To “Uproot & Destroy” Redux

Under different circumstances, I’d maybe feel a bit sympathetic about Ashley Wilcox’s account of having “stopped doing ministry among Friends for more than three years” because of an April 2019 blog post of mine.

My post was in response to a lecture she delivered at Guilford College in April 2019 [Full lecture text here. ]

In the talk she announced she had received a Divine command via the biblical prophet Jeremiah 1:10, which she read aloud: “I [God] have this day set thee [Wilcox] over the nations and over the kingdoms [unprogrammed liberal Quakers] to uproot, to pull down, and to destroy” what Wilcox [and God] have determined to be intolerable about them (i.e., us).

What was Wilcox divinely sent to uproot, pull down & destroy? The liberals’ magnet for God’s wrath, she revealed, was putting an end, a century ago, to the recording of ministers.

In her words, “Our system of recording is broken, and it is something that I want to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow.”

(Pardon the repetition, but such was a chronic refrain: Wilcox used “destroy/destroyed”, “uproot,” “tear down,” and “overthrow” 27 times in her lecture, about one per minute.)

Once that uprooting/destruction is done, she added, the former recording system is to be replanted in its place. This version will be in a form to ensure those recorded were up to “a professional standard.”

I listened, but didn’t agree with this plan, and my blog post explained why. 

The post, to my surprise, went “viral”, reaching a few thousand hits — which counts as a lot in the tiny Quaker internet.

And reportedly its appearance sent a number of Wilcox’s friends into a protective panic. They rushed to her aid, insisting that for her own good she must not let my text into her field of vision.

So she didn’t,  for more than four years.

It wasn’t until July 2023 in a post on her own blog she acknowledged, “I actually never read the post until this week. At the time, it felt terrible, but now it just seems sad.”

Sad.

Okay. I have no complaint if actually reading it made Wilcox sad, though that wasn’t the goal. I hoped it might have induced her to think, to probe and grapple with the deep historical and religious context of the liberal practice, and what shaped its evolution, none of which were mentioned in her lecture.

And maybe then push beyond glibly declaring “this idea of being called to uproot and to tear down . . . .Why do we uproot and tear down?  Because things are broken or in the way, things aren’t working.”

But also, the post underlined that “we” tear down & uproot if “we” believe “we” are speaking for God.

But I am one of those Liberal Friends who is very skittish about such claims, of which this was not the first I had confronted. I’m also dubious about church bodies centered on elite circles convinced of their supreme access to the Divine. (If Catholics want a Pope? Fine for them, and they’re lucky to have their new Leo; but I’m a Quaker; that’s not our jam.)

The works of such circles among Friends have cast many of the darkest shadows on too many sad chapters of Quaker history. This record now includes a long wave of such, delivered in this century by “The Separation Generation, which has left much  “uprooting & destruction” in its wake.

I both lived through such a recent “tear down & destroy” ordeal and reported on several others as the work of close to ten years.

So I nodded when Wilcox charged her hearers to be ready to  “Sit with discomfort” about her agenda of tearing down & uprooting.

But this mandate did not apply to her lecture, however: there were to be no questions, no discussion. She later blogged that just the presence of a potential but silent questioner at the lecture (i.e., me), gave her a panic attack.

Yet searching—by discussions, even debate & critique is a traditional Quaker process; two customary terms for which are threshing & discernment. (North Carolina Yearly Meeting. for example, threshed and discerned about its stance on slavery for about sixty years.)

Instead, my (unspoken, then unread) questions evoked a screed four years later about alleged bullying of young women ministers.

A word about that: Wilcox charged us to “Pay attention to the things that people are saying—especially men—about young women in ministry.

Are these men making fun of their clothing or appearance? Are they twisting the women’s words to get likes and retweets? If they are making a joke, is it at the expense of women?”

I recognize these as real concerns; there is still plenty of misogyny in the larger realm of Quaker ministry, and many other religions.

So let’s “pay attention” to how they were manifested then, in this man’s original writing:

A tally from Fager’s April 2019 blog post:

Comments on AW’s clothing —————ZERO

Comments on AW’s personal appearance —————ZERO

Comments on AW’s age —————ZERO

Comments on AW’s gender preference/marital status ———ZERO

Comments on AW’s ethnic background —————ZERO

Comments on her educational/occupational history ———ZERO

Attempts at Humor at AW’s or anyone’s expense —————ZERO

Insinuations of sexual or other violence —————ZERO

“Twisting” AW’s words for “clicks” —————ZERO

Comments adverse to women’s ministry —————ZERO

 

By contrast, the post DID include:

—-> Challenges to AW’s use of Scripture

—-> Questions about the history of the end of recording

—-> Doubts about AW’s “uprooting” program and its theological basis

-—> A call to preserve congregational & individual equality

—-> In sum, questions about the IDEAS and PROGRAM, rather than the advocate.

 

I stand by those questions, but will not relitigate them here.

What does this analysis mean to me? It showed respect for Wilcox’s words, ideas and plans by taking them seriously. And it shows they were addressed seriously and plainly, without extraneous matters. 

Maybe engagement then would have led her to “sit with some discomfort.”

Except of course, she didn’t read the questions til four-plus years later.

That is, her panic & extreme “discomfort” in 2019 came from second- or third-hand sources. It was —again to be plain: gossip. Pernicious gossip, for which I have no sympathy. Take heed: public posting of such is little short of libelous.

By the way, during those same four years, I wrote and published a lot more about efforts to “uproot, tear down and destroy” much about religion and authentic religious freedom in our society — inside and outside of Friends — but did so without mentioning Wilcox or her “uproot & destroy “ plans again.

But then, to repeat, when she did finally read the actual post, in July 2023, she says it made her “sad.”

Thus recalling it brought to mind a couple of other biblical options, to set alongside her Jeremiah passage:

Proverbs 27:17: “People learn from one another, just as iron sharpens iron.”

1 Thessalonians 5:21 “Try all things, test all things, hold fast that which is good . . .”

Sound counsel, to me, even if “sitting with discomfort” is involved. So that was the road not traveled.

To see the slurs reposted in 2026, though, nudged me to this response. To be forthright, if the 2019 lecture and the 2023 follow-up were supposed to be examples  of “prophetic Quaker ministry,” they were nowhere near the “professional standard” spoken of, particularly the one set by Jeremiah, whose ordeal was crudely appropriated and trivialized. Nor does repeating the smears in 2026 come any closer.

Does all that really serve Friends?

No.

And that’s just sad.