North Carolina Quakers: Another Sad Saturday Surprise?

North Carolina Quakers: Another Sad Saturday Surprise?

This Saturday, June 4, another tense scene will unfold in North Carolina’s ongoing Quaker soap opera: NC Yearly Meeting-FUM (NCYM) will hold its spring Representative Body session.

For the past two years, these Seventh Day (Saturday) assemblies have been the stage for one melodrama after another, all focused on a single burning (well, smoldering) question: Will NCYM purge the handful of liberal meetings?

Let’s review:
The current drive surfaced in the summer of 2014, with a round of open letters. In response, one small liberal meeting did leave after the opening salvo, citing a history of being abused by evangelical zealots. But otherwise, the purge hasn’t happened yet.

Instead, at just about every session, the YM “reaffirmed” the NCYM Faith & Practice, including the several parts where it says it isn’t a creed; and then turned right back to trying to enforce it (or what some thought was in it) creedally.

To this end, an ad hoc committee was named, to find consensus for a purge (it wasn’t there); then the idea was repackaged as a push for purge-by-partition, carving up the YM like a side of beef. But none of five options for this self-dismemberment gained traction.

There was something eerie about this episode; it was like being among a group planning mass suicide, but squabbling endlessly over the means —

— “Hanging?”
— “No, let’s hold hands & jump off a cliff.” 
— “I’m scared of heights; what about poison?” 
— “Well, which kind? A gun to the head is quicker.” 
— “But messy; let’s get in the church bus and start it in a closed garage.”

It was a church remix of Dorothy Parker’s classic ditty of self-mockery:

RESUMÉ
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

After hours of this, with no agreement, NCYM seemed that it too might as well live, for the moment, and staggered on through summer 2015.

There was even a momentary bright spot in that several influential Friends and committees publicly denounced the abusive tactics and statements which the louder purgers had inflicted on Friends, including promising young adults, who got in their way.

But the upswing didn’t last. A few weeks later the Executive Committee tried to decapitate the trouble with a “surgical strike,” unilaterally expelling three meetings (two hard core evangelicals & the largest liberal one). But when the annual session convened, Friends across the spectrum weren’t having it, and quickly overturned the decision. 

The two evangelical meetings quit anyway, and were soon followed by a dozen-plus more.

By late fall 2015, one might have thought that with the loudest purgers and bullies now gone, and two purge attempts lacking anything like unity, some of the pressure would be off.

One might have thought that. But one would have been wrong.

The cry was for another committee to be formed, first called a Task Force but later merely a task group, to figure out “The Way Forward.” They did their best, but when their “Way” was unveiled, it turned out to be a laundry list from another century, indeed another millennium.

They took their key text from the NCYM session of 1990, one which insisted Friends give up beer, tobacco & canoodling, and –oh, yes– re-opened the door to the purge of liberals. Meetings were given until December 1, 2015, to “affirm” all this, or explain why not — & to re-RE-re-affirm Faith & Practice yet again; I mean, why not?

While counting down to the December deadline, the Fall 2015 Representative session gathered in November. There the Executive Committee brought in another bombshell: a way to “fix” Faith & Practice. Instantly.

But wait— if the F&P was good enough to be re-affirmed so many times, what was there about it that urgently needed “fixing?

Good question. It turns out that F&P contained a big problem for the purge-seekers; or rather, what it did NOT contain was a big problem:   it did not give NCYM any power to do any such thing.

Pretty much all such YM books once did dictate a top-down structure (the liberal Quaker notion that the Society has been “a spiritual democracy” is so unhistorical as to be laughable); but many YMs have more recently drawn back from such an authoritarian structure. (The history of this top-down structure and the process of change is told in my book, Remaking Friends.)

In NCYM’s case, the change came after the 1967 edition. And the book had been further revised, approved & reprinted half a dozen times since, for nearly 50 years, without the YM power provision. 

And then re-re-re-affirmed in the current go-round as it was.

No matter. The Executive Committee declared it “couldn’t find” a minute about the post-1967 change, so it must not really have been made. So they proposed to remedy this “mistake,” by re-inserting the previous YM power provision, on the spot. And despite loud protests from liberal representatives, the Clerk took a shouted voice vote & declared it done.

This gambit, concocted in secret, was shocking. NCYM’s Faith & Practice is quite specific about how amendments to its text are to be put through a lengthy deliberative process, taking a year at least. But this bit of chicanery took only about an hour.

The scheme was compared in these columns to dumping toxic Flint River water into the YM’s well of credibility. But metaphors aside, by both its substance and fraudulent procedure, this “re-insertion” opened the way to the purge of liberals that some still seem to want.

Which brings us to this week, looking ahead to the next Saturday Surprise that awaits.

There are several possibilities, involving both NCYM’s mangled “Quaker process,” and the substance of the issues involved.  Unfortunately, given the history summarized here, such ploys can’t be ruled out as unworthy of a Quaker body. But we’ll take these up in tomorrow’s post.