Thirteen years ago I wrote a post on "Quaker culture." I had just read a novel whose Jewish and Catholic characters were described with lavish details from their Jewish and Catholic religious cultures—rituals, architecture, thought patterns, built up, elaborated, and passed on from generation to generation over many centuries. I wondered if our Quaker religious cultures aren't a bit thin by comparison.
I've recently read two more novels with dense religious settings and the same thought occurred to me. Given the temptation toward Quaker exceptionalism among some of us, maybe a bit of modesty would do us some good!
Of course it's not that simple. A beautiful and rich culture can honor God, and can do so through so many emotional and sensory channels that go far beyond the doctrines and propositions that were hallmarks of that highly contentious period of English history when we got our start. (Come to think of it, doctrines and propositions, and our conflicting feelings about them, continue to exercise us Friends to this day!) But those rich, dense, beautiful cultures can, at their worst, also exclude, entrap, and alienate.
Those two newer novels illustrate this beauty and this hazard in very different ways. I highly recommend both of them. The one I read first was Niall Williams's Time of the Child, set in a rain-soaked village in the west of Ireland in the year 1962, the year that, among other things, the first television arrives in the town. At the center of the story is an agnostic general practitioner who attends Mass faithfully, and whose relationship with the parish priests is fascinating. Also in the center of the story is his eldest daughter, who serves as his receptionist; his other two daughters have moved away. Almost every important action in the story is somehow linked, whether by intention or habit, to the region's Catholic culture and faith. I loved this story so much that I hope you'll read it without further commentary from me, so I can avoid revealing its compelling and gradually unfolding plot. Williams, in all the novels of his that I've read, somehow manages to convey love with extraordinary depth but without sentimentality.
If you still need a bit more detail to be persuaded, here's a review.
The other novel is Kate Riley's Ruth. I think it is a small miracle that this book even came to be published. It is by turns deadpan and laconic, reverent, snarky, sad, and wicked funny. Ruth's story is a near-lifetime compressed into a chain of telling incidents from a life lived in an Anabaptist commune, with similarities to Hutterite and Bruderhof communities. Ruth understands the rules, until she doesn't. Her son doesn't. She loves her husband, and despises his annoying habits. In the community she's loyal and skeptical, a total insider who is somehow not trapped.
For a time, the community seems oddly totalitarian, but the leaders confess their inadequacies. Misdeeds can lead to temporary shunning, usually on a voluntary basis! Travel to the outside world is permitted when necessary—for example, to meet and pray "with a Quaker colloquium at the Wyndham Sault Ste. Marie." "In the van Ruth had erred in wondering aloud whether Quakers might love peace more than they loved Christ, which she'd read somewhere and liked the sound of. No one responded."
(Talking about people behind their backs is not permitted in the community, but, just between you and me, it's worth listening to Ruth!)
Rachel Muers does an amazing job of describing Friends faith, practice, worship, and diversities in a compact, even-handed, and well-organized article for the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, with lots of useful links. Thanks to Jim Fussell for the reference.
Ashley Wilcox on "Alaska in my bones," and the example Anchorage provides us.
Adrienne LaFrance wishes happy 100th birthday to Mel Brooks, "the funniest man who ever lived."
Kelly Zirbes and her band Kelly's Lot perform "Ship." Kelly's tour dates include Klamath Falls (July 25), Burns OR (August 5), Spokane (August 10), and Portland OR (August 12, with Carolyn Wonderland).
Tatiana Blokhina, Autumn in Bolkhov. Elektrostal Artists exhibition, 2012.
There is nothing new about imagining the world as a village. But today that image really struck me.
It came as I saw the photos and videos coming from Venezuela, with earthquake survivors' faces filling the frames with their personal accounts of disaster. That story on my news feed was followed immediately by the U.S. president blaming vandals for the National Mall's Reflecting Pool scandal, and his vice president and secretary of state spinning their awkward interpretations of war and not-war and maybe-again-war with Iran.
All that was soon followed by accounts of Europe's record-breaking heatwaves. (But nothing about South Asia.)
Speaking just for myself, maybe it takes witnessing disasters—earthquakes, famines, scenes of rubble-filled streets and their desperate inhabitants—to bring the world into human scale. But then, seen in that immediate scale, how do I regard the world's potentates and their conceits? Suddenly Trump, Putin, and other would-be global bigshots can be seen shrunk down to their true scale, not the puffed-up versions they want us to admire or fear. What right do they have—do we grant them—to pollute our village and put our neighbors and ourselves in danger?
I still don't advocate caricaturizing or demonizing them. But let's expose their imperial pretensions, whether they're peddling white Christian nationalism or the equally toxic Russian World ... or whatever actual demon is telling them and us that all our problems would go away if we saw our village neighbors as faceless "others."
We're going through a time when the vision of a global village may seem hopelessly idealistic. But ... is it nevertheless a valid vision? Or, if we surrender it in favor of a more cynical view, what keeps us from ending up behaving as apologists for the supposed realism of raw power, aided by increasingly clever tools of persuasion and disinformation?
Some of us are wonderful at bringing visions to life, whether through imaginative policy studies or through creative arts. Others are more suited to analyzing and exposing the forces which seek to pull down such visions in favor of passivity and mutual suspicion. Still others have the gift of keeping practitioners of these two different approaches in loving contact with each other, so that none of us find ourselves abandoned to disillusionment or resignation.
That's where I hope trustworthy faith communities can find a unique and urgent role.
Have you found such a home? Tell me about it!
Aleksandr Ilichev, North South East West, Elektrostal Palette exhibition, 2012.
The occupation of the USA by Donald Trump and his movement has now continued for 514 days and twelve hours. Whether by design or impulse, he and his Project 2025 allies seem to find new ways nearly every day to enrich themselves at our nation's expense, subvert our laws, ignore our courts, divert our taxes, weaken our international reputation, betray former allies, insult former presidents and other leading citizens, reduce civil and environmental protections, shoot and bomb at will, exalt racial purity, lie about our nation's history, and misrepresent our patriotism and our faith.
This constant flow of transgressions, along with the evidence that millions of our fellow citizens see nothing to complain about beyond the president's unfortunate vulgarity, can wear down even the sunniest idealist. When "our" side also resorts to gross malice, it doesn't help! Maybe it's for these reasons that this biblical advice, in King James English, has recently been echoing in my brain:
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
This is part of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, specifically the verses (6:24-34) where we are told not to worry about our basic necessities but strive for God's kingdom and righteousness.
Most modern English translations translate "evil" (κακίᾳ) as "trouble" or"troubles." Sarah Ruden has "aggravation." ("Today's aggravation is plenty for today.") For some reason I like the English word "evil" here. In Jesus' voice the whole line seems to have a hint of humor or irony.
The full passage seems to suggest that we can overcome anxieties about our basic needs through faith in God, who knows what we need—and wants us to depend on God rather than the illusory security we might be tempted to get via wealth and worldly power.
On the other hand, Jesus doesn't tell us that we should not worry about others or simply forget about the future altogether. In addition, there are other places in Scripture where planning and policy are addressed. In this same passage in Matthew, we are to care about God's kingdom and God's righteousness. Further on in Matthew, addressing the people and the nations, are we sheep or goats? As for becoming too passive and today-focused, there's Proverbs 6:6-8:
Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.
And as regards policy, there's Joseph's advice to Egypt's pharaoh to prepare for the famine that's coming in seven years (Genesis 41:33-36): (here I have in mind those who argue that government has no role to play in caring for the people's welfare...)
"And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine."
Here's the lesson I'm drawing for myself from all of this—and please tell me if this is helpful of if I'm on a tangent:
Don't ignore today's evil; pay attention to what is going on in the world today that's not consistent with a vision of God's care for us all, and God's righteousness.
But then take it all directly to God. Confess freely to God both gratitude and distress. Ask how my gifts and temperament fit into God's picture.
Tomorrow, start the day fresh by being grounded in God's presence so that tomorrow's evil doesn't already turn me sour! I'm much more useful to self, family, and the world if I'm not obsessed and addicted.
Be prepared to join and support communities that plan and advocate for the longer term, but above all remember to live one day at a time.
Robert Reich charges Donald Trump with a rolling coup. (Is this a fair charge?)
Thanks to the creator of this spreadsheet, with its many details and contact information for U.S. legislators, governors, other officeholders, and news media.
Instagram video: Why do children of Christians become socialist?
I was feeling sorry for my half-Norwegian self when our temperatures here in Portland, Oregon, reached 95 degrees (F) a couple of days ago. A friend in Pakistan reminded me of another reality.
Nancy Thomas and a thirty-year-old memory of AI's forebears trying to tempt her with canned letters for "virtually every situation you can face in the church." (I remember this when she first wrote about it in Quaker Life. It's great, though sobering, to be reminded.)
The real harvest: Micah Bales on the day-to-day ministry of Jesus, and its implications for our role.
It’s a really big deal that God hasn’t simply jumped in and fixed our problems for us without involving us in the process. I want us to really grasp what this means for us as human beings: This means that we matter. Our lives and actions are important. The salvation of the world is coming about not merely through the Spirit’s action in the world. God in his wisdom has decided that our world is to be redeemed and transformed by the working of the Holy Spirit in us.
McKinley James, with Mark Wenner on harp. "Blues With a Feeling."
Last week I looked at a specific debate... True or false? ... Christians are called to change themselves, not systems. I agreed that it is necessary to start with ourselves, but that some of us may then be led to challenge systems. I appreciated Marshall Massey's responses in that post's comment section.
That original debate sprang from an assertion by Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and a rebuttal from one of his Christian opponents. It seemed like a textbook example of a conflict between two different understandings of Christian faith and practice—a conflict that has heated up in the USA's current political context, in which white Christian nationalists seek to dominate the country.
For a while it has seemed that the alliance between some evangelical Christians and far-right politics was defining the public face of Christians in U.S. mass media. Secular audiences could be forgiven for concluding that our Good News was actually bad news. For those seeking to offer different, more attractive and more honest expressions of our faith, help is coming in the form of both diagnoses and resources.
Some of these resources have actually been around for a while, but are worth mentioning now. Here are just a few examples, mostly from a quarter of a century ago or more:
Elizabeth O'Connor, Letters to Scattered Pilgrims. ("Whoever joins God's liberation movement must be content to spend time in the wilderness....")
John Fugelsang, Separation of Church and Hate (the book I started with above).
Of these last three, Fugelsang's book is less diagnostic and more of a resource: specifically, biblically-based counterpoints to the truth claims of white Christian nationalism. It's the book I've spent the last couple of days with, trying to decide whether to recommend it here.
The person who told me about this book often engages, sometimes at surprising length, with MAGA Christians online. The MAGA participants are often surprised at encountering biblical literacy among those who challenge their claims, and it is with this goal in mind—equipping the humane left wing of the Christian movement with biblical responses (and, more importantly, biblical context)—that Fugelsang wrote his book.
Separation of Church and Hate is divided into several sections corresponding to most of the principal controversies that mark these debates.
Jesus and Paul
Biblical literalism
Feminism
"Thou Shalt Not Hate the Gays"
Abortion
"Illegals"
Poverty and poor people
Sex
Capital punishment
Gun control and the worship of "Warrior Bro-Dude Jesus"
"Thou Shalt Not Hate Jews, Muslims, or Even Atheists"
White supremacy
John Fugelsang is not a biblical scholar, historian, or theologian, but he interviewed several of them in the process of assembling this book, and his acknowledgments include some familiar names. Within each of those themes, he gives some background for the controversies within that theme, and also lists typical claims made by Christian nationalists, and suggests responses. I'm guessing that you would already have anticipated many of his recommendations, but this book doesn't take a reader's familiarity with the Bible for granted. One of the good features of this book is its value as an introduction to the depth of biblical resources for justice, grace, mercy, and radical love. And in the process, he comes up with some flashes of insight that may delight you as much as they did me.
Fugelsang anticipates that his audience will include all sorts of readers, including people altogether outside Christianity, and Christians who don't share some of his interpretations. Here's how he explains his purpose:
[The book is] ... a guide to everything the haters got wrong. It focuses on Christianity through the teachings of Jesus, known to some as the "red letters" of the bible. And it'll show that if you're debating an authoritarian Christian on almost any subject that divides us, Jesus probably has your back. Whether you're a believer, agnostic, or atheist, whatever you think about politics, you're going to have to deal with these people at some point. they want to control the level of freedom in US society based on how they pick and choose from the Bible. It's going to be increasingly vital to dismantle their supernatural authority by elegantly pointing out that they don't really follow this Bible they claim to base their lives on. And you'll be surprised at how good it feels, too.
Personally, I hope I'm not in this conflict simply because it feels good to one-up anyone, but there's nothing wrong with modest confidence in one's desire to uphold the reputation of the Gospel. A related note: Fuglesang is, among other things, a comedian, and I sometimes find his jocularity a bit off-putting. (Note the subtitle!) Maybe you won't. It doesn't diminish the book's usefulness. However, at times it introduces a bit of dissonance when, on the one hand, he proposes excellent guidelines for pursuing dialogue in a courteous and receptive spirit, but then he himself uses some spicy nicknames for the people he's helping us oppose.
A recent exchange on Facebook began with a quotation from U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico:
We as Christians are called to do more than charity. We are called to challenge the system that made the charity necessary.
The response:
Christians are never called to change systems. We are called to change ourselves.
The next two participants in the exchange explained why they felt that Christians should challenge systems. I have my own reasons for agreeing with them, but before I go into those reasons, I want to say why that "never called to change systems" commenter should also be heard.
We are called to change ourselves, and to be changed by our relationship with God. In his preface to George Fox's Journal, William Penn put it this way, describing the marks of authenticity among early Quakers:
I. They were changed men [sic] themselves before they went about to change others. Their hearts were rent as well as their garments; and they knew the power and work of God upon them. And this was seen by the great alteration it made, and their stricter course of life, and more godly conversation, that immediately followed upon it.
II. They went not forth, or preached in their own time or will, but in the will of God, and spoke not their own studied matter, but as they were opened and moved of his Spirit, with which they were well acquainted in their own conversion.
It was in this spirit that George Fox testified that "Christ has come to teach his people himself." In this same spirit, he resisted persuasive invitations to join the Commonwealth forces in the civil war against the forces of Charles I. If he had agreed, he would have been freed from prison. While he was still in that prison, he also felt led to protest against capital punishment for minor crimes, and (not surprisingly) against cruel prison conditions.
These are the points that perhaps the "never called to change systems" commenter and I might agree on:
Being Christian is not a solo act. In changing ourselves and our world, we are part of a community that prays and studies and offers discernment to each of us, activists as well as those of other temperaments. "... And the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets," 1 Corinthians 14:32, context.
Most people struggling for revolutionary change sooner or later resort to coercion. For those called by Jesus to love their enemies, and by Paul never to return evil for evil, the illusion that we can make others' lives better through force, whatever the driving ideology, is not an option.
It is also not an option to label something "Christian" with manipulative intent, trading on the emotional strength of religious language, references, behaviors, or symbols when the Holy Spirit is not part of the performance. (See this post for my cautions about using public meetings for worship in a protest context.)
On the other hand, here are some of the reasons Christians (when mutually accountable to each other) should work on the level of systems as well as selves.
Paul's letter to the Ephesians, in chapter six, has a famous passage about spiritual warfare and "the whole armor of God." "...Our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). We are called to identify and oppose bondages of all kinds, on a systemic level, but only after having the "whole armor" for what we Quakers have sometimes called "the Lamb's War."
Within the mutually respectful and mutually accountable division of labor that is the Church, some of us are prophets. The biblical model of prophecy includes announcing God's judgment and God's promises to all who will listen—sometimes a whole city, sometimes a whole country, sometimes a whole generation. The rest of us may have gifts that overlap into prophecy (such as the gift of evangelism), but all of us are part of the prophets' discerning community.
Jesus told us to "Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s." As citizens we participate in our country's support and governance, in part by obeying laws and paying taxes, and in many countries, doing our part to choose our leaders. Although we are working as citizens to preserve some systems and perhaps to change others, our values and ethics, and consequently our vision of good governance, reflect our faith as disciples. (NOTE: I'm not saying that Christians are the only ones who have such values and ethics!!)
On a related point: when Caesar trespasses on God's territory—for example, when the authorities told Peter and John that they had to stop speaking or preaching in the name of Jesus—obedience to God takes precedence: Faced with the authority's demands, "... Peter and John replied, 'Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to [God]? You be the judges! As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.'" (Acts 3:1-4:31.)
Finally, on a mundane level, as soon as a congregation (even a house church) actually gathers for worship and education at set times and places, they are interacting with the systems. Do they need permission to meet? Do they own property? Do they require security? Are they allowed to feed people and provide shelter? What happens when they decide to shelter immigrants? Do they stand up for people of other faiths who desire the same freedoms?
This post was prompted by an exchange I saw on Facebook. Now it's your turn; is there anything you'd like to add or correct?
The Global Justice Project attempts to set out a new vision for global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.
It was my effort to make sense of the experiences of Christian women that led me to this new account of American Christianity writ large, and ultimately, to a clearer understanding of the spiritual underpinnings of our current cultural and political landscape.
While Live Laugh Love complements Jesus and John Wayne, it presents a more complicated narrative. To trace the roots of modern Christian women’s culture, I needed to reach back to an earlier era, to the dynamic religious landscape of nineteenth-century America. I also needed to extend beyond evangelicalism to include mainline and charismatic Christianity, Mormonism, and “secular” philosophies of positive thinking. Women’s relationship to power is more complicated than men’s. Women exercise agency, but it is often circumscribed by the authority of the men in their lives. Like Jesus and John Wayne, however, this is a book about whiteness. Although women of color have participated in aspects of this consumer culture and at times have voiced astute critiques of it, the book describes a consumer marketplace that caters primarily to white women’s needs and desires.
Also like Jesus and John Wayne, this story ends in a dark place, as perhaps any history of the United States that runs up to the present must.
The research that gave rise to this book was full of twists and turns. Early on, I was surprised by the frequency with which twentieth-century Christian women quoted the wisdom of Hannah Whitall Smith. A nineteenth-century “holiness” preacher, Smith had popularized a more optimistic version of Christianity than the one I had heard preached from the pulpit of my church. In contrast to Calvinism’s depiction of the persistence of sin even in the lives of believers, Smith taught that a simple act of faith granted believers victory over sin and a profound sense of peace, well-being, and happiness. Despite the fact that Smith had written one of the best-selling religious books of her time, most histories of American Christianity mentioned her only in passing. Why was Smith everywhere in the sources, I wondered, and why had so many other Christian women repackaged her ideas more than half a century after her death?
Following footnotes and traveling to archives, I began to piece together a narrative almost entirely unfamiliar to me. My sources brought me to the court of Louis XVI and to the woods of upstate New York, to the Chinese mission field and along the Mormon Trail. When I ended up back on the terrain of twentieth-century evangelicalism, the familiar had become strange. By then, three interlocking strands had come into focus: Smith’s holiness evangelicalism, Mormonism, and the philosophy of New Thought.
Du Mez totally keeps her implied promise of tracing those "interlocking strands" right through to this very year, including the ways Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, along with the religious publishing, marketing, and broadcasting enterprises and the phenomenon of multi-level marketing, became part of the mix.
Early in the book, Du Mez addresses her audience:
This book is for the men in the room. It is for readers who have never heard of Beverly Lewis or Rebecca St. James, for those who wouldn’t dream of buying a Thomas Kinkade print or waiting in line for a Magnolia cupcake. You have no idea what you’ve been missing. But this book is especially for the women. It is for girls who braided their hair like Laura Ingalls and tried to obey like Elisabeth Elliot. It is for women who made all the crafts and know all the songs. It is for those of us who were not pretty enough or sweet enough or white enough. It is for women who loved Beth Moore and for women who still love Beth Moore. It is for all of us.
As a white male who came to Christian faith as an adult, I'm among those who never heard of Beverly Lewis or Rebecca St. James. I was aware of the "prairie fiction" and "Amish romance" genres, and of authors Janette Oke, Elisabeth Elliot, and Catherine Marshall, simply because I've worked in three different Christian bookstores, but I was completely unaware of the underlying influences and messages directed at women.
I was aware of Hannah Whitall Smith's book The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, because it was on my Canadian charismatic relatives' bookshelf as well as on the shelves of those bookstores. It had been in print ever since it was published in 1875.
In this book, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, Smith identifies with "we Quakers," the faith of her family and young adulthood, although later she and her husband were baptized by the Baptists and became Holiness celebrities in the context of Atlantic-culture evangelicalism. (She eventually rejoined Quakers through Baltimore Yearly Meeting.) What I didn't realize until reading Live Laugh Love was how her book was appropriated for the purpose of creating a specific message to women: you must decide to be happy, whatever your outward circumstances; that's (more or less) the only control you have. Other parts of her spiritual heritage, particularly the freedom she insisted upon to preach as a woman, and her belief in universal salvation, were de-emphasized and forgotten.
Du Mez mentions the neglect of Smith in histories of American Christianity. (I just checked Peter W. Williams's 604-page America's Religions and found one tiny mention of her, misspelled, paired with David Updegraff as "Quakers with evangelical leanings..." in a list of those participating in an early stream of the Holiness movement. No mention of her book.) This lack of recognition reminded me of Agnes Sanford, whose central role in the healing-prayer movement of the twentieth century while almost invisible to the academic world, was documented in William de Arteaga's book Agnes Sanford and her Companions: The Assault on Cessationism and the Coming of the Charismatic Renewal. (See this post.)
But the main reason I'm referring to Du Mez's careful study of Hannah Whitall Smith's work is that it is just one example of how she presents her many sources and the ways they influenced each other to this day, including the role of women in the Christian networks that now seek to remake the USA into a theocracy.
I found insights, references, and connections to highlight on practically every page of this book. It took over my life these last few days. Du Mez's writing is intense ... sometimes I was struck deeply by the bondages imposed on women under Christian pretenses, sometimes I cheered the Christian resistance to those bondages, but I was never bored. If you have any interest in these themes and variations of faith, politics, and culture, I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Hoping I'm not stretching fair use to the breaking point, here's another excerpt, this time related to the book's name.
Live Laugh Love is a book about love and fear, longing and greed, about Mary Kay makeup, Christian romance novels, Joyce Meyer Ministries, and Ballerina Farm. Its cast of characters includes true believers and charlatans, well-intentioned people and predators, and it is not always clear who is who. This is also a book about politics. White Christian women often claim to be apolitical; if you ask them, they will tell you that their lives revolve around faith and family, yet what they think about faith and family informs their views on education, taxation, welfare, economic inequality, immigration, law enforcement, and what it means to be American. Far from trivial, the products women consume influence how they see the world they live in and the world they hope to create. Ultimately, this is a book about power—about women’s power to define their own lives, men’s power over women, and the power women wield over one another. It is about discipleship and devotion, authority and submission, manipulation, cruelty, and control.
These excerpts and my comments are based on a digital galley proof obtained through Netgalley. I was made aware of the galley when I joined the Live Laugh Love Launch Team. When the book is printed and made available in September, I may need to check and revise these quotations. However, what you've read so far accurately represents the author's promises to us readers, and the amazing work she has put into fulfilling them.
Lamorna Ash, author of Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion, which I reviewed in this post, will speak at Westminster Quaker Meeting's meetinghouse on Saturday, June 20, 7 p.m. London time, in person and online. Theme: "Quakers and a new generation’s search for religion." Details here. (Thanks to Bunhill Fields Quaker Meeting's newsletter for the link.)
Elderchaplain Greg Morgan on Rosalie, her gratitude, and her quilt.
