Quaker Orthodoxy: A Rant

I just made the mistake of reading a Friends Journal article that I knew would frustrate me. I saw a link to it last week, and knew better than to click on it. This morning, I clicked it anyway. Maybe I hoped for new insight on a long-exhausted topic. Maybe I forgot how painful my lack of unity with received Quaker wisdom has been. Maybe I forgot how painful it is that such a thing as “received Quaker wisdom” exists.

Over the winter, I took an on-line course through Beacon Hill Friends House on the topic of Quakers and authority. We looked at how Quaker meetings have held authority over the 350-year history of the religion, and reflected on current practices. My classmates seemed to agree that Quakers do not have clearly-articulated shared beliefs. On the contrary: Quakers in the liberal, unprogrammed tradition tend to reject the idea that we should. None of us had ever experienced a meeting that united around the shared belief that God exists, or that Christ is devine, or that these things can’t be known, or that God doesn’t exist. On the contrary, we were aware that the meetings we’d participated in included, to varying degrees, people who held all of these beliefs, and more.

We also agreed that this miscellany of beliefs creates some degree of tension in most meetings. Many Quakers I’ve spoken with aren’t sure whether their particular expression of faith will be welcomed; others know that it is disapproved of, or will make people uncomfortable. As a group of really, really nice people, we don’t want to make each other uncomfortable, and so we hold our tongues.

We also don’t want to feel judged by our meetings. Many Quakers have had painful experiences in other religious traditions, and find Quakerism a refuge from the dogmatism that wounded them. I know that when I was thinking of leaving my monthly meeting, one of my fears was that if I left Quakerism, there would be nowhere left for me to go.

This fear of judgment suppresses people of all types. During one stretch of just a few months, for instance, I had two people in my meeting tell me that they were not comfortable speaking honestly about their spiritual beliefs in worship. One was an atheist. One was a Christian. That is as sad as it is hilarious.

Hearing the same personal concern from such different people helped me understand why vocal ministry in our meeting tended to be political messages, reflections on the content of the New York Times, and Hallmark-card soft-spirituality banalities about spring flowers and the joys of children’s voices. These messages are safe, lowest-common-denominator messages that people, on the whole, find unobjectionable. It seems to me sometimes that Quakers hold “unobjectionable” to be the highest possible good.

In my experience, though, while they reject spiritual or religious orthodoxy, Quakers do have truths they take to be self-evident. These truths are not spiritual, but political and social. It was very common in my meeting to assume that everyone in the room was in agreement about political figures, world events, and proposals that made it onto state and local ballots. In addition, it was common for people to make universal assumptions about parenting, about things like what we’d feed our kids, what kinds of toys we’d buy for them, and the extent to which we’d restrict television and video games, some high degree of restriction being taken for granted. We would never have said, “I know we all believe in God...” or “everyone in the meeting should have a daily spiritual practice,” or "It's vital that our First Day School give the children a good Biblical grounding." But people often said things like, “I know we all support this candidate,” or “It’s important that we all go out Tuesday and vote in favor of this ballot proposal,” or “None of us wants our kids engaging in pretend gun play.”

I experienced many conversations among parents, both locally and at gatherings, in which categorical value statements were made in confidence that there would be agreement among everyone present. Or in which “people who...” were discussed as if it were not possible that a “person who” might be present. I have often been the “person who” in the room, and it is painful and alienating. It is frowned upon to criticize someone for their spiritual beliefs or practices, but judgments about lifestyle, parenting choices, and political choices abound.

The kid on the right takes both his
Quakerism and his cosplay seriously

Our political, social, and personal actions and beliefs ought to be the fruit of the spirit, but in meetings like mine they are taken as first principles. Expression of these shared attitudes, often coupled with implicit or explicit judgment of people whose actions and attitudes differ, seems to me to be a central way that Quakers cement their community bonds. They serve as the binding that holds the meeting together, in lieu of a spiritual or religious unity which we cannot find and aren’t sure we ought to be looking for.

I see this as a serious problem for liberal Quakers, though the broad consensus which Friends seem to share in these areas means that I am out of unity on this subject. But it seems to me that when we replace the powerful bonds of spirit with the worldly bonds of political opinion, social action, and lifestyle choices, we are significantly weakened. We abandon our unique message for one that could be delivered just as well by the Democratic Party or an NGO. We have values rather than convictions, and when God speaks powerfully to one of us we are as likely to discourage the minister as to lift her up.

This has been my experience among Friends.