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| Kevin Camp. Photo: Chris Stewart. |
Kevin Camp on Quakers' "wildly diverging views."
Reposted, with permission, from Kevin's post on the Facebook group Christian Quakers. The titles above are mine.
This past First Day I felt a leading, as I often do, to invoke the memory of Abraham Lincoln in my vocal ministry. Lincoln is a hero of mine, and he steered the United States through the worst crisis in its existence up until that point, and arguably its most dire state ever in our nearly 250 years of existence.
Christians find themselves increasingly divided into factions these days. I'm speaking primarily about American Friends in this post. Quakers on the right adhere to their own strongly held beliefs and the same is true with Quakers on the left.
Friends are called by different names. Some are Evangelicals. Some are conservative, in the Quaker sense, meaning they seek to conserve the old way of doing things. Some are Hicksite Friends, usually closely allied with FGC—and are by in large liberal unprogrammed Quakers, who may or may not consider themselves Christian.
And who can say which of us has the correct answer, the correct verse of Scripture to invoke in debate, the most accurate usage of the Quakerese we know so well and love so much. I adhere to my own interpretation, but so does someone else who, while we might share the moniker "Quaker", we don't share very much besides that. Lincoln observed a similar dynamic in his own time, a country torn asunder by Civil War. And he was struck by the many ironies. Thinking of what North and South had in common, Lincoln spoke,
"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other...The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.'"
The passage of Scripture with which Lincoln concludes the above passage with is pulled from the King James Version of the Bible. Put into more contemporary language, it states that suffering is inevitable. Some will always lead others astray. And though that suffering is inevitable, how terrible it will be for the person or persons who create it. They will experience harsh punishment.
We live in an era where many seek to lead others astray. Some through ignorance. Some through misguided zeal. Some with an agenda to advance. And I can't determine the complete truth in any source I consult. It all seems slanted to suit someone's self-interest.
Lincoln took a radical view about the American Civil War. A pox on both your houses! Both sides were equally at fault, in his reckoning. Though the South's plantation owners kept enslaved people, and maintained the system that kept it profitable, the North indirectly made money from the products produced by slave labor.
Maybe levying fault isn't as important as changing the status quo. I don't pretend that people with such wildly divergent views will ever come together under a common purpose. For example, the only thing an Evangelical Friend and I will likely ever have in common is the fact that we are a product of the hard work of George Fox. Beyond that, we are as different as chalk and cheese.
So rather than let this demoralize us, I suggest we work within the people who will hear our message and strive to push past the propaganda that passes for news, not just on the right and left, but everywhere. Provided that those who disagree with me don't deny my right to worship as I please and what I please, I have no grievance with them.
But wouldn't it be wonderful if we ended up on the same page, eventually. That's an idealistic goal and one that seems increasingly unlikely the older I get, but it is a solution for us, not just as Friends, but also as Americans.
Kevin Camp (they/them), a member of Birmingham (Alabama) Friends Meeting and Camas (Washington) Friends Church, published an excellent book of short stories last year, Thanksgiving on Meth Mountain. Fuller biography on their Amazon page here.
Kevin's post gave me a lot to think about.
First of all, their quotation from Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address once again reminded me of how unusual it is for a politician not to refer to God as 100% WITH US. Elton Trueblood referred to Lincoln as the "theologian of American anguish," and this speech makes the case. In the U.S. Civil War, the North prevailed, as Trueblood pointed out, not "as a consequence of the supreme wisdom or righteousness of the citizens of the North." When Lincoln spoke of "all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil", the settler colonial beneficiaries of that toil were in both North and South.
In one of the most sublime passages in English-language political speech, Lincoln yearned and prayed for reconciliation:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
What was always clear to some of us, and has now become glaringly obvious as racism makes a roaring comeback in today's USA: the nation's wounds have not been bound up, a just and lasting peace has not been achieved. All the more reason to recall Lincoln's words and remind ourselves of this vision, stubbornly not giving it up for lost.
We Quakers haven't exactly gone through a civil war, but we have had a number of severe divisions, as a result of which (as Kevin pointed out) we're often appealing to the same history and the same Quaker language and drawing very different conclusions. Kevin's post urges us not to let divisions demoralize us, and I agree.
In two periods of my service with international Friends organizations—ten years with Friends World Committee for Consultation and seven with Friends United Meeting—I visited hundreds of Friends communities, and I found among them many Friends who, with varying degrees of stubbornness, would fit Kevin's descriptions of people as different as chalk and cheese according to their preferred interpretations of core Quakerism. But over all those years, I caught glimpses of progress as well. Maybe we won't be reading from the exact same page anytime soon, but there are many Friends who are at least looking at each other's favorite pages....
- Some of us in our tight categories simply haven't heard that there are other ways of being Quaker. Among other important accomplishments, Friends World Committee for Consultation consistently offers Quakers opportunities to meet and consult across the traditional lines that Kevin's post cited, but how many of us are even aware of these opportunities? Looking at our theological divisions from my home on the Christian side of things (dare I even say "evangelical"?), I've run into many so-called liberal or universalist Friends who haven't deliberately rejected a Christian Quaker testimony, but simply haven't even had a decent chance to encounter and consider it. (Let's face it: authoritarian religiosity, toxic biblical malpractice and Christian nationalist heresies have not helped.) If we get to know each other better, you might still not agree with my spiritual priorities, nor I with yours, but at least it won't be from ignorance...
- ... and there is no reason we can't work for peace and justice together along the priorities we do share, which is important in a world with so much pain and bondage. Friends in Portland, Oregon, for example, are crossing categories in advocating and acting for refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers.
- When I was at Friends United Meeting, I remember being startled at how often the occasions when liberal and evangelical Friends were irritating each other actually boiled down to differences between urban and rural communication styles, and not just theology. Learning to accommodate these differences in styles won't overcome every theological gap, but at least we can clear away some of the misunderstandings.
- Few divisions are absolute. Some of us live in the overlaps. I began my life as a Friend in the unprogrammed side of the Quaker world, among predominantly liberal Friends (though my mentors in that community were deeply Christian), but now I've spent most of my fifty years as a Friend in pastoral, programmed meetings. I'm not alone in my dislike of being defined by conventional categories. Over the last 21 years I've been writing this blog, I've seen more and more bloggers, traveling Friends, retreat and workshop leaders, authors, and others helping expand opportunities for lively Quaker conversations and new understandings of leadership, community, and calling. (Emily Provance and Windy Cooler, just for starters, and, as always, Martin Kelley helping us stay up to date.)
- Are genuine seekers, waiting on the Holy Spirit (whether in quiet receptivity or in total desperation!), ever all that far from God and each other, regardless of their worship styles? When we resort to faking it for the sake of conformity, and either start hiding in the silence or retreating behind our Sunday routines, the differences in style and language are most obvious—and matter the least.
- We share other significant challenges. Liberals and evangelicals alike suffer from widespread ignorance about our spiritual and intellectual roots in the "hard work of George Fox" mentioned by Kevin. Sometimes we prefer to stick with a few selected sound bites if we know even that much. We allow our internal conceits and conflicts to obscure our most important audience: those who have never heard of us. We sometimes tolerate lazy mediocrity in our administrative systems and communications, a mediocrity we would not accept in our secular lives. Sometimes our Quaker exceptionalism makes us unaware of other faith communities that have pulled ahead of us in addressing our signature concerns. Saddest of all, too often we can describe Quaker ideals eloquently but can't point to a church or meeting nearby that actually lives them out.
What do you think? Will we continue to drift apart, or will the overlaps increase? Tell us about meetings and churches where newcomers and long-timers say "I'm so glad I'm here!"
Some related posts:
- Signs, part three
- Open hearts (scroll down to "radical hospitality")
- Quakerism of the future
- The Quaker voice
- Barriers revisited
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| Our courtyard, August 6, 2010. |
Here's an item that takes me back fifteen years, to the summer of 2010. That was the year I stayed in Elektrostal, Russia, the whole summer, not attending the Northwest Yearly Meeting sessions in the USA, and thereby able to experience the smog caused by that summer's fires in the region's neglected peat fields. The item: "How Peat Elektrified the USSR."
Jemar Tisby asks, "What's going on with white men?"
... When a single demographic consistently diverges from every other group—across race, education, and gender—it’s worth asking why.
The UN's latest humanitarian situation reports for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Trump's plan is now in the open, says Peter Wehner. "It’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots."
In honor of Christone "Kingfish" Ingram's visit to the UK this month, here's a recent video, "The Thrill Is Gone."
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