leadings, we need a robust infrastructure for the discernment and support of that ministry.

And we need a new Lamb’s War, a radical, unreasonable, Spirit-led assault on the roots of our civilization’s downturn, as we had in the 17th century. But with a new focus, a new sense of urgency, a new understanding of what the endtimes and the second coming of the Christ mean now that the seven seals are being opened and the Four Horsemen have been set loose, for real.

In short, we need the Holy Spirit.

We need a new apocalypse, a new revelation, one that gives us some hope and faith with which to overcome the fear and dread we feel and that helps us embrace the failure that we certainly face. For we are going down. The end is near—depending on what you mean by “the end” and “near”. My wife Christine just came back from a planning conference in which scientists studying the New Jersey shore say that the barrier islands won’t be there in 25 to 30 years; South Cape May is already under the Atlantic Ocean.

Climate change, sea level rise, species extinction, the death of our oceans, the spread of ideological evil, the collapse of old institutions, including our own—all this calls for something new, a lamentation that can reach the ears of God, a Seed that can awaken a new consciousness in at least a critical mass of the people.

We may be the only religious community on the planet that is already equipped to receive and nurture that seed, for whom continuing revelation is a concrete reality, a movement that knows that any one of us could hear that call and answer it.

This is very unlikely to happen in our witness committees. We have had committees for a hundred years and they, too, have run their course; they have become part of the problem.

If we take our faith in continuing revelation seriously; if we really believe in Spirit-led ministry, then meditation, prayer, and worship are where we will receive the Seed, not in some committee brainstorming session. Like the Seekers of the 1650s, we need to stand in expectant waiting for the Word to come.

Do we have the discipline, the patience, and the faith to do this? I’m not sure that I do. But I don’t know what else to think. I don’t know where else to turn, except radically, toward G*d, who century after century, has come through for us.

This is the second installment in a five-segment series on the history and future of Quaker witness, focusing on how we organize it.

Evangelical witness

Into the desert of late-18th century ossified Quaker ministry emerged evangelical Quakerism around the turn of the 19th century, giving rise to a third phase of Quaker witness. Evangelical witness had a new willingness to engage with the outside world and to minister to some of its needs. The new witness impulse took the forms of social witness against slavery, ministry to prisoners, the temperance movement, expanding women’s rights, and a few others I’m certain I have missed. It matured into the philanthropic movement as wealthy Friends felt compelled to use their wealth in positive ways for social change. Friends led the movement toward philanthropy that you see typified in scenes from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Evangelical witness had organizing principles that had been missing in the previous period: the cause of social ills was sin, and thus the solution was evangelism, calling people away from their lives in sin to a life in Christ. I think of Joseph John Gurney’s deep soul searching after the economic crash of 1828 in Britain, a depression that was worse in some ways than our Great Depression. The Gurney family nearly went under and Joseph John agonized over whether his greed had brought on his trials.

For evangelical political economists (the dominant economic school of the time) and evangelical ministers were laying the blame on those who had overextended themselves in debt through greed. The cause was the sin of greed. The solution was an avalanche of pamphlets and sermons against greed in particular, and sin in general. A clear understanding of business cycles, of boom, bubble, and burst, that would emerge in classical economic circles, had yet to find its adherents.

Evangelical witness was somewhat confrontational, but hardly unreasonable. The discourse was flooded with moral reasons, biblical reasoning, and intelligent argument. But it wasn’t radical. This was no real departure from 1,500 years of Christian religious culture, just a more focused intensification of an already seasoned message about sin and salvation. Thlnk of Elizabeth Fry teaching the women in Newgate prison to read the Bible.

The rise of liberal witness

The next phase of Quaker witness was a radical departure in very important ways from its evangelical roots. My poster boy for this revolution is Seebohm Rowntree, a member of the Rowntree chocolate dynasty located in York, and a member of the cohort of young Friends who gave birth to liberal Quakerism around the turn of the 20th century, a group that included Rufus Jones and Seebohm’s brother John Wilhelm Rowntree. Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Town Life was the first widely-read sociological analysis of a social problem in human history. He interviewed virtually all of the households in York and tabulated their economic condition, then drew some conclusions and made his arguments.

His central conclusion about the cause of poverty was truly radical at the time, though it seems obvious to some of us today (though obviously, not all of us): sin was not the problem. Most poor people worked hard, they just didn’t have enough money. Their poverty was not the consequence of their character, as the evangelical model had insisted. It was not lust (too many children), intemperance, gambling, etc., that made them poor; it was the low wages their employers paid them.

Rowntree gave us the first systematic analysis of systemic evil, and he saw that it called for structural solutions. Moral exhortation of the poor would never raise their wages; only their employers could do that, and they weren’t likely to do it on their own. Seebohm Rowntree himself reformed the labor relations in his own family business after writing his book, but he did not substantially raise worker’s wages. Meanwhile, he also argued that the government had an important role to play in making up the gap, in relieving this human suffering, and in trying to regulate business toward greater compassion.

This, too, was a radical departure. Evangelical witness had actively opposed government involvement, seeing it as intervention in a process of conviction and repentance that rightly involved only the sinner and God. Helping poor people with alms actually enabled the sinful life, in the evangelical view. Rowntree saw that the only agent powerful enough to affect the behavior of business—the real source of poverty—was the government. Poverty played a significant role in the creation of the Liberal Party in Great Britain and of Britain’s welfare state. Among other breakthroughs, the book popularized for the first time the brand new idea of a “poverty line”, a formula for measuring poverty and therefore for evaluating programs. His formula was picked up wholesale by Roosevelt’s New Deal labor department and is still the basic framework for policy thinking and poverty metrics today.

Rowntree went on to serve in government in several capacities for the rest of his life. Rufus Jones went on to help found the American Friends Service Committee. With the onset of World War I, Friends recovered their testimony against war and, for the first time since the late 1600s, Quakers were again being persecuted for their witness. Thus the Great War forged a new consciousness in Quakerism and we have been much more focused on “mending the world” ever since.

AFSC illustrates the arc that this witness took as the twentieth century roared on. While many men went to jail rather than serve in the military, AFSC and similar efforts aimed to reduce the suffering that the war was causing. The genius of the Orthodox Quaker Herbert Hoover at organizing relief efforts put him on the political map.

But gradually Friends turned their attention more and more to the structural causes of our problems, as the consciousness that Seebohm Rowntree had ignited began to mature. Committees on industry and the social order in both Great Britain and the US published amazingly searching and radical pamphlets. A small but vocal and influential socialist movement eventually spawned some collective communities in the UK.

World War II returned us toward the peace testimony again. Then the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution of the 1960s helped broaden the “peace testimony” beyond just a testimony against war into a deeper understanding of violence. The Alternatives to Violence Project was born.  AFSC became increasingly an advocacy organization rather than just a service organization. And other testimonies began to proliferate, as we woke up to new evils: environmental degradation, women’s rights (again), racial equality, then an even broader understanding of equality that could include the sanctuary movement, LGBTQ concerns, and so on.

Liberal witness is reasonable in the extreme and not radical, by definition; it is liberal. It works with existing institutions. it studies problems, proposes solutions, argues from science, develops programs, and seeks to move governments into the roles that only governmental scale, reach, and resources can assume.

And it is pursued by Friends through committees organized around concerns—a peace and social witness committee, Quaker Earthcare Witness, Friends Committee on National Legislation, the American Friends Service Committee. AFSC, I think, ,may have led the way into organization by committee. But the rise of liberal Quakerism settled the already significant trend toward abandoning the traditional infrastructure for Quaker ministry that had developed in the 18th century and continued into the 19th. It increasingly relied on membership donations and the operating budgets of local and yearly meetings rather than on the largesse of wealthy philanthropist Friends. And it was  inspired by a more reasonable energy than the apocalyptic fervor that had ignited the Valiant Sixty.

I think I feel led to return to my Quaker-pocalypse series, to focus a bit on our witness life. But my leading for this blog has been sputtering lately and I find myself darting from one theme to another without clear coherence, so I’m not sure where I’ll be led next.

Meanwhile, this post, when I finally finished it, was so long that I decided to break it up into segments. This one takes a historical look at our witness—how we have organized it—in the first two of four—possibly five—stages. These first two stages are The Lamb’s War and “Quietist” Ministry. The next two segments are Evangelical Witness and Liberal Witness. Finally I look at Radical Quaker Witness Today.

I think we need a new approach to witness. And to work my way feebly toward such an opening, I found myself reviewing how Quakers have organized our social witness in the past. I see four modes of organizing witness in our history, in which energy followed by maturity and then decline—or in the first case, persecution—has led to a new form with new energy. It’s as if the Holy Spirit wants us to keep at it, providing new openings, and—hooray!—finding us with ears to hear. One big reason we believe in continuing revelation.

The Lamb’s War

The first phase was the Lamb’s War, the Apocalypse of the Word (see Doug Gwyn’s groundbreaking book of this title). It focused on the world with the zealot’s intensity and often was confrontational. It was unreasonable, being founded on religious faith. It engaged virtually all the Children of the Light, in the sense that virtually all Friends eschewed hat honor, used plain speech, etc., in their everyday lives. It aimed at what early Friends believed to be the root of social ills—false religion, as the agent of an even deeper cause, alienation from God. And it was radical, not just in its critique, its methods, and its proposed solutions. It also arose from radical discipleship and it aimed at the roots, as they saw it, of a world that could not comprehend the light that was coming into the world.

Then came the persecutions, the backlash from the established church and the state, bringing the wholesale death of our early leadership in Britain’s gaols—the collapse of the Apocalypse of the Word and the need to change our stance toward the world.

“Quietist” ministry

The result was the second phase of Quaker witness—the reliance on Quaker ministry that characterized the 18th century. Think of John Bellars and John Woolman. Friends who felt a divine leading to mend the world in some way who took their leading to their meeting and, if the meeting discerned that the leading was a true one, off they went. It tended to be focused internally (think of Woolman visiting Friends to persuade them against slaveholding) and it was not, generally speaking, confrontational or radical. Putting aside the vigorous culture of travel in the gospel ministry, this period’s social witness ministry did not, as far as I can tell, engage very many people as either ministers or recipients.

There was no overarching organizing vision for collective action, as there had been for the first generation, no sense of mission like the earlier apocalyptic belief that the second coming of Christ was at hand. As Doug Gwyn describes in The Covenant Crucified, Friends had cut a deal with the powers of the world after the persecutions gave way to some level of tolerance: you leave us be and we’ll leave you be—that was the deal.

This witness was morally reasonable, in that it relied on arguing from a scriptural and a moral stand. But it was not yet reasonable in the secular humanist sense that so dominates Quaker witness today, in which we argue from a stand in social science and use liberal political rhetoric.

This witness was radical in that Quaker ministry still relied radically on the movement of the Holy Spirit, at least in theory, but it was much more contained and far less focused on the world outside the Quaker community than the Apocalypse of the Word had been.

But Quakerism became more and more quietist, more withdrawn from the world into Quaker distinctives and an ossified culture of eldership that tended to quench the spirit.