There have been a lot of distractions during Pride Month 2025: a coup, a war, shocking Supreme Court rulings, a flop of a tank march, the soaring success of its No Kings rival — I won’t even try to list all the major ones. In June’s waning days, this blog will play some catchup: a … Continue reading “Quaking Over Gay Rights” — Kicked in The Head in Wichita
And what will the exodus of the Nones turn into? Passive resistance like what filled the speakeasies under Prohibition, undermining it with every jug of moonshine and bathtub gin? More open, organized pushback?
Who knows: but I have an actual example of what could happen in mind: For 300-plus years, the Catholic Church was the dominant institution in Quebec Canada, with immense political as well as social power. Then around 1960, for reasons historians still debate, Québécois just had enough, and quit showing up. It wasn’t “organized,” but it was unstoppable. The mass departure sparked what is now called “The Quiet Revolution,” and included the collapse of clerical hegemony.
The African Saint started Western Europe on the downward course of religious persecution proper. Before him there had, indeed, been persecution of religions for racial or political reasons, but St. Augustine was perhaps the chief of those who supplied the religious motive for religious persecution, and turned God Himself into Moloch, a feat which no one but a really “good” man could have performed. Thenceforth, until the age of the much abused Whigs and sceptics, all the best people in the world were engaged in torturing each other and making earth into hell. It was through St. Augustine rather than through Constantine that the Church drank poison. The torch was handed down from him through St. Dominic and St. Ignatius till it scorched the hand of St. John [Calvin] of Geneva by the pyre of [Michael] Servetus. They were all, at least after their conversions, unusually “good” men, but not good all through like John Woolman.
Lucretia Mott completely rejected this whole [traditional Easter] scenario, decrying the “harm done” by it.
Yet she seemed devoted to Jesus. She quoted his words incessantly, affirmed his “messianic status,” and thought she was preaching his “gospel” message during her sixty controversial years as a Quaker preacher.
But if Jesus’ “gospel” was not about depravity and vicarious blood atonement, what did Lucretia say it was?
Scholar Priscilla Eppinger has put it in a nutshell: Salvation for humans would come through the faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. By this, Mott meant a faith like that of Jesus. She quoted from Paul’s letter to the Galatians (2:20):
“Faith of Jesus Christ is faith in the truth, faith in God and in man. The life that I now live in the flesh, said the Apostle, I live by the faith of the son of God. . . . Well [Mott added] what is this other than a faith similar to that which Jesus held, the faith of the son of God.” (Greene 124)
The faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. Neither Eppinger nor Lucretia originated this alternate motto. And what was this “faith”?
Promising to reform this traditional system, even while coping with being purged by it, is not a new response. When the group that became “Hicksites” were pushed out of Philadelphia Yearly meeting in 1827, their initial leadership insisted that they would preserve the recorded ministerial elite system — only they would run it better, less oppressively, than had the rival Orthodox junta.
And maybe they did, for a short while. But before long, internal agitation surfaced among Hicksites about rising issues like women’s rights, and abolitionism, with the specter of civil war on the horizon. And it was shortly clear that the Hicksite recorded establishment did not like such reforming notions one whit more than did their Orthodox rivals. Soon enough there began among Hicksite meetings what I have called the Great Purge: hundreds of Friends deemed to be, in Kershner’s words, “divisive voices” or “only troublemakers,” who were silenced, marginalized or disowned.
But this time many victims stayed and, pardon the expression, fought back.