This past First Day (Quaker talk for Sunday) I Zoomed into worship in my Friends meeting, the one out in the farmland of Flyover County, North By-God Carolina, where I missed one of my favorite annual scenes there: the appearance in the back 40 of a big unruly spread of wild daffodils. But I did hear a stirring message.
A year ago last Saturday, the Friends Meeting I’m part of took a big step, for us: we rented a booth at the Alamance Pride Festival, held in a large park in downtown Burlington NC.
The Spring booth, with a blogger on duty at the table.
Outwardly, our booth was not particularly eye-catching. Amid the fluttering of a thousand floating rainbows, the yellow table banner we made for it is about as gaudy as we get. Spring Friends Meeting has been what many call an “affirming” congregation for more than a dozen years, and we’ve paid our share of dues for that. But we didn’t do it for publicity, and we haven’t done much of what many others call evangelism, which we’d rather name “outreach.” We have lots of opinions about things, but are mostly quiet about them.
Maybe too quiet. Spring has been gathering for Quaker worship in southern Alamance County for 251 years, but we soon found out in the booth that hardly anyone we talked to knew we were there. Which meant that Pride was a great opportunity for our outreach aspirations, but it also brought home the suspicion that maybe we had been a bit too ready to “hide our lamp under a bushel,” for much of those two-and-a-half centuries, which is something the gospel says not to do. There’s a false modesty which at bottom is mostly a mix of snobbery and pride. Continue reading The Shadow at the Pride Festival→
Lately it’s been hard to find yard signs for the disgraced pizza-and-pornstar NC Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Governor Mark Robinson. But this one was in Burlington a few days back.
Burlington is in North Carolina’s Alamance County, once notorious as a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan back in the day, Neo-Confederates now. A 35-foot statue of a rebel soldier still guards the county courthouse, and the monument itself is surrounded by a thick wrought iron fence and plenty of Don’t-Tread-On-Me attitude.
The county voted against Obama twice by ten-point margins, and for Trump in 2016 by 14 and in 2020 by 8.
During Covid it was a locus for pandemic mask and mandate defiance. When Hispanic Democrat Ricky Hurtado managed to unseat a Republican state rep a few years back, the supermajority GOP legislature promptly re-drew the district and pushed Hurtado out in 2022.
Nevertheless, to lift our spirits on Thursday, Oct. 3, the Fair Wendy and I drove straight into Alamance and then Burlington, to a modest storefront on the edge of downtown. If too much of the county is still stuck in a revanchist fantasy past, this was an outpost of a very different Alamance future that is beginning to unfold.
Alamance County NC Democratic Party office
Yes, Alamance has Democrats. And they’re on the move. Their monthly meeting is the first Thursday, and inside, the joint was jumping.
The session was predictably focused on the last climactic weeks of the current campaign; but there were a couple of important preliminaries :
First, a discussion of relief efforts for the hurricane-devastated city of Asheville and other communities in western NC. (My contribution was some bottled water.) The County Chair, Ron Osborne (above) knows such emergency work inside and out: he specialized in it for Duke Power as an electrical engineer, managing large crews who helped get the lights back on in the wake of dozens of the worst storms and floods from Katrina to Sandy. Osborne pointed out the safest and most useful ways for those of us who managed to dodge the deluge of Helene to do our bit.
Ron Osborne holds a prized possession, a book autographed by Jimmy Carter, as he speaks of the 39th president’s achievements at turning his religious faith into continuing practice.
Then he turned to a more pleasant landmark, the 100th birthday of Jimmy Carter. The 39th president was clearly a model for Osborne: another southerner, who publicly renounced his segregationist heritage, and overcame the experience of defeat in 1980 to build a long and uniquely productive post-political career with a multitude of projects, from building houses for the poor to preventing wars and reducing the toll of guinea worm disease from multimillions annually to thirteen (yes, 13) cases in 2023.
Seneca Rogers, a school board candidate in Burlington, addresses the session.
Osborne even made a pilgrimage which I long hoped to make, to Plains, Georgia, to join in the Sunday Bible classes Carter taught for more than 40 years whenever he was in town.
Then to the main business of the meeting, which was a series of rapid-fire short speeches by candidates for local offices, county commission, and district judgeships. The multicultural character of the lineup was a standing rebuke to the dogged whiteness of the rival party (does Mark Robinson count? Thats above my paygrade . . . .)
The enthusiasm level was high, and the candidates welcomed the intensity before them in the campaign’s frenzied final month.
Jaded pundits might still be noting that the Carolina GOP has been gerrymandering and suppressing votes nonstop for fourteen years (true) and is counting on the institutional bias it has been cementing to hold back the rising insurgency growing around the corner in their Alamance stronghold (true again.)
Your faithful blogger, with the sticker he was awarded at the meeting’s conclusion, since the supply of the ”Old White Geezers for Harris-Walz” stickers was gone. They accepted my solemn affirmation that I’m an emeritus member of the youth cohort.
And to further harsh my buzz, they can carp, “So Alamance is happening; fine. But there’s 100 counties in NC, and what about the other 99??” And true, I don’t get out that much.
Finally, they’ll repeat that the polls are all tight as a tick, margin of error, yada yada. (Undeniable.) So is my optimism just whistling Dixie??
Well, I’ve resigned from the Pundit Prediction Panel, so I’ll concede the prognosticators may turn out to be right. However, I’ll recklessly stick a toe back in this muddy pool, and forecast that, at least in Alamance County, the NC Democrats in 2024 will — wait for it — Do BETTER.
Will that be enough to save us?
Check back with me in a month.
[Note: Here’s the part for Quakers: Ron Osborne is a longtime member of Spring Friends Meeting, which has been in Alamance County for more than 250 years. He’s also a Quaker history buff, like me. He’s enjoying his retirement, and I don’t think he likes political campaigning much more than hurricanes, but like saving lives devastated by the latter, helping rescue democracy by the former is a part of his low-key but diligent and distinctive Quaker witness.]
By Jess Bidgood — September 23, 2024
The latest, with 43 days to go
It was about an hour into the 11 a.m. service on Sunday, and Bishop Patrick Wooden Sr. of the Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, N.C., was at the pulpit, wearing a suit of deep plum. The music had drawn quiet. The morning announcements had been made. And now, the bishop said, he had something to address.
“Everybody’s talking about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson,” Wooden said, explaining to the congregation that he’d gotten a call from a local reporter on Friday and that the news media — me — was sitting among them that morning. “I called him Friday,” Wooden said, referring to Robinson, “and spoke to him myself.”
21. 1994-1995 — In a 1994 statement to the NC Yearly Meeting Ministry and Counsel Committee, Willie wrote,
“It seems somehow odd to be on trial for heresy within the Society of Friends, when Quakerism itself was born amid charges of heresy. It is not surprising that, in Puritan England, a group that rejected creeds, depended on the guidance of the Spirit, believed in the Inner Light, taught the equality of all people, advocated a universal priesthood, and allowed for diversity of individual religious experience would be suspect. It seems almost bizarre now, however, to be put on trial for believing these very articles of faith on which the Society of Friends was founded and for which Fox and others suffered so much.”
Nevertheless, the “trial” dragged on. Still stalled over the demand for an antigay manifesto, as well as the matter of banishing Willie and the calls for a broader purge, desperate finding a way out of the impasse, NCYM leaders agreed to undertake a “Listening Project.” This would be a series of in-depth, non-directive interviews with Friends from each of its 80-plus meetings and churches, in search of enough common ground to recover civil, patient Quaker seeking.
The project took time and faced obstruction, opposition, even intimidation; nevertheless it seemed a temporary success. At least, many tempers had cooled enough by 1995 for NCYM to set aside the stalled 1992 minute (but the issue did not vanish). Much of the talk of division and expulsion seemed to subside (though a few churches did leave NCYM). Willie’s recording was left intact.
Willie finished a 1996 report on the experience on an optimistic note:
“[The Listening Project] played a key role in helping the yearly meeting avoid a serious division, drop the idea of disowning people over the issue of homosexuality, and begin the process of attempting to communicate.
Perhaps its most important contribution was that it served to bridge the gap between a complete lack of communication to the beginnings of dialogue. . . .”
Perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
22. 1995-2007 — For Willie and Agnes at least, their public, if impromptu “coming out” in 1993 as committed parents in an affirming family, may have closed many doors to them in NCYM, but it also marked a way opening into a much broader emerging community, namely that of openly LGBTQ Friends, friends of Friends, and family members. These made up a rainbow chorus of voices that, despite frequent setbacks, were becoming inexorably more visible.
In an address at the 1998 mid-winter gathering of the national lesbian-gay Friends network, Willie said,
“When homosexuality became a prominent issue in NC Yearly Meeting, Agnes and I took what was to become a very unpopular stand. There were times in the 1993 sessions when we stood virtually alone and people became very upset with us.
We’ve not only been disappointed and frustrated by the hostility of our fundamentalist Friends toward our positions on social issues; we have been equally disappointed and frustrated by the reluctance of liberal Friends to stand with us.
We were reflecting recently on the fact that so many liberal Friends have remained silent both during the social issues of the 1960s and 1970s and now during the gender issues of the 1990s.”
Yet Willie and Agnes found a renewed and deeper sense of ministry as they began to share and speak to the spiritual needs of LGBTQ Quakers. They helped to form Piedmont Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns (PFLGC). They also started a non-sectarian chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in Mt. Airy and another in Clemmons.
With all this, his pastoral work at Mt. Airy continued. He wrote gratefully that:
Mt. Airy Friends, Surry County, “Mayberry” North Carolina
“We are in a meeting that supports us. They don’t raise a hue and cry every time I appear on TV or do an interview for the newspaper. They have clearly given me not only their permission to carry out this ministry, but they have given me their blessing. . . .”
With this home support, the scope of their work kept growing:
Kathy: “Willie and Agnes partnered to minister to gay individuals and their families. They were surrogate parents to men and women whose biological parents had rejected them because of their sexual orientation. They attended Friends General Conference gatherings all over the US as they formed close relationships with Friends in the FLGC group.”
23. — In 2001, Willie retired from full-time ministry, but he and Agnes continued to participate in organizations that supported LGBTQ persons. Willie participated in “Gay Pride” events, even marching in “Gay Pride Parades.”
This closing period of broader ministry only ebbed in 2007, when Willie’s health began to give way to an advancing cancer, to which he at length succumbed in September 2013.
Their final round of wider work had brought much consolation to Willie and Agnes, especially after their hopes for reconciliation and progress within the yearly meeting they had served so long were dashed. The Listening Project’s “cooling off” proved to be only a temporary truce: at the 2014 sessions of NCYM-FUM, a year after Willie’s passing, the “urge to purge” burst out in its sessions again.
Now the demands went beyond a statement to a massive purge. Meeting and individuals who had opposed the 1992 statement or its underlying doctrines were called on to leave NCYM immediately.
Among the targets of this effort was Spring Meeting, which this writer attends. Spring had taken a public affirming position a few years earlier. We too were told we should either leave NCYM, or we would be expelled; words like “unsound” and “abomination” were directed at us.
Spring calmly but steadfastly stood its ground: we had done no wrong, violated no provision of Faith & Practice, and hoped any differences in NCYM could be patiently and civilly worked through.
A handful of the surviving meetings have formed small, loose associations; some others (e.g., Spring) continue as independents; many have simply withered and disappeared.
24– The saga of Willie and Agnes Frye remains both an inspiration for many (like this writer) and a solemn warning about the costs of pursuing authentic witness in turbulent times. Willie Frye, with much struggle, managed to keep up and complete his career of ministry through decades of racial strife, war, and continuing cultural conflict.
NCYM-FUM was once, in the early 1900s, one of the largest Quaker bodies in America. Since its founding, it had weathered the American Revolution, the Civil War, the tragedies of failed Reconstruction, deep economic depressions, a century-plus of Jim Crow, successive waves of KKK terror and many other trials. But it succumbed to the multiple-pandemics of homophobia, militarism, racism and fundamentalism after 320 years. (This sad tale is chronicled in detail in the book, “Murder at Quaker Lake.”)
But if there is hope here, it can be glimpsed in the life and witness of Willie and Agnes Frye as examples and precursors.
Such examples should be preserved, remembered and celebrate, in my view at least twice a year. Once could be around the date of a significant life event, which for Willie points to September, as Willie & Agnes Frye Month.
The other occasion would be any time those who are striving to follow examples like theirs, in the beleaguered Society of Friends or other faith communities, need encouragement and models.
Which in these days, is pretty often.
It’s been a century since this anti-Kan editorial was published. As an organization, the KKK has again largely faded from the North Carolina scene. But its “state of mind” and basic agenda are still very much present.
A year ago last Saturday, the Friends Meeting I’m part of took a big step, for us: we rented a booth at the Alamance Pride Festival, held in a large park in downtown Burlington NC.
The enthusiasm level was high, and the candidates welcomed the intensity before them in the campaign’s frenzied final month.
Yet Willie and Agnes found a renewed and deeper sense of ministry as they began to share and speak to the spiritual needs of LGBTQ Quakers. They helped to form Piedmont Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns (PFLGC). They also started a non-sectarian chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in Mt. Airy and another in Clemmons.
Nice thoughts, but no chance. The purge efforts became a struggle to the death, and the yearly meeting ultimately 
NCYM-FUM was once, in the early 1900s, one of the largest Quaker bodies in America. Since its founding, it had weathered the American Revolution, the Civil War, the tragedies of failed Reconstruction, deep economic depressions, a century-plus of Jim Crow, successive waves of KKK terror and many other trials. But it succumbed to the multiple-pandemics of homophobia, militarism, racism and fundamentalism after 320 years. (This sad tale is chronicled in detail in the book, “