New neofascist conspiracy targets Quakers

October 24, 2018

I won’t link to the rightwing Dai­ly Caller web­site on prin­ci­ple but in a week in which some of their favorite tar­gets are being served with explo­sives (the homes of the Oba­mas, Clin­tons, and George Soros have been tar­get­ed with IEDs), an opin­ion piece by Raheem Kas­sam, a Bre­it­bart alum and assis­tant to UKIP leader Nigel Farage, tries to cook up a Quak­er conspiracy.

It’s hog­wash top to bot­tom, thin­ly con­nect­ed dots meant to look like an evil plot. Appar­ent­ly some peo­ple who were involved in Casa de los Ami­gos in Mex­i­co City lat­er donat­ed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns and Casa lat­er rent­ed office space to a migrant rights orga­ni­za­tion in 2012 and… well, that’s pret­ty much it. Proof that the “inter­na­tion­al Quak­er move­ment” is the orga­niz­ers of the refugee car­a­vans aimed at the “destruc­tion of U.S. borders.”

The lan­guage is florid in the man­ner of rightwing con­spir­a­cies. They specif­i­cal­ly call out Brigid Moix, a for­mer Casa de los Ami­gos direc­tor and well-respected Quak­er peace advo­cate who Friends Jour­nal pub­lished just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote some­thing rather obvi­ous about immi­gra­tion that sounds like some­thing rather obvi­ous oth­er peo­ple have since wrote about immi­gra­tion. Oh and the one guy is now a Mex­i­can ambas­sador to Greece. And some­one was on a con­fer­ence call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seri­ous­ly, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coher­ent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after anoth­er bridg­ing togeth­er ran­dom­ly Googled triv­ia, all care­less­ly run togeth­er because the author obvi­ous­ly assumes Dai­ly Caller read­ers don’t read past the headline.

This would all be laugh­ably obtuse in its over­reach except that these con­spir­a­cies are get­ting less and less fun­ny every day. The AFSC reg­u­lar­ly gets con­spir­a­cy webs spun around its work in Pales­tine but I haven’t seen much try­ing to tie Friends to the bian­nu­al con­spir­a­cies around immi­gra­tion. Hope­ful­ly it will fade away and Kas­sam will find some oth­er bogey­man. The only stitch of truth can be found in the com­ments. There, buried near the bot­tom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:

Syncretism and dilution

June 11, 2018

Bri­an Dray­ton looks at the effects of syn­cretism, dilu­tion, and cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion on the Quak­er movement.

At first blush, such a process might be cel­e­brat­ed as a process of enrich­ment: Quak­erism ver­sion 1 turns into Quak­erism v2, now new and bet­ter because it has bells or out­ward sacra­ments or what-have-you. But note that this kind of change is not just a mat­ter of sim­ple addi­tion, because ele­ments drawn from var­i­ous oth­er tra­di­tions are them­selves embed­ded deeply in some cul­ture, and so they are clothed round with mean­ings and nuances that are implic­it­ly adopt­ed along with the idea or prac­tice that has been explic­it­ly imported.

Love, judg­ment, and the “inner crit­ic”, pt. 2b: Syn­cretism, dilu­tion, and the draw­backs of cul­tur­al appropriation

The open (Quaker) web

April 23, 2018

Chris Hardie’s semi-viral man­i­festo cham­pi­oning the open inter­net isn’t about Quak­erism per se, but Chris is a Friend (and one time web host to every­thing Quak­er with­in a hun­dred miles of Rich­mond, Ind.). Since the rise of cor­po­rate gate-keeping web­sites and then social media, I’ve wor­ried that they rep­re­sent some of the largest and least vis­i­ble threats to the Quak­er movement.

I use it all as a tool, for sure. But there are many ways in which we’re increas­ing­ly defined by cor­po­ra­tions with no Quak­ers and no inter­est in us except for what­ev­er engage­ment num­bers they can gen­er­ate. Look at the non­sense at many of the open Quak­er Face­book groups as an obvi­ous exam­ple. Peo­ple with lim­it­ed expe­ri­ence or knowl­edge and rel­a­tive­ly fringe ideas can eas­i­ly dom­i­nate dis­cus­sion just by post­ing with a fre­quen­cy that involved or care­ful Friends couldn’t match. Face­book doesn’t care if it’s a zoo as long as peo­ple come back to read the lat­est out­ra­geous com­ment thread. Just because the top­ic is Quak­er doesn’t mean the dis­course real­ly holds well to our val­ues, his­tor­i­cal or modern.

Add to this that Google and Face­book could make any of our Quaker-owned web­sites near­ly invis­i­ble with a tweak of algo­rithms (this is not hypo­thet­i­cal: Face­book has dinged most pub­lish­er Pages over the years).

The open web has a lot of plus­es. I’m glad to see a Friend among its promi­nent cham­pi­ons and I’d like to see Quak­er read­ers seek­ing it out more (most eas­i­ly by stray­ing of Face­book and sub­scrib­ing to blogs’ email lists). From Hardie:

Of course, there is an alter­na­tive to Face­book and oth­er walled gar­dens: the open web. The alter­na­tive is the ver­sion of the Inter­net where you own your con­tent and activ­i­ty, have min­i­mal depen­dence on third par­ty busi­ness mod­els, can dis­cov­er new things out­side of what for-profit algo­rithms show you, and where tools and ser­vices inter­act to enhance each oth­er’s offer­ings, instead of to stamp each oth­er out of existence.

https://​chrishardie​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​4​/​r​e​b​u​i​l​d​i​n​g​-​o​p​e​n​-​w​e​b​/​a​m​p​/​?​_​_​t​w​i​t​t​e​r​_​i​m​p​r​e​s​s​i​o​n​=​t​rue

Early Quaker “Yearly meetings”

March 18, 2018

Bri­an Dray­ton is look­ing at an ear­ly form of pub­lic Quak­er wor­ship, who’s var­i­ous names (includ­ing “year­ly meet­ings”) have per­haps hid­den them from mod­ern Quak­er con­scious­ness: From the Quak­er tool­box: “Year­ly meet­ings” and related

These meet­ings often includ­ed gath­er­ings of min­is­ters, and of elders (and some­times the two togeth­er), and meet­ings most­ly for Friends. But the pub­lic wor­ship was care­ful­ly pre­pared for — usu­al­ly more than one ses­sion, often over more than one day, with lots of pub­lic­i­ty ahead of time. Tem­po­rary meet­ing places were erect­ed for large crowds (the word “booth” is used, these clear­ly held hun­dreds of people.

Bri­an’s sto­ry reminds me of when I was a tourist in the “1652 Coun­try” where Quak­erism was born. One of the stops is Fir­bank Fell, where George Fox preached to thou­sands. Most his­to­ries call that ser­mon the offi­cial start of the Quak­er movement.

But Fir­bank Fell itself is a des­o­late hill­side miles from any­where. There was a small ancient church there and then noth­ing but graz­ing fields off to the hori­zon. A thou­sand peo­ple in such a remote spot would have the feel of a music fes­ti­val. And that’s kind of what was hap­pen­ing the week the unknown George Fox walked into that part of Eng­land. There was a orga­nized move­ment that held inde­pen­dent reli­gious preach­ing fes­ti­vals. Fox was no doubt very mov­ing and he might have giv­en the seek­ers there a new way of think­ing about their spir­i­tu­al con­di­tion, but the move­ment was already there. I won­der if the gen­er­al meet­ings of pub­lic wor­ship that Dray­ton is track­ing down is an echo of those ear­li­er pub­lic festivals.

One of my Fir­bank Fell photos:

Nineteenth-century Quaker sex cults

March 6, 2018

An arti­cle in Port­land Month­ly is get­ting a lot of shares today, large­ly giv­en its breath­less head­line: How the Father of Ore­gon Agri­cul­ture Launched a Doomed Quak­er Sex Cult.

It pro­files Hen­der­son Luelling (1809 – 1878) and it’s not exact­ly an aca­d­e­m­ic source. Here’s a snippet:

Luelling had tak­en up with these groovy Free Lovers, whom he met in San Fran­cis­co. From the out­set, the jour­ney had com­pli­ca­tions. “Dr.” Tyler, it turned out, was actu­al­ly an ex-blacksmith who now pro­fessed exper­tise in water-cures and clair­voy­ance. One of the men was flee­ing finan­cial trou­bles, and when the ship was searched by police he hid under the hoop­skirt of a female passenger.

Luelling’s life fol­lows many com­mon themes of mid-nineteenth cen­tu­ry Quak­er life:

  • He was a hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ist, first mov­ing to the Port­land, Ore­gon, area and then to a small town near Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia. Friends had long been inter­est­ed in botan­i­cal affairs. Rough­ly a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er John Bar­tram was con­sid­ered one of the great­est botanists of his generation.
  • Luelling moved from Indi­ana to Salem, Iowa in the 1830s and became a staunch abo­li­tion­ist, even build­ing hide­outs for the Under­ground Rail­road in his house. Wikipedia reports he was expelled from his meet­ing for this.
  • He got Ore­gon fever and moved his oper­a­tion out there.
  • At some point in this he became inter­est­ed in Spir­i­tu­al­ism and its off­shoots like the Free Love move­ment. This was not a Quak­er move­ment but the mod­ern Amer­i­can move­ment start­ed with the Fox Sis­ters in Upstate New York and was heav­i­ly pro­mot­ed by Quak­er Hick­sites Amy and Isaac Post.

If you want to know more about Luelling’s “sex cults,” this arti­cle in Off­beat Ore­gon feels much bet­ter sourced: The father of Ore­gon’s nurs­ery indus­try and his “Free Love” cult:

The “free love” thing is far from new. Over the years, espe­cial­ly in the Amer­i­can West, at least half a dozen gen­er­a­tions have pro­duced at least one “dar­ing” philoso­pher who calls for a throwing-off of the age-old yoke of mar­riage and fam­i­ly and urges his or her fol­low­ers to revert to the myth­ic “noble sav­age” life of naked and unashamed peo­ple gath­er­ing freely and open­ly, men and women, liv­ing and eat­ing and sleep­ing togeth­er with no rules, no judg­ment and no squab­bles over paternity.

He’d also start­ed his very own free-love cult — “The Har­mo­ni­al Broth­er­hood.” Luelling’s group made free love the cen­ter­piece of a strict reg­i­men of self-denial that includ­ed an all-vegetarian, stimulant-free diet, cold-water “hydropa­thy” for any med­ical need, and a Utopi­an all-property-in-common social structure.

Port­land Friend Mitchel San­tine Gould has writ­ten about some of these cur­rents as well. His Leavesof​Grass​.org site used to have a ton of source mate­r­i­al. Dig­ging into one day it seemed pret­ty clear that the Free Love move­ment was also a refuge of sorts for those who did­n’t fit strict nineteenth-century het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty or gen­der norms. Gould’s piece, Walt Whit­man’s Quak­er Para­dox has a bit of this, with talk of “life­long bachelors.”

Many of the Spir­i­tu­al­ist lead­ers were young women and their pub­lic lec­ture series were pret­ty much the only pub­lic lec­tures by young women any­where in Amer­i­ca. If you want to learn more about these devel­op­ments I rec­om­mend Ann Braud’s Rad­i­cal Spir­its: Spir­i­tu­al­ism and Wom­en’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century Amer­i­ca. These com­mu­ni­ties were very involved in abo­li­tion­ist and wom­en’s rights issues and often start­ed their own year­ly meet­ings after becom­ing too rad­i­cal for the Hicksites.

And lest we think all this was a West Coast phe­nom­e­non, my lit­tle unpre­pos­sess­ing South Jer­sey town of Ham­mon­ton was briefly a cen­ter of Free Love Spir­i­tu­al­ism (almost com­plete­ly scrubbed from our his­to­ry books) and the near­by town of Egg Har­bor City had exten­sive water san­i­tar­i­ums of the kind described in these articles.

Mix up a little Evangelical fire and liberal progressivism and you get?

July 29, 2013

There are a lot of good con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing around Rachel Held Evans’s lat­est piece on the CNN Belief Blog, “Why mil­len­ni­als are leav­ing the church.” One cen­ters on the rela­tion­ship between Evan­gel­i­cals and Main­line Protes­tants. As is often the case, the place of Quak­ers in this is complicated.

Some his­to­ri­ans cat­e­go­rize the orig­i­nal Quak­er move­ment as a “third way” between Catholi­cism and Protes­tanta­n­tism, com­bin­ing the mys­ti­cism of the for­mer and the search for per­fec­tion of the lat­ter. It’s a con­ve­nient the­sis, as it pro­vides a way to try to explain the odd­i­ties of our lack of priests and liturgies.

But Quak­ers trad­ed much of our pecu­liar­i­ty for a place set­ting at the Main­line Protes­tant table a long time ago. The “Quak­er val­ues” taught in First-day schools aren’t real­ly all that dif­fer­ent than the lib­er­al post-Christian val­ues you’d find post­ed on the bul­letin board in the base­ment of any pro­gres­sive Methodist, Pres­by­ter­ian, or Epis­co­palian church. We share a focus on the social gospel with oth­er Main­line denominations. 

In a follow-up post, Evans re-shares a piece called The Main­line and Me that tries to hon­est­ly explain why she finds these church­es admirable but bor­ing. The lack of artic­u­la­tion of the why of beliefs is a big rea­son, as is the the fire-in-the bel­ly of many younger Evan­gel­i­cals and a cul­ture adverse to step­ping on toes.

One of the peo­ple she cites in this arti­cle is Robert E. Web­ber, a reli­gious Evan­gel­i­cal of anoth­er gen­er­a­tion whose spir­i­tu­al trav­els brought him back to Main­line Protes­tantism. I first dis­cov­ered him ten sum­mers ago. The cross-polination of that book helped me bridge the Quak­er move­ment with the pro­gres­sive Evan­gel­i­cal sub­cul­ture that was start­ing to grow and I wrote about it in the Younger Quak­ers and the Younger Evan­gel­i­cals.

I sup­pose I should find it heart­en­ing that many of the threads of GenX loss and redis­cov­ery we were talk­ing about ten years ago are show­ing up in a pop­u­lar reli­gion blog today (with the sub­sti­tu­tion of Mil­lenials). But I won­der if Friends are any more able to wel­come in pro­gres­sive seek­ers now than we were in 2003? I still see a lot of the kind of lead­er­ship that Web­ber iden­ti­fied with the “prag­mat­ic” 1975 – 2000 gen­er­a­tion (see chart at the end of my “Younger Quak­ers” post). 

Web­ber might not have been right, of course, and Evans may be wrong. But if they’re on to some­thing and there’s a pro­gres­sive wave just wait­ing for a Main­line denom­i­na­tion to catch a lit­tle of the Evangelical’s fire and artic­u­late a clear mes­sage of lib­er­al pro­gres­sive faith, then Friends still have some inter­nal work to do.

Tempations, shared paths and religious accountability

June 29, 2008

Some­times it seems as if mod­erns are look­ing back at his­to­ry through the wrong end of the tele­scope: every­thing seems soooo far away. The effect is mag­ni­fied when we’re talk­ing about spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. The ancients come off as car­toon­ish fig­ures with a com­pli­cat­ed set of worked out philoso­phies and pro­hi­bi­tions that we have to adopt or reject whole­sale. The ide­al is to be a liv­ing branch on a long-rooted tree. But how do we intel­li­gent­ly con­verse with the past and nego­ti­ate changes?

Let’s talk Friends and music. The car­toon Quak­er in our his­tor­i­cal imag­i­na­tion glares down at us with heavy dis­ap­proval when it comes to music. They’re squares who just did­n’t get it.

Get­ting past the cartoons

Thomas Clark­son, our Angli­can guide to Quak­er thought cir­ca 1700, brings more nuance to the scru­ples. “The Quak­ers do not deny that instru­men­tal music is capa­ble of excit­ing delight. They are not insen­si­ble either of its pow­er or of its charms. They throw no impu­ta­tion on its inno­cence, when viewed abstract­ly by itself.” (p. 64)

“Abstract­ly by itself”: when eval­u­at­ing a social prac­tice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tem­pa­tions? Quak­ers are engaged in a grand exper­i­ment in “chris­t­ian” liv­ing, keep­ing to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral liv­ing. The warn­ings against cer­tain activ­i­ties are based on obser­va­tion borne of expe­ri­ence. The Quak­er guide­lines are wikis, notes com­piled togeth­er into a col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of which activ­i­ties pro­mote – and which ones threat­en – the lead­ing of a moral life.

Clark­son goes on to detail Quak­er’s con­cerns about music. They’re all actu­al­ly quite valid. Here’s a sampling:

  • Peo­ple some­times learn music just so they can show off and make oth­ers look talentless. 
  • Reli­gious music can become a end to itself as peo­ple become focused on com­po­si­tion and play­ing (we’ve real­ly decon­tex­tu­al­ized: much of the music played at orches­tra halls is Mass­es; much of the music played at folk fes­ti­val is church spirituals). 
  • Music can be a big time waster, both in its learn­ing and its listening.
  • Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won’t say any of these are absolute rea­son to ban music, but as a list of neg­a­tive temp­ta­tions they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very con­scious­ly has music as a cen­ter­piece. It’s very beau­ti­ful, but I always appre­ci­ate the pas­tor’s reminder that the music is in ser­vice to the Mass and that no one had bet­ter clap at some per­for­mance! Like with Friends, we’re see­ing a delib­er­ate bal­anc­ing of ben­e­fits vs temp­ta­tions and a warn­ing against the snares that the choice has left open.

Con­text con­text context

In sec­tion iv, Clark­son adds time to the equa­tion. Remem­ber, the Quak­er move­ment is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of ear­ly Quak­ers] was prin­ci­pal­ly in the hands of those, who made a liveli­hood of the art. Those who fol­lowed it as an accom­plish­ment, or a recre­ation, were few and those fol­lowed it with mod­er­a­tion. But since those days, its progress has been immense… Many of the mid­dle class­es, in imi­ta­tion of the high­er, have received it… It is learned now, not as a source of occa­sion­al recre­ation, but as a com­pli­cat­ed sci­ence, where per­fec­tion is insist­ed upon to make it worth of pur­suit. p.76.

Again we see Clark­son’s Quak­ers mak­ing dis­tinc­tions between types and moti­va­tions of musi­cian­ship. The labor­er who plays a gui­tar after a hard day on the field is less wor­ri­some than the obsessed ado­les­cent who spends their teen years locked in the den prac­tic­ing Stair­way to Heav­en. And when music is played at large fes­ti­vals that lead youth “into com­pa­ny” and fash­ions, it threat­ens the reli­gious soci­ety: “it has been found, that in pro­por­tion as young Quak­ers mix with the world, they gen­er­al­ly imbibe its spir­it, and weak­en them­selves as mem­bers of their own body.”

Music has changed even more rad­i­cal­ly in the suceed­ing two cen­turies. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it’s ubiq­ui­tious and often invol­un­tary (you can’t go shop­ping with­out it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of iso­lat­ed lis­ten­er­ship. Then, what about DIY music and sin­ga­longs. Is there a dis­tinc­tion to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between are­nas and cof­fee­house shows? And move past music into the oth­er media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, com­put­ers, glossy mag­a­zines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsess­ing over Amer­i­can Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion? 

Does a social prac­tice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral cen­ter? What if we turned off the medi­at­ed con­sumer uni­verse and engaged in more spir­i­tu­al­ly reward­ing activ­i­ties – con­tem­pla­tive read­ing, ser­vice work, vis­it­ing with oth­ers? But what if music, com­put­ers, radio, is part of the way we’re engag­ing with the world?

How to decide?

Final­ly, in Clark­son’s days Friends had an elab­o­rate series of courts that would decide about social prac­tices both in the abstract (whether they should be pub­lished as warn­ings) and the par­tic­u­lar (whether a par­tic­u­lar per­son had strayed too far and fall­en in moral dan­ger). Clark­son was writ­ing for a non-Quaker audi­ence and often trans­lat­ed Quak­erese: “courts” was his name for month­ly, quar­ter­ly and year­ly meet­ing struc­tures. I sus­pect that those ses­sions more close­ly resem­bled courts than they do the mod­ern insti­tu­tions that share their name. The court sys­tem led to its own abus­es and start­ed to break down short­ly after Clark­son’s book was pub­lished and does­n’t exist anymore.

We find out­selves today pret­ty much with­out any struc­ture for shar­ing our expe­ri­ences (“Faith and Prac­tice” sort of does this but most copies just gath­er dust on shelves). Month­ly meet­ings don’t feel that over­sight of their mem­bers is their respon­si­bil­i­ty; many of us have seen them look the oth­er way even at fla­grant­ly egre­gious behav­ior and many Friends would be out­raged at the con­cept that their meet­ing might tell them what to do – I can hear the howls of protest now! 

And yet, and yet: I hear many peo­ple long­ing for this kind of col­lec­tive inquiry and instruc­tion. A lot of the emer­gent church talk is about build­ing account­able com­mu­ni­ties. So we have two broad set of ques­tions: what sort of prac­tices hurt and hin­der our spir­i­tu­al lives in these mod­ern times; and how do we share and per­haps cod­i­fy guide­lines for twenty-first cen­tu­ry right­eous living?