Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

Making (Quaker) History: the Roundtable Is Now on Video!

At the Quaker Historical Roundtable, there was a sense of immediacy and connection. Many events that presenters wrote about, some of us had lived through, or had personally felt the reverberations. And in some cases, though the “history” goes back many decades, it is far from over yet.
Willingness to open up tough questions: Does FUM have a future? Was there militant segregation, war fever & homophobia in a large southern yearly meeting? (And how much still lingers?) Communists working with AFSC? Other socialist influence among Friends then?

Quaker History Roundtable — With Webcast!

It’s Here!
The Quaker History Roundtable opens Thursday evening, June 8. Its focus is 20th Century American Quakerism, and it will continue through Sunday morning, June 11.
If you can’t join us in person, you can watch it online. It will be webcast online here.

William Penn & the Fruits of Technological Solitude

Last First Day I needed something to read to open Meeting. Feeling reflective, a little book by William Penn, “Some Fruits of Solitude” came to mind.

Some Fruits was first published, anonymously, in 1693, and has been in print most of the 320-plus years since, and a copy of it has sat on my bookshelf for a few decades.

Some Fruits came to be written because Penn was obliged to disappear for a couple of years. He had to beat it because of his longtime friendship with King James II.

This was an odd friendship, for many reasons: For one, Penn was prominent, yet not part of the nobility; but James had known and liked Penn’s father, an admiral in the Royal Navy. It was also odd because, as a Quaker, Penn was poles apart from James religiously, as the king had become Catholic. Nonetheless, James kept calling Penn in to chat and hang out, while leaving his royal councillors, who had lots of actual state business for the monarch to conduct, waiting and fuming.

Penn was not there just to schmooze. He had an agenda: he was nudging James toward issuing a royal declaration of religious toleration, one broad enough to end all persecution of both Quakers and Catholics, both of which were opposed by the Anglican establishment.

Penn felt he was making progress with James; but then in June 1688 his Queen, Mary of Modena, had a son, also named James, who became his heir, the Prince of Wales, destined to become a legitimate Catholic king of England.

This prospect horrified the anglican church and most of the British establishment, which had been increasingly Protestant since Henry VIII’s reign 150 years earlier. They decided that the new Catholic prince could not be allowed to succeed. So they hatched a plot. . . .

The Handmaid’s Tale 1990: When Frightening Fiction Including Quakers Crashed into a Frightening Quaker Reality (And After)

Francis Hall, a firmly Christian Friend, is an important, but unfortunately forgotten example. In a brave 1973 essay, he turned to the matter of what to do about the increasing acceptance of non-Christians by liberal yearly meetings. He wrote about this for the Faith and Life Movement, the study project that followed the 1970 St. Louis Conference where “realignment” was first floated.

While affirming his own steadfastly Christian faith, Hall lists several aspects of modern history and scholarship which have challenged orthodox confidence and credibility, and concludes,

“I am convinced that these twentieth century developments are just as powerful as barriers to faith in Christ as was the lack of knowledge of the story of Christ in the time of Barclay. I can therefore believe that the universal, saving Light can be working salvation among these modern people who know the history but do not accept it because of one or more of these barriers… If there are Quakers who cannot believe that Jesus is the Christ and yet who show that they have faith in the Divine Light, have experienced, and follow it as fully as they can in their lives, who is to say that they are not truly Quakers?” (Hall, in Quaker Understanding of Christ & Authority, 1973, p.42ff)

Who indeed?

Of course, we have seen that there is no shortage of persons who are quite ready to say this, some politely, others not. But Hall, the staunch Christian Quaker, has put the hopeful version of my entire argument in a nutshell.

Looking at our plight now, 27 years later, that upbeat case seem more difficult to make. In the American Quaker world, four yearly meetings have been through internal division over the last decade-plus; the “Realignment” diehards, having bided their time, have now managed in three of the four to get much of what they were after in 1990-1991: in Indiana, a liberal pastoral meeting was targeted for expulsion over its public welcome to LGBT persons; but when the Indiana leadership made push come to shove, seventeen other meetings joined the exodus. In Northwest, several meetings that were either openly welcoming or unwilling to accept an enforced homophobic stance were expelled earlier this year.

In North Carolina, the yearly meeting has been essentially divided in two subgroups, barely linked to a shell of North Carolina Yearly Meeting, which is now to be reduced to little more than a sanctified ATM machine. Its one remaining function will be to dole out payments from the body’s endowment.