I wrote up a lit­tle some­thing about this week­end’s pre­sen­ta­tion on the Quak­er peace tes­ti­mo­ny that I gave at Crop­well Meet­ing on Sun­day. I think it turned out well. I have no actu­al pic­tures of the event because I was up front lead­ing it. In con­tent it was not unre­lat­ed to my August Friends Jour­nal col­umn, “Wrestling with the Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny” but it was a whole heck of a lot tamer, as I was aim­ing it at new-to-Quaker atten­ders who don’t know any­thing about the peace tes­ti­mo­ny oth­er than we have one. Ukraine is a hard prob­lem for them, as it is for many of us long-term activists.

One result of my prep was div­ing deep­er into the Eng­lish Civ­il War (per­haps more accu­rate­ly, wars) than I have pre­vi­ous­ly. As an Amer­i­can, I only dim­ly know that there were one but as I kept dig­ging down I real­ized just how essen­tial it was to both the start of Friends and the draft­ing of the famous Dec­la­ra­tion of 1660 to Charles II. We some­times act as if the recip­i­ent was inci­den­tal, as if the king were sim­ply cc’ed on a minute. But it real­ly was craft­ed for the king’s atten­tion and it was a nonag­gres­sion pact of sorts: Quak­ers would­n’t chal­lenge his author­i­ty or the empire if he just left them alone. It’s quite like­ly a state­ment like this was essen­tial for the Quak­er move­ment to sur­vive the roy­al gov­ern­men­t’s back­lash against the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies but it seems just as clear that the state­ment installed guard rails on the purview of Quak­er polit­i­cal action. There were parts of the empire that war­rant­ed a chal­lenge — slav­ery and colo­nial­ism in par­tic­u­lar — and the 1660 Friends side­stepped those questions.

Any­way, I have a slideshow and a prac­tice run so if any­one wants me to repeat the pre­sen­ta­tion for anoth­er Quak­er group I could eas­i­ly do it.

Quak­er Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny Talk