Bait & Switch – The Carolina Quaker Steamroller Cranks Up

Bait & Switch – The Carolina Quaker Steamroller Cranks Up

There’s no hurry, the North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM) Executive Committee (EC) assured the YM’s Representatives on June 4, about their proposal to split NCYM-FUM. Further, there would be no compulsion. When the split came, it would “allow each meeting, if it chooses, to join either of the two new yearly meetings . . . .”

Their proposal repeated this theme, adding that the EC would “return to Annual Session with recommendations for consideration by the Yearly Meeting that pertain to process only, with substantive discussions to occur in carefully selected committees to follow Annual Session.”

And as we reported then, as the body was pressed for approval, the EC’s Clerk insisted that the next step was to prepare a plan for how to discuss the proposed split, not to actually do it. And besides,
“We do not propose a timeline or a deadline. We only propose that the process should commence . . . .” (Emphasis added.)

And so the Representatives, several of whom had expressed doubts, approved this plan to make a plan to talk about a plan. Or what appeared to be that.

But it was Baloney. Bait & Switch. Stay with me to see what I mean.

Within 24 hours, the agenda and alignment of forces behind the EC proposal came more fully into view, in the form of a blackmail letter from Yadkin Quarter, home of many hardline fundamentalists and political conservatives. For weeks the letter had been rumored to exist, though NCYM’s spokesperson, who was one of the addressees, denied knowing anything about it. But it finally came to light, and was published here.

The Yadkin letter insisted that unless several progressive meetings were made to “come to unity” with Yadkin’s view of certain sections of NCYM’s Faith & Practice, “many more [Meetings] are ready to leave [NCYM] if unity in our theological beliefs is not accomplished soon.”
Indeed, “soon” was not good enough; the letter then set the November 2016 Representative session as the drop-dead deadline for the targeted meetings to submit or be “sanctioned and or disciplined” (i. e., expelled).

To my mind, this background of blackmail is a key to understanding what has happened since:

On July 20th, the NCYM Executive Committee sent out a draft document, dated July 14: “Procedural Plan for Separation into Two Yearly Meetings” (The full text is here.)   

This is the bait-and-switch part. How so?

First, it misstates the action that was taken in June. It says the body “gave approval at the meeting of representatives on June 4, 2016 to move forward with the development of a procedural plan to separate into two yearly meetings.”

That’s not what was said to the representatives; I was there and took notes. As reported here earlier, what the Representatives were told was that the EC was asking to develop plans for how to discuss a split, with no deadlines and no hurry.

But the new draft has both: a specific timeline with dates, deadlines for concrete actions — and not just a hurry, but a mad rush: the essential decisions of the split are to be made within four months.

Yes: this July 14 draft aims not only to discuss a split but to approve it AND launch it at NCYM’s Annual Sessions August 12-14.

That is less than a month from the time the draft was made available. And on top of the rushed split, this plan will come with a set of two “statements of faith” defining the basis for the two future YMs– and these statements will not even be formally presented until the YM sessions start.

Let’s pause for a second while you catch your breath. What in June was described as a process that was to be without “timelines” or “deadlines” has been squashed into a few hours, over two days — days which are also packed with much other NCYM business.
Yet at the end of the YM session, says the draft:

“If the plan is approved, each Monthly Meeting will be asked to align with their preference for one of the two yearly meetings. The statements of faith will be central to the alignments. Each monthly meeting will notify the NCYM Ministry and Counsel and the Superintendent of its decision.”

The deadline for this notification is November 4.

Note: it doesn’t say local meetings “may” report by then; the text is imperative, directive: they “will” do so. No more talk of “if they choose” to be part of this split at all.

Does that date ring any bells? Here’s a clue: it will be just in time for the November Representative session — which is the deadline set in the Yadkin Quarter blackmail letter. Coincidence?

The notion that local meetings would be able to carefully consider this “procedural plan” in three weeks, and then take it up together with two new “statements of faith,” all in three or so hours is about as practical & credible as a seminar from Trump University. And it has no discernible resemblance to what was described to the Representatives in June.

So let’s call this what it is: bait and switch, from a time of calm, searching deliberation, into a bum’s rush, a steamroller, an ambush, a setup.

And it’s one more thing: Once the project is launched at annual sessions, local meetings, it will be a done deal.

Actually, my sense is that it already is a done deal. That the fix was in became evident when strong dissents were voiced to it by three EC members before the June session. These were shouldered aside; one of the dissenters resigned in protest.

Who are we kidding? The dice are loaded; the deck is stacked.

And the fix was in well before June. It surfaced last November, as reported here, when the same Executive Committee stated to the Representatives that:

“Past years and particularly the events of the last fourteen months have made it increasingly clear that positions and actions adopted by a very few meetings are serving to create much of the discord and unrest that we experience in North Carolina Yearly Meeting. These continued statements, positions and actions are threatening the very existence of North Carolina Yearly Meeting as we know it today.”

That is to say, the EC repeated and signed onto the push from Yadkin Quarter and other like-minded groups, which had surfaced in the summer of 2014, demanding the exclusion of “liberal” Friends and the “progressive” meetings. (Detailed background on the 2014 uprising is here. )

One problem for the purgers was that the NCYM’s Faith & Practice did not give the yearly meeting power over monthly meetings. But the EC decided to fix that. And at the same November, 2015 session, the EC suddenly declared it had “discovered” a passage that did give the yearly meeting such power over local meetings — but it had been deleted from Faith & Practice almost 50 years ago. (And F&P had been reissued half a dozen times since, minus that section.)

The EC insisted that the deletion was done in error, and proceeded to ram through its reinsertion on the spot, defying all recognizable legitimate norms of Quaker process, including the detailed procedures carefully laid out in Faith & Practice itself.

With this coup as precedent and justification, the fact that there are already public dissents from this current plan to split are likely to make little difference. We reported on July 6 that two NCYM Meetings had already adopted minutes stating they want no part of any plan to split NCYM. They “Just Said NO.”

Since then a third meeting, Randleman Friends, has joined the naysayers. In a letter dated July 3, Randleman Friends, their Clerk stated:

“We appreciate the work of the Executive Committee in trying to find a solution to the ongoing controversy within the Yearly Meeting; however, Randleman Friends Meeting is adamantly opposed to any form of separation, theological or otherwise, within North Carolina Yearly Meeting.

Randleman Friends Meeting, along with other Monthly Meetings, have diverse theological concepts among Its membership. Dividing North Carolina Yearly Meeting into two theological groups and forcing Monthly Meetings to choose sides would likely lead to new controversy, causing separation and loss of membership at the Monthly Meeting level.” (Emphasis added.)

Randleman Friends is not on anyone’s list of “liberal” meetings; or at least, it wasn’t until now. Moreover, in my view Randleman’s Clerk was much too generous. The EC and yearly meeting top officers are now part of the problem in NCYM. Their partisan behavior and twisting of Quaker process have ruined their credibility, and dissipated their moral authority. The new split plan, with its blatant bait and switch character, reinforces this unsavory record. It is a figleaf for a purge, a craven capitulation to blackmail.

On August 6, the pair of “doctrinal” statements for the split will be taken up by the NCYM Ministry & Counsel committee. This assemblage is supposed to thresh and vet them.

Again, what are purported to be the central seeds of two books of Faith & Practice are supposed to be digested, debated, refined & approved in about four hours. Really? (By contrast, making even a relatively minor revision in NCYM’s existing Faith & Practice, according to F& P itself, faces a careful five-step process that typically takes a year. Why? Because , F&P says, “Such changes should be made cautiously and with an ample opportunity for prayerful deliberation.” (2012 Edition, page 105.) This is the spirit that has been shamelessly tossed aside in this plan.

It will take another blog post to begin to unpack the two “doctrinal” statements. But here’s a prelude: the drafts are barely a beginning of a beginning. They are minimally informed, dealing with only a few of the real issues, with little useful content. At this point, they are hardly more than part of a pretext.

In the meantime, momentous questions are raised by this draft plan and the agenda it reveals. Will the three dissenting meetings be left “twisting slowly in the wind” when the steamroller cranks up at annual session? Will we see the return of Doormat Quakerism, with many uneasy but too few with the gumption to say so?

Or can it be that a shouting majority is ready to ratify it, and force out the dissenters, regardless?