I very occasionally do a book review for the magazine. My colleague Gail thought I might be interested in this biography of the longest-serving editor of our British counterpart, “The Friend.”
The part of Henry Stanley Newman’s life that I found most fascinating was his generation’s ability to bend technicalities almost to the breaking point in order to maintain formal unity. As a young man, he rebelled against the stodgy and insular Quakerism of his upbringing and found a way to create a parallel spiritual life based on evangelical principles. In middle life, established and respected, he faced challenges from the younger liberals and managed to stay engaged and keep them within the fold. In the United States, these same tendencies toward first evangelical and then liberal theologies both resulted in schisms, many of which still divide Friends here.
Almost twenty years ago I visited a small Midwestern U.S. yearly meeting that really felt like a family, both in its bonds and its dysfunctions. I liked it. One of the most respected members was gay and at some point earlier he was nominated to be the yearly meeting clerk. This was a non-starter for a member church that also affiliated with an Evangelical yearly meeting. After some back and forth he was was approved as an assistant clerk, a solution everyone could live with. Logically it makes absolutely no sense — if gayness precludes one from one yearly meeting position it should for any. But the yearly meeting wanted him and knew he’d be good in leadership and found a way to make it work and he cheerfully accepted the situation. (The situation didn’t last and the dual-affiliated meeting eventually had to make a choice and disaffiliate from one of its yearly meetings.)
There’s an impulse toward purity that woudn’t have allowed these kinds of negotiated compromises. A young Newman, starting Evangelical organizations left and right that were nominally outside of Quaker structure but full of Quakers, would have been disowned. The Midwest yearly meeting would have splintered over an insistence of a clerk status. I certainly understand purity: sometimes we need to make a stand. But sometimes it’s more important to be a logically inconsistent family than to be alone in our correctness. Henry Stanley Newman’s compromises is an interesting model for us, still.
Friends Journal
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