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.

Meetings and Ministry, Part 4: Reviewing Faith and Practice

August 7, 2025 § Leave a comment

Yearly meetings should review their books of Faith and Practice to ensure that they treat minutes of travel and service fully, including what to do with such minutes when a member transfers membership. The recommendations below are based on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s entry on minutes of travel and service, which is rather brief but it covers the essentials pretty well.

The F&P entry on minutes of travel should:

  • Process. Lay out the process for clearness regarding the leading—to whom a Friend with a leading should go and what the clearness for discerning a leading should be. Lay out the process for writing the minute, and for its approval.
  • Minute’s content. Provide guidelines for the content of the minute—nature, scope, and duration of the proposed service, affirmation of the meeting’s support, room for endorsements.
  • Support. Consider forming a spiritual support committee of some kind for the minister while pursuing their ministry.
  • Release. Recommend that the meeting consider ways to help release the minister from obstacles to their service, if there are any.
  • Companionship. Recommend traveling with an elder or companion, if possible.
  • Meeting endorsement. Recommend endorsement by the regional meeting and the yearly meeting if the travel will extend beyond the region or the yearly meeting.
  • Visitation endorsement. Recommend asking that the bodies being visited endorse the minute, on its back or on an attached page, giving the name of the body visited, its location, and the date of service, comments on the character and quality of the service, and a signature and date of signature by the person(s) presiding in the visited body.
  • Reporting. Provide guidelines for reporting back to the meeting, perhaps annually.
  • Laying down. Provide guidelines for discernment and the laying down of the minute with final reporting when the minister and the meeting are clear that the minister has been released from their leading by the Holy Spirit.
  • Transfer of membership. Provide guidelines for both the transferring meeting and a member’s new meeting regarding the transfer of the minute and of care for any spiritual support that the transferring meeting may have convened for the minister.

Early Quaker Christology and Blasphemy

January 12, 2025 § 1 Comment

I’ve been reading “Accusations of Blasphemy in English Anti-Quaker Polemic, c. 1660–1701,” by David Manning, from Quaker Studies 14/1 (2009) [27–56]. The article focuses on polemical charges of blasphemy against early Quakers based primarily on early Friends’ theology of the light within as anti-Trinitarian and on a claim that Quakers were identifying themselves with God.

Before sharing some of the article, it’s worth noting that George Fox was charged with blasphemy three times, tried twice, and convicted once and got jail time. There probably would have been more trials, but his magistrate for the second trial happened to be none other than Judge Fell, Margaret’s first husband. Fox and Fell met before the trial and uncovered a loophole in the law and Fox got off on a technicality. Judge Fell was such a senior and respected jurist that the third charge never went to trial because they knew they would lose, and it probably kept other prosecutors from bringing charges. And then, of course, there was James Naylor.

Pamphlet wars about these claims raged between Quakers and anti-Quakers throughout this period, to which William Penn was a major contributor. Part of the problem was that early Friends were inconsistent about their theology in this period, so it was hard to pin them down. Manning draws on the work of Leo Damrosch and Ted Underwood*, writing: “. . . no definitive account of early Quaker theology can be written because early Quakers regularly equivocated about their beliefs and that their early theology was, quite understandably, somewhat fluid and contestable precisely because it was a new and developing belief system**.” Which hasn’t stopped most of us from offering “definitive accounts” of early Quaker theology anyway.

But as to the theological claims that gave rise to charges of blasphemy, Manning writes:

The terms Christ, God, and Holy Spirit were not denied, but appeared to have been used interchangeably to describe the Light, rather than to acknowledge the existence of distinct divine persons. Early Quakers most commonly identified the Light with Christ, professing that the pre-incarnate and the incarnate Christ were the same. Christ on earth was, therefore, not manifest in human form, but a celestial being in the vessel of a human body. [emphasis mine] Thus, from this position, Christ was wholly supernatural and provided a uniquely spiritual soteriology [salvation theology]. . . .

The Quakers’ type of non-Trinitarianism meant that they rejected the traditional tenets of Christian belief: faith was not a bridge between human and divine, and mortals did not receive the grace of God, but experienced him immediately (i.e. without mediation). For the Quakers, the language of ‘inwardness’ was effectively a euphemism for the only true way to form a relationship with Christ; for his celestial being had no cause, or means, to mediate with humans, but dwelt within them. . . . one can appreciate the thrust of [Richard Bailey’s] argument that Quaker conviction hinged upon a Christo-present, rather than Christo-centric belief system***.

I read Bailey’s book (New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God) some time ago and found it both fascinating and challenging. Here’s a quote from it along similar lines as above taken from Fox’s The Great Mystery of the Great Whore. This is Fox speaking:

God’s Christ is not distinct from his saints, nor their bodies, for he is within them, nor distinct from their spirits, for their spirits witness him . . . he is in the saints, and they eat his flesh, and sit within him in heavenly places.”

This is weird stuff. It is truly unorthodox, and it is much more radical thinking than later Quaker Christology, which has, it seems to me, been retrojected onto Fox and early Friends in apparent embarrassment, or maybe just through incredulity and misunderstanding. Assuming that Damrosch, Underwood, Manning, and Bailey are not the ones who misunderstand. Moreover, these quotes echo ideas in Glen D. Reynolds’s Was George Fox a Gnostic? An Examination of Foxian Theology from a Valentinian Gnostic Perspective, and some of the insights of Rosemary Moore in The Light in their Consciences.. 

Those anti-Quakers might have been right, from the orthodox point of view. 

Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Naylor and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. Ted Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth Century England.

Manning, p. 32.

Richard Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God.

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.

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