There’s a notorious set of photos from St. Louis, of a public housing project called Pruitt Igoe, being brought down in a controlled detonation of high explosives. The story is that the project, meant to provide sturdy housing for the poor, had become toxic and uninhabitable. It could be a fitting parable for North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM – NCYM for short)
Yes, all too soon, I had to pack up the car and head out of Frederick Maryland back south to North Carolina; first to join my colleagues in the cast of “Pathway to Freedom,” a Quaker-inspired outdoor drama about the Underground Railroad, followed later today and tomorrow by the final session of North Carolina Yearly Meeting FUM, which, unlike BYM, is about to go out of business after 320 years.
More on that later. I drove over to Interstate 81 to take the scenic route down through the Shenandoah Valley, then jogged east toward Charlottesville and then turned south again in US 29, through Lynchburg and Danville to the North Carolina line.
Lynchburg has been practically absorbed into the ever-expanding Liberty University complex, down to and including the Jerry Falwell Parkway, to memorialize its late founder.
Sixty miles farther, Danville, or at least some of its prominent residents, made their sentiments clear in a couple of ways . . . .
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. . . .
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.
To review, here’s the general idea from last summer. NCYM would be “reorganized, as an umbrella for two new subgroups, or associations.
Note that the two new “associations” would really have had very little day-to-day connection, other than being “under” (graphically speaking) NCYM. And NCYM would be drastically shrunken, reduced to little more than an investment bank account & a committee of trustees (drawn from the two subgroups), and its only staff a part-time bookkeeper.
But it turns out that for some evangelicals, even that slender residual “connection” is too much to bear. One can hear the tired refrains: “Be not unequally yoked . . .”; “what does Christ have to do with Satan or Belial (satan’s nickname),” yada yada antichrist, demons, homosexuals.” (Wake me when it’s over.)
So, as we reported in late January, a transition committee headed by longtime NCYM pastor Hugh Spaulding put out a letter insisting that the hardcore had reneged. They now said they must have “adequate separation into two groups,” or else they “will continue to splinter,” which would somehow be terrible. And even though Spaulding’s committee was not in unity to give in to this demand, he said we had to anyway. (See what I mean about who gives a fig for a fair Quaker process?)
In response, the Autonomites (the unofficial name for liberal meetings; we posted about them here), called a meeting last Saturday (February 25), in which they were urged by facilitator Mark Farlow to form a solid block of opposition to this plan at the upcoming Representative session this Saturday.
There was general agreement with this idea, but this observer noted something less than a tide of enthusiasm or high dudgeon in the room. Indeed, one suspects that even many Autonomites, after two-plus years of fending off wave after wave of these purge attempts, are feeling a good bit of purge fatigue. This sentiment could well have been deepened by the many other shocks they (and the country) have faced since January 20.
But I digress. What’s at stake in this internecine, increasingly obscure dispute?
As far as I can see, it’s mainly two things: first, the remaining shreds of integrity retained by the NCYM establishment. If they’re gong to toss out their own decision made in August and reaffirmed in November, in the face of yet another blackmail/extortion ultimatum, then for what it’s worth, their reputation will go down the drain with it.
Otherwise, the main concrete stake is money; but even that won’t really be affected much.