Agony For Carolina Quakers: More On Its Sad Saturday

Agony For Carolina Quakers: More On Its Sad Saturday

When it comes to guessing what will happen at Saturday’s Session of North Carolina Yearly Meeting’s Representative body, pick your rumor — there are plenty of them. But let’s not call them rumors; “scenarios” is more elegant:

— First, it could yield the long-sought (by some) purge of the liberals. Despite the departure of more than a dozen strongly evangelical meetings, there are still those in NCYM who have been dreaming of and agitating for this for years.

And last Fall the key tools for it were put in place: the idea of yearly meeting supremacy was tacked on to Faith & Practice; and the use of shouted voice votes as amounting to “unity” was pushed through.

As the record shows, such a push could take a variety of forms; there are many dead rabbits that could be pulled out of the hat.

— As previous purge efforts have fallen short, the fallback has been, “We won’t take NO for An Answer,” which has translated into Torture-by-Committee. The ill-starred Task Force/Group was created for that reason, when its predecessor’s final report in June 2015 properly noted that after months of wrangling, it had reached no unity in support of a purge. But the purgers simply refused to accept this verdict, and insisted on creation of the current Task Force/Group, to try again.

After a year, the Task Group is in turn slated to make its “Final Report” on Saturday. The advance text distributed a couple weeks ago says much the same thing as the previous group, though it’s buried under several deflecting paragraphs about the value of having re-affirmed Faith & Practice so many times.

But could this really be the end? The task group report is vague about that. So will we see more luckless Friends, for their sins, sentenced to serve on yet another incarnation? If so, they have my sympathies.

— There could be more meeting departures announced. Indeed, the Representative session will be held at Forbush Meeting, west of Winston-Salem. Forbush was one of the meetings that issued a Do-or-Die manifesto in mid-2014, insisting that the presence of liberals was intolerable and they were near the end of their patience.

The Forbush letter, dated August 8, 2014 and similar to numerous others, vehemently decried “the distorted spiritual direction of several [NCYM] meetings and some of their members,” repeatedly accusing them of “a lack of integrity” in doctrinal views and behavior.

The “distorted spiritual direction” refers to different (i.e., liberal) views about the Bible and various Christian doctrines, and the Forbush Friends’ conviction that “It is a fundamental truth that we must guard against people who abandon Christ for a distorted belief in something else.”

Yet they concluded that “we will continue praying for peace and unity for our body of believers through a return to the fundamental Christian beliefs upon which NCYM was founded.” But at the same time, “As a Meeting, we are considering other options if steps are not taken soon to correct the spiritual course of North Carolina Yearly Meeting.”

Well, almost two years have passed. Will the “other options” shoe finally drop in Forbush?

Rumors are rife (if unsubstantiated) of a mass exodus if no liberal purge occurs; we’ve heard them before, and what’s happened is attrition rather than rebellion.

— And, the no-brainer: F&P will be re-affirmed again, along with its instantly-ignored reminders that it is not a creed.

— Or (dare I say it?) nothing. The Task Group Final report could be read as hinting that two years of this hullabaloo is enough, at least for now. But that could be an excessively hopeful view.

–The biggest surprise would be a “surprise-free” session: Routine reports, plans for summer projects, worry about the budget, yawns and heading home tired but unscathed? That would be more than a surprise; closer to a miracle. But the last time I went to a Rep session expecting that, the roof fell in.

And what of the targeted liberal meetings? It’s intriguing how little attention they have paid to this matter since the winter meeting. I’ve seen no signs of alarm. My sense is that an understanding of the “Blockbuster Effect” is sinking in.

What’s the “Blockbuster Effect”? It mirrors the rapid downward slide of Blockbuster Video from being at the top of its industry, with 9000 stores, to bankruptcy and oblivion, as technology and consumers left it in the dust. It’s taken NCYM longer, but it is clearly, sadly on that track. And scapegoating liberals won’t fix it.

For local meetings today, this effect feeds a growing realization, on both sides of the current controversy, that they are no longer dependent on NCYM, for either critical services or Quaker legitimacy. Sure, liberals especially would rather stay connected. (We-can-all-get-along is an article of liberal faith, if sometimes an overly optimistic one; plus many have family ties, some going back several generations. It’s not easy to have those shaken.) But if push comes to shove, they understand they can get along fine without NCYM. They are beyond being intimidated by hellfire blustering and homophobic panic.

So with minor exceptions, they have not changed the ideas and practices that have got them in such trouble:

— they are still friendly to LGBT persons; they prefer non-fundamentalist approaches to studying the Bible; they don’t like the recent U.S. wars, which so many others in NCYM have embraced, along with U.S. flags next to their pulpits. And while these liberals like Jesus, a lot, they are still not much concerned about going to hell if they (or others) don’t “believe in” and get “saved” by him according to somebody else’s strict formula. (The minor exception is that one liberal meeting, which was withholding some of its payments to NCYM in protest of abusive treatment there, has been paying up its arrears.)

The liberals have not invaded any evangelical Friends churches, brandishing rainbow flags and unrolling yoga mats. But they have not been entirely silent in NCYM circles; and more than their words, their very presence is too much for some to handle. More than one hard-line pastor has made clear to me that just having non-fundamentalist meetings in the body puts their personal salvation in peril; like we’re a spiritual Zika virus, or Ebola, a sin they can catch just by breathing the same air.

Even so, I wonder if any liberals feel guilty about their convictions driving some other meetings away, but I doubt it. If my horror at the recent wars, my fumbling efforts to affirm LGBT persons, and the way I approach the Bible and Jesus are beyond the pale for some, I’m willing to talk about it, but otherwise, that’s too bad — because if I know anything about Jesus, it’s that he’d understand, even my mistakes. I believe I’m not alone in that resolve.

Another thing I know is that these tensions are not new. More than a hundred years ago, there were many in NCYM who were deeply suspicious of liberal notions about the Bible and evolution creeping in at Quaker-founded Guilford College, located right in their midst; and while memories may be shorter these days, the pattern persists. I once heard a strongly evangelical NCYM pastor describe how he had considered enrolling at Guilford a few years back. But simply driving through the campus looking for a parking space, and reading the antiwar and culturally liberal bumperstickers quickly convinced him to look elsewhere.

For the liberals who want to stay in NCYM, they have some powerful support, at least on paper: NCYM’s Faith and Practice includes very strong statements on the Quaker Peace Testimony; it says not a single word about homosexuality or LGBT matters. And of course, it’s anti-creedal.
But all this is ignored by the purgers in favor of a few paragraphs exalting the Bible as an authoritative text, which are extracted and applied creedally.

This pushing and pulling has gone on at the fault lines of American Quakerdom for generations. But that doesn’t mean it is insignificant today: sometimes the pulling apart presages and deepens social chasms. Such splits seem to be happening all around us today.

Might they be lessened or moderated in NCYM this weekend?
One can always hope and pray. But I wouldn’t bet on it, and not only because there was once a testimony against gambling.