I’m a little nervous soliciting Quaker humor but it’s become part of my job description… Friends Journal is devoting a whole issue to “Humor in Religion” next April. The writing deadline is January 7. A frightfully serious list of things we’re looking for is below.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Religion
The gray wave that wasn’t
November 7, 2018
Back in March, Friends Journal and the Earlham School of Religion co-hosted an online discussion with six Quaker candidates for congressional seats. The idea and coordination came from the awesome Greg Woods. I went to see just how high the 2018 “gray wave” had crested.
Spoilers: no wave. Four of the candidates didn’t make it out of the primaries and a fifth was running as an independent in a long-shot candidacy. The one candidate to win major-party primary was the awesome Shawna Roberts1 of Barnesville, Ohio. Shawna’s one of the most down-to-earth, real, people I know and it was a lot of fun to follow her campaign. Her twitter feed has been a hoot:
Last night, at the BPW forum, my opponent’s statement said his childhood home “didn’t even have indoor plumbing.”
Oh, Bill. Indoor plumbing’s still pending at our old farm house.
You can’t out-hillbilly me. Unless you eat squirrel brains. I draw the line at squirrel brains. pic.twitter.com/hGMJvQ8Yhq— Shawna Roberts (@RobertsOhioD6) October 20, 2018
Unfortunately Shawna only got about 30 percent of the vote yesterday. This election was not kind to Democrats in rural districts like southeast Ohio’s 6 and she was running against an incumbent. From my vantage point 30 percent seems pretty good, though as my seventh grade math teacher used to intone in his weary baritone, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. 2 Still, the prospect of a Mrs Roberts Goes to Washington win had me hoping against the odds. I’d love to see her continue to be involved: 2020 is only two years away.
Stats on everyone’s results are at the updated Quakers in Politics page. For anyone wondering about Quaker politicians, Paul Buckley had a nice overview of our complicated relationship to voting a few years ago.
North American Quaker statistics 1937 – 2017
September 17, 2018
These are numbers of Friends in Canada and the United States (including Alaska, which was tallied separately prior to statehood) compiled from Friends World Committee for Consultation. I dug up these numbers from three sources:
- 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quakers World Wide: A History of FWCC by Herbert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWCC’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the relevant chart).
- 1972, 1992 from Earlham School of Religion’s The Present State of Quakerism, 1995, archived here.
- 2002 on from FWCC directly. Note: Current 2017 map.
Friends in the U.S. and Canada:
- 1937: 114,924
- 1957: 122,663
- 1967: 122,780
- 1972: 121,380
- 1977: 119,160
- 1987: 109,732
- 1992: 101,255
- 2002: 92,786
- 2012: 77,660
- 2017: 81,392
Friends in Americas (North, Middle South):
- 1937: 122,166
- 1957: 131,000
- 1967: 129,200
- 1977: 132,300
- 1987: 139,200
- 2017: 140,065
You could write a book about what these numbers do and don’t mean. The most glaring omission is that they don’t show the geographic or theological shifts that took place over time. Midwestern Friends have taken a disproportionate hit, for example, and many Philadelphia-area meetings are much smaller than they were a century ago, while independent meetings in the West and/or adjacent to colleges grew like wildflowers mid-century.
My hot take on this is that the reunification work of the early 20th century gave Quakers a solid identity and coherent structure. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remarkably confident document. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, participatory religious movement that was attractive to people tired of more creedal formulations; mixed-religious parents came looking for First-day school community for their children. Quakers’ social justice work was very visible and attracted a number of new people during the antiwar 1960s3 and the alternative community groundswell of the 1970s. These various newcomers offset the decline of what we might call “ethnic” Friends in rural meetings through this period.
That magic balance of Quaker culture matching the zeitgeist of religious seekers disappeared somewhere back in the 1980s. We aren’t on forefront of any current spiritual trends. While there are bright spots and exceptions 4, we’ve largely struggled with retaining newcomers in recent years. We’re losing our elders more quickly than we’re bringing in new people, hence the forty percent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign5 or it may be a statistical phantom.6 I’ll be curious to see what the next census brings.
2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some numbers in my original 2018 post and have corrected them above.
Quakers in Politics Live Web Panel (March 22 2018)
March 9, 2018
Back last August, Greg Woods noticed that there were some Quakers running for U.S. Congressional seats. While modern-day Quaker politicians are not unheard of, they’re also not particularly common and it seemed like there was a bumper crop. The idea to interview them took on a momentum, even as we started to learn about more candidates. It’s grown into a Quakers in Politics Live Web Panel set to take place on Thursday, March 22nd at 3pm EDT. There’s six confirmed Quaker candidates and the event is co-sponsored by the Earlham School of Religion and Friends Journal. The moderator will be Earlham College President Alan Price.
The upcoming U.S. Congressional mid-term elections already have at least seven Quaker candidates for office. How does their Quaker faith inform these candidates’ desires to run for Congress? What advice would they have for other Quakers wanting to run for office in the future?
It’s a pretty interesting bunch and I’m looking forward to lots of good questions about the intersection of faith and politics in 2018.
- Steve Bacher (Pennsylvania 8th District, @stevebacher)
- Adam Coker (North Carolina 13th District, @AdamFromNC)
- Darlene McDonald (Utah 4th District, @VoteDarlene)
- Shawna Roberts (Ohio 6th District, @RobertsOhioD6)
- Molly Sheehan (Pennsylvania 5th District, @pennsymolly)
- Nick Thomas (Colorado 2nd District, @NickT4Congress)
Bono’s Christianity
December 26, 2013
U2’s singer talks about God:
Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. [laughs] A list of instructions where there was once conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship. Why are you chuckling?
More on Frank Viola’s blog
Religion in the mainstream press
July 10, 2012
They default to the same boring tropes, says Amy Levin at TheRevealer:
Religious wars, religious dress, religious money – these are the real and yet superbly complex elements of our cultural existence. Scout any crack or cranny of popular culture and you find religion creating a glorious maze of topics for writers to discover and sift and sing to the masses.
But lately, I find that a repulsive plague of repetition and banality has swept over the disenchanted cybersphere. Each day I begin my religion news search with hopeful eagerness, sifting closely through mainstream and fringe outlets, hungry for signs of a new trend, movement, argument, study – anything other than what I consumed the day before. But I search in vain, and my doldrums have led me to take action.
(H/T to David Watt on Facebook)
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a page devoted to issues of faith and next…
November 8, 2011
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a page devoted to issues of faith and next year’s presidential elections.
Embedded Link
2012 Presidential Candidates Religious Backgrounds | Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Interested in how religion could affect the 2012 election? Learn about the 2012 presidential candidate’s religious backgrounds in Pew Forum online biographies.
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“The drafters of the statement included Quaker Symon Hill who has written of…
November 1, 2011
“The drafters of the statement included Quaker Symon Hill who has written of the statement: “As one of the drafters of the statement, I want to make clear that we want to act in solidarity with people of other religions and of none, not impose our religion on them or claim to be a more important part of the movement than they are. This point is made in the opening line of the statement.”
Embedded Link
A Quaker presence at Occupy London
Almost 100 Quakers attended a Meeting for Worship on the steps of saint Paul’s cathedral in London on Sunday afternoon. The Meeting for Worship took place in support of the Occupy London movement that…
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