“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.

Quaker Justifications for “Plain Speech”

January 6, 2025 § 1 Comment

I’ve just finished reading “Aspects of 17th Century Quaker Rhetoric,” by Richard Bauman, published in The Quarterly Journal of Speech*, and learned some great stuff about early Quaker rhetoric. By “rhetoric,” Bauman means “the art of persuasion,” in in Quaker terms, the art of convincement.

Bauman lays out four explanations and justifications early Friends gave for rejecting “the use of “you” in the second person singular, insisting instead upon ‘thou’ and ‘thee.’” I was only aware of two. Here’s his list in brief:

  • “You” ungrammatical. The use of “you” was ungrammatical, and thus not true. “You” was properly used for the second person plural.
  • “You” unbiblical. In the Bible, “the equivalents of ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ were employed by Christ and by the primitive Christians as well as in parts of the Old Testament.” The generalization of “you” was a later corruption.
  • Spiritual egalitarianism. They rejected the honorific “you” “in order to bring their behavior into line with their principle that the spirit of God was accessible within every [person] and that the unity of this shared bond was of primary importance in interpersonal relations.”
  • Social rank and etiquette. “The use of ‘you’ to a single individual communicated deference, honor, courtesy, while ‘thou’ imparted intimacy or condescension when used to a close equal or subordinate, but contempt when addressed to a more distant equal or a superior—either that or boorishness. . . . By refusing to conform their usage to these conventions the Quakers violated very strongly established social norms.”

Bauman goes on to point out that this “active aggressive” approach “was not meant to be merely provocative or exemplary, but to bring people to spiritual self-knowledge—‘to see where they were’—and thus from the world’s honor to a higher state.” Plain speech was a rhetorical tool for convincement. With the practice of plain speech, they sought to “arouse the Spirit of God in those who witnessed it, provided they were ready to receive the Light . . . “ “Any behavior whatsoever that was actuated by the spirit of Truth could lead other [men] to that Truth by evoking the spirit of God within them.”

“. . . the rhetoric of the early Quakers was not simply a rhetoric of words, but a unified rhetoric of symbolic action for which Fox’s words might stand as the keynote: ‘Let your lives speak.’”

* Sorry I failed to capture the date and issue of this journal when I downloaded it.

Are We A Chosen People?

June 9, 2024 § 2 Comments

In the elder days, Friends would sometimes refer to themselves as a “peculiar people.” By “peculiar” they did not mean that they were odd, though they were odd, and I think they knew they were odd. Rather, they meant that they were a a distinct people, a chosen people; they had been gathered by Christ as a people of God for a purpose.

This identity as a chosen people appears in the passage in the gospel of John from which we get our name as the Religious Society of Friends:

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.  You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. (John 15:12–17)

Integral to the identity that we claim with our name from this passage are five things:

  • The commandment of love—“Love one another.”
  • Direct and intimate communion with the spirit of the Christ—“You are my friends.”
  • The promise of (continuing) revelation—“I have made known to you everything . . .” And
  • Being chosen—“I chose you.”
  • For a purpose: a mission as a called people of God—“Go and bear fruit.”

Pondering this passage today in meeting for worship raised some queries:

  • Do we see ourselves as a chosen/called people of God?
  • If so, what is our mission?
  • Are we bearing fruit that will last?

Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 2

June 4, 2024 § 4 Comments

Casting out the spirit

Jesus’ answer to the problem of society’s possession by a violent and oppressive spirit is not to assault the man who is possessed, but to drive out the spirit that possesses him. To do this, he forces it to declare its name, its true-name, if you will—what it really is.

What is our Legion’s name?

I woke up a few mornings ago with a name in my mind: Teufelvolksbefolgengeist (pronounced toy’-full-folks-be-foal’-gen-gicest). (I love the German language for its capacity for creating compound nouns that say something concisely that you couldn’t say any other way, like zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.*) I translate teufelvolksbefolgengeist as the devil-spirit-whom-the-people-follow, whom they adhere to and obey.

The key to driving out this unclean spirit is not to attack the possessee, but the possessor, the teufelvolksbefolgengeist, the spirit that has infected our society. How do you do that?

First, we meet it with the truth of its name. This movement is following and obeying a spirit we have seen before. It animated Nazi Germany and reemerged in Soviet-occupied East Germany; it animated Stalin’s Russia. It’s an addiction to power and money, a love affair with the Satan, the father of lies, and with Mammon, the love of ill-gotten gain.

Second, we minister to the fears, trauma, and resentments that are the movement’s wellspring. Only by addressing the problems that the movement’s people face can we unbind them from their pain. Only communities can restore what they have lost—hope, a sense of belonging, of being seen and being known, and security, both material and spiritual. This calls governments, civic institutions, and the church to step up.

Third, we meet its most dangerous elements and their assaults with moral aikido, using their own energy and direction to disarm them and throw down their spirit, the way Jesus did repeatedly to his opponents. The way, for instance, that he caught out the scribes who tried to trap him into saying Jews shouldn’t pay the Roman tax: when you render unto God what is God’s, there’s nothing left for Caesar. For us, this means the law and the courts. And against the white Christian nationalists who are prominent in this movement (as “Christians” have always been in such movements), it means we prophetically uncover how they violate God’s laws with their words and deeds; specifically, in some cases, for instance, how they have broken their oaths of office, in which they had invoked God’s attention and judgment with the words at the end of their oath: “so help me God.”

Fourth, we meet the worst of them with humor and ridicule. Like Mel Brooks’s The Producers and the opening monologues of our late-night hosts. With political cartoons and video mash-ups of these possessed folks revealing their possessed selves, like John Oliver does in his show.

And fifth, we love. We call to their true selves. We answer that of God within them, that spirit within them that seeks truth, peace, wholeness, and love. I’m not talking about a feeling here, which we are just not going to feel. At least I’m not going to feel it, unless, perhaps, I get to know one of these folks personally. I’m talking about biblical love, which is something we do, not necessarily something we feel. With this love, we remember that we are dealing with a spirit, not just with a person; that these people are children of God, just like we are, that there is that of God within them, somewhere; that some trauma or pain lies behind their fear, their anger, their despair; that we must go high when they go low and remain faithful to our own moral compass.

To return to mythology and monsters for a moment, I take heart from a truth that guides the faithful fellowship of the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: evil always overreaches and it does not expect others to make the sacrifices that it would never make itself. Sauron never expects the good guys to destroy the ring; he expects them to use it. In the chapter in the The Fellowship of the Ring titled “The Council of Elrond,” Gandalf says something that has always stuck in my mind: “[Sauron] weighs all things to a nicety on the scales of his malice.” Meaning, evil assumes that everybody else is malicious, too. But we aren’t.

* I studied German for two years in college and still retain a surprising amount of that knowledge, considering. But I think this word teufelvolksbefolgengeist came into my mind because I’ve been watching Amazon Prime’s TV series Grimm, in which each episode features a monster from fairy tales or mythology, a la the work of the brothers Grimm; they all have German compound-noun names. I have long been fascinated by the monsters in mythology and folklore, and have always loved a good monster story. Grimm is pretty good in this regard. 

Note that the Grimm brothers did not just collect these stories, they studied them, and developed a vocabulary for categorizing them according to repeating themes and structures. Their approach was soon applied to the stories in the Bible, especially those in Christian scripture, giving birth to what is now called form criticism, which names various kinds of gospel story according to their theme, purpose, and structure. The brothers Grimm are the progenitors of one of the main disciplines in Bible criticism.

Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 1

June 4, 2024 § 1 Comment

Spirit-possession in America

America has become like the town of Gerasa in the gospel of Mark (5:1–20 and parallels in Matthew 8 and Luke 8): we have a man with an evil spirit who roams the dead places in our society crying out blasphemies and repeatedly escaping from those who would bind him. 

Now it would be easy to conclude that I’m talking about Donald Trump, and yes, he fits the description. But, like the Gerasene demoniac, this spirit possesses not just one person; it is legion. Mark tells us the demoniac kept cutting himself with stones. Stoning was the prescribed punishment for blasphemy, among other crimes. This story is a metaphor for a society insanely attacking itself.

In the story, Jesus does not address himself to the man, but rather to the spirit. He asks: “What is your name?” “Legion,” answers the spirit, referring obviously, to the Roman military occupation/possession of Gerasa, of Palestine, of the known world, an unclean presence of violence and oppression in society. This explains why Gerasene society is attacking itself: some folks are okay with the occupation; some want to fight against it. Insurrections were so persistent and frequent in this region of the Near East that Rome posted a legion there to put them down.

When Jesus drives the unclean spirit Legion into the sea (an obvious reference to Roman expulsion), it/they enter a herd of pigs. “Legion” is a collective spiritual entity who, when seen through prophetic eyes, manifests through individuals.

The quasi-fascist takeover of the Republican party and other once-conservative institutions in America is our modern-day Legion. And like the story in the gospels, our Legion is a spiritual problem. The fear that animates the movement, the hate that darkens it, the crudeness, cravenness, and cruelty that characterizes the movement, all are spiritual conditions that reflect a corruption of character in the individuals who comprise it.

But like Legion, the movement is not just personal and individual in its characters, but also social, inter-personal, and trans-personal in its collective character. The individuals are in personal moral and spiritual crisis, especially in the the root meaning of that word in Greek—krisis means judgment in Greek. But the body politic is sick, also, and not just the body politic, but also the body civic, and even the body of Christ. 

There is in the collective, in our contemporary white Christian nationalist movement, a momentum. Momentum is defined in physics as mass times velocity; velocity is defined as speed with direction. A movement in its spiritual dimension has mass, it has its people and their words and actions. It also has speed, it is on the move. And it has direction, it is moving toward something; the people that are its mass are trying to achieve something with their words and their actions.

This momentum is spiritual in character. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It is trans-personal. That is, it is transcendental, it transcends the wills of its constituent members; it has a mob psychology. It can induce people to do things they would not otherwise do, as it did in Nazi Germany. 

Its power is fear. It’s lever is loss and resentment. Its weight is the promise of release from fear and the hope of recovering what has been lost.

But what to do? In my next post, I name this spirit and offer some ways to cast it out from us.

So Help Me God

March 2, 2023 § 1 Comment

Oaths offer Friends and other faithful Christian communities a point of leverage by which we may be able to move some elected officials who assault the truth in the service of their white Christian nationalist god of violence and untruth. These officials have sworn oaths, and they are breaking their oaths with their words and actions. These oaths end with the phrase “so help me God”. Former Vice President Michael Pence might be especially open to this kind of appeal, since he is so self-avowedly Christian in his private and public life; he’s even used the phrase as the title of he newly-published book.

This is obviously somewhat ironic in the case of Quakers, since we traditionally forswear the taking of oaths (if you will forgive the pun).

Oaths are a covenantal form of speech. They connect all three of the points in the covenantal triad: one’s self, the community, and God.

Oaths are a magico-religious form of speech. They invoke the attention, judgment, and sentencing action of God as the guaranteeing authority behind the substance of the promise.

In their fullest form, oaths have the following formal structure:

  1. Formal naming of one’s self as the oath-taker; “I, [Michael Pence], do solemnly swear . . .” Note that the word “solemn” means “marked by the invocation of a religious sanction.”
  2. Formal stipulation of the promised actions; “. . . that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: . . . “
  3. Formal invocation of the (divine) authority, including, in some cases, stipulation of the punishment for breaking the oath, though not in this case; “So help me God.”

The oath for federal office-holders is a bit wishy-washy in it’s divine invocation and completely unclear about the punishment for violating the oath. By contrast, the oath that all kids are familiar with is: “Cross my heart and hope to die.” That is, if I’m lying, I’ll suffer a heart attack.

In order to hold Michael Pence, Mitchell McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their co-conspiring oath-breakers prophetically accountable for breach of their covenantal oaths, we have to unpack this divine invocation a bit.

So. “So” in their oaths seems to me to be a conjunction with several semantic possibilities. My dictionary gives the following: “provided that” God helps me, or “therefore” God help me. But it might be an adverb: “most certainly” [will] God help me. I’m going with “provided that” because of the next word in the phrase.

Help. If the “so” means “provided that”, as I propose, then “help” asks God to help the oath taker to be “faithful” in their discharge of its promises. It makes the oath a prayer. And the whole tone of the oath-prayer suggests that certainly God will help the oath taker, or at least would presumably want to. It assumes that God exists and is paying attention, that God has a stake in the discharge of the oath’s promises, and therefore, that God will act if the oath taker breaks the covenant.

God. What action will God take against an oath breaker? To answer this question, we have to ask, who is God? Whose God is being invoked by these people, and what do we know about that God’s character and intentions? To truly answer these questions, we would have to ask the oath taker.

THIS IS THE FIRST CHALLENGE OUR WITNESS SHOULD TAKE:

Who is your God and what does your God do to oath-breakers?

We could also ask what the Founding Fathers who wrote this oath had in mind, to use the “originalist” jurisprudential “philosophy” so popular now with white Christian conservative lawyers, judges, and Supreme Court justices. Sussing out the details of such an answer runs down the rabbit hole that originalist thinking always opens up. But we know the basics: God is the Christian God, and that Christian God is a lawmaker and a judge; [he] IS paying attention, he DOES care what we do, and he has a punishment waiting for those who break his law.

Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that breaking any oath is also a violation of the eighth commandment—thou shalt not bear false witness; you shall not swear falsely. Or else.

Punishment. So what is the punishment waiting for Mitchell McConnell for failing to give Merrick Garland a hearing as a nominee for the Supreme Court, which the Constitution expressly commands and which he had sworn to do? What will God do to him for breaking his oath? And for breaking the eighth commandment?

I’m not talking about the voters. God will not ensure that the voters vote him out of office, which would be appropriate and commensurate with the violation. No, God has presumably a personal stake in his breach of covenant and therefore, [he] must have something else in mind. Or so he and Marjorie Taylor Greene presumably believe.

We do have a benchmark. Her/their God stipulates twelve curses that will fall on covenant breakers in Deuteronomy 27; specifically, verse 26 reads: “Cursed be anyone who does not uphold the words of this law by observing them.” Chapter 28 gets specific about what those curses are, and it’s pretty bad. Especially pertinent: “The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds . . . “ (Deuteronomy 28:20) The chapter goes on to include pestilence, military defeat, boils, madness . . . lots of bad stuff.

But that’s the Old Testament, you say (though you presumably lean toward the literalist reading of scripture and assign it ultimate religious authority). Okay, Jesus then. In Matthew 23, Jesus pronounces prophetic oracles of woe against scribes and Pharisees for crimes that are roughly commensurate to oath breaking, and he specifies the judgment in verse 33: “You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”

The sentence is hell. There it is. The conservative Christian answer to the question of the judgment sentence for violating God’s law is, and always has been, hell. Mitchell McConnell is going to hell. Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to hell. That’s what they themselves believe—presumably.

Unless they repent, of course. 

THIS IS OUR SECOND CHALLENGE AS WITNESSES TO TRUTH: REPENT!

OR GO TO HELL.

At least that’s what you say you believe. We Quakers don’t necessarily believe that. But you do, or so we must assume. And if you say you believe you’re going to hell if you break the eighth commandment and don’t repent, but don’t actually believe it, then you’re breaking God’s law AGAIN. You hypocrites! as Jesus would say.

Our case. Here’s our case against these oath breakers:

We should ask who their God is and what he wants from them, whether they believe that he is watching what they do, whether he cares what they do, and what their God does to those who swear falsely.

We should indict these politicians for breaking their oaths of office, in direct affront to the God they invoke for help. Our own prophetic oracles in this regard should cite their crimes—“whereas, you, Mitchell McConnell, have failed to give a legitimate nominee for Supreme Court justice a hearing in the US Senate, as required by the Constitution to which you have sworn allegiance . . . “

We should indict these politicians for breaking the eighth commandment. “Whereas, you also have sworn falsely, and therefore have broken one of God’s ten primary commandments . . . “

We should demand that they repent, that they turn around and faithfully discharge their obligations to the Constitution to which they’ve sworn allegiance, so help them God. “Therefore, we the people for whom the Constitution was written, do demand that you repent of your oath-breaking and that you hold a hearing for the nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court of the Untied States as soon as is practicable, in faithful discharge of your obligation under your oath . . . “

And we should tell them to go to hell if they don’t, as they themselves presumably believe. “Failing your repentance and some attempt at restoration and redemption, and having rejected the help of your God, we ask, “how can you escape being sentenced to hell?”

Anti-racism and the War of the Lamb

June 8, 2022 § Leave a comment

I want to pass on this post by Adria Gulizia on “anti-racist” efforts in our yearly meetings because I feel its message deserves wider exposure. I find Adria’s ministry to be faithful and consistently refreshing, so I encourage my own readers to check her blog out and to read this post, in particular.

In the Shadow of Babylon—Adria’s blog

Anti-racism and the War of the Lamb—Adria’s post on anti-racism

Evil, the Collective, and the New Lamb’s War

May 15, 2022 § 3 Comments

Evil becomes fully transcendental when it manifests as sin by the collective. It is in the psycho-social dynamics of the mob that evil becomes a spirit, a Power, a force that transcends the personal to animate individuals into acting as organs of the collective. In its transcendental state, evil is capable of attracting and infecting new members to the collective, sometimes just on contact, and of transforming even those who otherwise would resist evil into at least silent enablers. 

This spirit’s weapons are fear, which leads to hate, and the lie. Hence what I call ideological evil, the willingness to do evil in the name of what you believe—burning witches, mass murder of Jews, invading Iraq or Ukraine, storming the Capitol.

That’s the psycho-social face of collective evil. There’s also a structural and systemic face—slavery and Jim Crow and the new Jim Crow, wage slavery and the other oppressive structures of capitalism, personal and collective dependence on fossil fuels, campaign finance law and partisan gerrymandering.

How do you turn the mob around? How do you transform the dominion of a system? The traditional Quaker answer is the Lamb’s War, individual and collective witness to the Truth through the word/Word, through the good news of a viable alternative exercised in the hands of love.

But you need an alternative. Where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 19:18); or, as my NRSV puts it, where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint.

Thus, the Quaker answer today, I believe, begins with the nurture of prophecy. It begins with efforts by meetings to foster mature spirituality in its members and in its collective worship, expecting that God will raise up servants in good time; to recognize and support the prophets that the Spirit raises up among us; and to surrender our own attachments to ideas and structures in favor of true revelation.

We have to go deeper than the facile turn to the ideas of “that of God in everyone” and of the “testimonies” as ready and settled outward guides for action. A sublime idea about human nature (“that of God in everyone”) or minutes of conscience unpacking the SPICES will not save us. Only the Holy Spirit can do that.

Presumably, the Holy Spirit is trying. Are we?

If Spirit-led prophecy is the vehicle for Quaker contributions to the struggle against collective evil, then every Quaker meeting should be proactively preparing the soil, teaching its members the Quaker traditions around Spirit-led openings, leadings, and ministry. Every meeting should be equipped to provide Friends who feel they may have divine leadings with discernment (clearness committees for discernment) and to provide support for those whom God has in fact called. 

This means meaningful religious education programs on Quaker ministry and an active and Spirit-led worship and ministry committee proactively building up the spiritual maturity of the meeting and its members. The obvious place to start with the nurture of Spirit-led ministry is with vocal ministry. 

Vocal ministry is the signature form of ministry in our tradition. It is the laboratory in which emerging ministers find their feet and in which the meeting learns to listen, discern, and support. And it sometimes is the launching pad for a Friend’s leading, the moment when they first hear the call. And in this regard, we should expand our view of vocal ministry to include programs outside the meeting for worship and any other speech addressed to the meeting. My own path into Quaker ministry came while I was preparing for an earthcare program for a meeting.

Finally, I believe we need to become much more open to what Friends in the elder days called public ministry: speaking Truth to the Powers where they are in their positions of power. I believe this means going beyond the writing of minutes of conscience and publishing them or sending them as letters to the powerful; it means sending people to speak in person.

But of course we can only send those who have been called. Do our members know to listen for the call? Are our meetings prepared to help them discern their call and give them the support they need, no matter what their calling?

Presumably, the Holy Spirit is doing its part. Are we?

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