Graham Taylor with a well-cited article on the proto-socialism of early Friends. There’s a bit of anachronistic thinking going on here, which he admits to. But it’s also the case that a lot of Quaker history is viewed through the lens of later Quakers and often ignores what was happening outside of Quakerism at the time. This can lead to bad histories. I’m not sure I buy some of Taylor’s arguments but it’s a good exercise and Fox certainly did talk about economics as part of his call for justice.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Quaker Socialist Society Hope and Optimism
December 1, 2024
December’s Friends Journal is online and looks at “Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism.” I wrote the opening column this month and explained why I wanted to see Quakers tackle this. It seems to me that hope and pessimism are attitudes that transcend typical religious and political divisions. Pick a topic or dissect a social group and you can usually find among them people who are undaunted by the challenges ahead and others worried to the point of paralysis. Our reactions to Covid these past five years have exposed these fault lines, as is our responses to the recent presidential election. I wrote:
Has there ever been an age in human history in which we could be purely optimistic or purely pessimistic? Quaker founder George Fox wrote that his ministry arose “when all my hopes in [preachers and experienced people] were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do.” He famously found inspiration, guidance, and courage in “one, even Christ Jesus,” who could speak to his condition. What keeps us going today in a world always ready to implode or blossom?
The Quaker Witch Trial
November 19, 2024
There’s a great story, almost certainly a tall tale, about Pennsylvania’s lone witch trial, in which the accused, a Swedish woman who couldn’t speak English, confirmed she flew on brooms. William Penn himself, presiding, replied “Well I know of no law against that!” and dismissed the case. The November issue of Friends Journal has a fictionalized account of this written by Jean Martin.
Friends Journal There’s no transcript of the actual trial so we don’t know the blow-by-blow. We know that Margaret Mattson was found guilty of having the reputation of a witch, a strange finding indeed.
The Swedes were the original European inhabitants of the Delaware River basin. Many were ethnic Finns who had brought folk remedies with them. They were close to the Native Lenape peoples and intermarried and allied themselves with one another against later Europeans rulers, the Dutch then English.
Being first amongst the Europeans, the Swedes/Finns had settled in some of the choicest land along the mouths of creeks and there was a lot of political pressure to move them out or hem them in. Accusations of witchcraft were part of this context. The English accusers might well have been engaging in classic scapegoating behavior meant to steal land and resources.
Like the Lenape, many Swedes/Finns eventually moved across the river to West Jersey, which had a strong Lenape presence, a much slower influx of English Quakers, and clearer boundaries between the two, such as Burlington County’s so-called “Indian Line” at the head of west-flowing creeks flowing into the Delaware. Margaret Mattson was part of this exodus. She might have won the trial but her Pennsylvania neighbors succeeded in bullying her out of the colony. The folksy story of Quaker toleration may be a lot shakier than later biographers made it out to be.
If you’re interesting in all this, Jean Soderlund’s work, esp. 2014’s Lenape Country, is fabulous and deconstructs a lot of myths promulgated by later Quaker settlers. She recently wrote about some of this for Friends Journal. There’s also a pretty good PDF of the trial here.
Some of this history lives on. I have to drive 1/2 hour to Quaker meeting because most of South Jersey’s Quaker meetings are located west of the long-forgotten “Indian Line.” Here’s the SJ Quaker map with the approximate line of watersheds toward the Delaware River. (The four outlier South Jersey Quaker meetings are all within a mile or two of Atlantic Ocean bays. Seafaring Quakers, often from Long Island/New England, settled them.)
Bluesky Quakers
November 13, 2024
It’s been a long battle to see what might replace Twitter for a lot of us. One option of course is X, Musk’s rebrand but it’s seen the biggest collapse of social media since Friendster. Threads looked promising but it’s Facebook and its algorithms favor clickbait and punish links, especially political ones. Bluesky seems to have finally past a threshold in the last week: it past the 15 million user mark on Wednesday and is one of the top apps in the iPhone App Store.
This week Isaac (aka catshashimi) has put together a Quaker Starter Pack. These are meant to be curated list of people who newcomers might want to follow. And I’ve started a Quakers list, which is more of a firehose of everyone I know with Quaker connections.
The art of the compromise
November 12, 2024
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, so I reviewed A Friend in Deed: The Life of Henry Stanley Newman.
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 a rising young Liberal faction and managed to stay engaged enough to keep them within the fold of mainstream British Quakerism. In the United States, these same shifts toward first evangelical and then liberal theologies resulted in schisms, many of which still divide Friends.
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 in earlier sessions he had been nominated to be the yearly meeting clerk. This was a non-starter for a member church that was 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 leadership position it should preclude them from any. But the yearly meeting wanted him and found a way to make it work and he cheerfully accepted the logical irony of 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 wouldn’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 the Liberal’s insistence of a clerk status or the Evangelical’s insistence on no status. Don’t get me wrong, 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.
We Know
November 6, 2024
Trump is back. He won cleanly and quickly this time, reportedly finally winning the popular vote. I think a lot of this is the global backlash against incumbency following the dislocations and inflation of Covid but it’s also yet another data point in the twenty-first century rise of strongmen.
The future is pretty clear. Trump has been telling us what he’ll do and there’s little reason to think he won’t do it. With Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court under his control and the GOP in full allegiance, there’s nothing to stop Trump from reshaping the United States in his image. Suppression of political opponents, the dismantling of the regulatory state, and a pullback from international security agreements will all be immediate actions. Ukraine is screwed. The Middle East is likely to get even worse, as if that’s possible. The January 6 insurrectionists will be pardoned and emboldened to focus their attention on whoever they deem to be domestic traitors. Limits on the police or military will be lifted. We’re going to get our own Russia-like class of unregulated oligarchs, with Musk first in line. There’s likely to be some surprises — members of Trump’s whispering class sometimes have different goals and he himself not systematic enough to always follow through on his stated logic. But the big picture is clear. And the effects will be rippling for decades.
This time we know what we’ll get. Trump’s shown us over and over that he’s a crook, a liar, a misogynist, a racist, and an lover of strongmen. Voters have seen that and decided this is what they want. As things start to fall apart they’ll blame others for the collapses. It’s all as predictable as it is sad.
Dave Karpf’s “What the future looks like from here” seems pretty spot on:
What I find myself staring at is the future. What will these next few years look like? Where, pragmatically, can we go from here? And the answers are all pretty bleak.
This is, effectively, the end of the American Century. We’ll still have an important global role, because the dollar is still the worldwide reserve currency and also we have nuclear weapons and a massive military. But we’re going to abandon Ukraine and NATO. The international institutions that we built in the last century — international institutions that gave the United States a first-among-equals advantage — will all wither away.
David Hunter’s “There is hope” talks a lot about trusting ourselves and one another and settling in for the long haul.
Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.
This also means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you.
I hope you all take care of yourselves. It’s going to be a long ride. Remember to love your neighbors no matter who they voted for. We’re all hurt, complicated people. Give grace, be the model of love you want to see in the world.
Miracles with Diane Allen
November 5, 2024
Cropwell Meeting had a nice program on miracles last weekend. Diane is locally famous for natives past a certain age because of her ubiquitous presence in Philly TV back in the day. She gave a great talk. Everyone was hushed and attentive throughout, with gasps Olof astonishment at some of the profiles.
Cropwell hosts Halloween family outreach event again
October 30, 2024
My meeting hosted another Halloween event earlier this week. When we did it in 2022 we arranged to have flyers distributed by the homeowners’ association of development behind us but we missed the October mailing deadline this time. So a few members flyered in the neighborhood and it worked! Someone saw it and shared it on a parent chat for the nearby elementary school. A few further-off people came because of the Facebook event, which frankly surprised me.