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.