"Where there was a wish, there was a way"

Source.  

Early in her new book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez (author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation) gives us some context for her major history of the Christian trends that are now seeking to dominate the USA:

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.

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Hoping I'm not stretching fair use to the breaking point, here's another excerpt, this time related to the book's name.

Two years after William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience, an Iowa woman named Bessie Anderson Stanley submitted a poem to a magazine contest asking readers to define “success.” The person who achieved success, Stanley wrote, was one who “has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.” The poem won the $250 cash prize, enough to pay off the mortgage on Stanley’s home. Reprinted in various anthologies, the poem entered the popular lexicon in condensed form. Over the years, one variant was mistakenly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, an error popularized by advice columnists Ann Landers and her sister, Abby. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, few bothered to ask where the phrase gracing glittery tumblers, decorative throw pillows, and Hobby Lobby wall art had originated. In 2021, online retailer Wayfair stocked more than fifty-six thousand Live Laugh Love products, and DIY marketplace Etsy reported over one hundred thousand searches and listed more than eight thousand products carrying the words. ... But the phrase’s popularity was more than a décor trend associated with “basic” white women. Its ubiquitous appearance on wall stencils and household items was a result, in part, of the enduring popularity of mind-power—if the mind could shape reality, then visual reminders to think positive thoughts could produce positive transformations. Where there was a wish, there was a way....

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.

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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.

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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.

Pope Leo XIV and artificial intelligence: the encyclical. "...A religious imperative...." "...Counterbalancing alarm with hope...."

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When I first heard this song as a teenager, I honestly didn't understand it but I couldn't stop listening.

#livelaughlovebook

"Speak, Memory"

A couple of weeks ago, my therapist suggested that I write down some of my early memories, grouped chronologically. Maybe later we can discern some trends and common causes.

The task became easier when I reached the age of 14, when I began writing a daily diary, which I continue to this day. Still, I have memories from before that age ... many of which came back to me since I began assembling the list she suggested.

Source for portrait

Judy is a volunteer at a charity shop in our neighborhood, and she primarily works with their used books. Coincidentally, the same day I accepted this memory-list assignment, Judy brought home a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's remembrances, Speak, Memory, which includes some of his earliest childhood memories.

Here's one of those memories:

Several times during a summer it might happen that in the middle of luncheon, in the bright, many-windowed, walnut-paneled dining room on the first floor of our Vyra manor, Aleksey, the butler, with an unhappy expression on his face, would bend over and inform my father in a low voice (especially low if we had company) that a group of villagers wanted to see the barin [that is, the master of the estate, Nabokov’s father] outside. Briskly my father would remove his napkin from his lap and ask my mother to excuse him. One of the windows at the west end of the dining room gave upon a portion of the drive near the main entrance. One could see the top of the honeysuckle bushes opposite the porch. From that direction the courteous buzz of a peasant welcome would reach us as the invisible group greeted my invisible father. The ensuing parley, conducted in ordinary tones, would not be heard, as the windows underneath which it took place were closed to keep out the heat. It presumably had to do with a plea for his mediation in some local feud, or with some special subsidy, or with the permission to harvest some bit of our land or cut down a coveted  clump of our trees. If, as usually happened, the request was at once granted, there would be again that buzz, and then, in token of gratitude, the good barin would be put through the national ordeal of being rocked and tossed up and securely caught by a score or so of strong arms.

In the dining room, my brother and I would be told to go on with our food. My mother, a tidbit between finger and thumb, would glance under the table to see if her nervous and gruff dachshund was there. “Un jour ils vont le laisser tomber,” [“One day they’re going to abandon him,”] would come from Mlle Golay, a primly pessimistic old lady who had been my mother’s governess and still dwelt with us (on awful terms with our own governesses). From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky, Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

I love this piece of writing, which combines a child’s lack of full context with our childhood tendency to make fanciful associations, like the similarity between his levitating father in his wind-rippled white suit with the angels on cathedral ceilings, which he might have noticed during a funeral liturgy.

My home in grade school years. (Second floor, left.)
Source: Google Maps, 2011.

In my family, such memories would have been unlikely to occur. We lived in an apartment building, not an aristocratic estate, and levitations of any kind outside our second-story windows would have been very hazardous. Furthermore, any mention of religion was strictly forbidden in our home, as I mentioned in this post a couple of years ago, so I would not have made any connections with angels on a church ceiling. 

As I recalled in that post, I have a vivid memory from grade school, when our teacher asked us why we should be afraid to talk about God. (This was before the prayer-in-school controversy that began in 1962.) I found myself sitting there, strangely tongue-tied, and thought then that I would never be able to use the word “God” out loud in public. Still, I was fascinated that people who appeared normal could have such a discussion at all. It was as if God had very temporarily levitated above the windowsill of our schoolroom, as Nabokov’s father had when his tenants had lofted him into the air.

Another time that God briefly hung in the air in my childhood was when I found a Gospel tract on the floor of our building’s lobby. The author described something resembling what I would now call a conversion experience. This new believer had so fallen in love with the Lord that, in his daily walks in the city, he would go out of his way to pass churches so that his hungry eyes would see the name “Christ” on the church buildings.

A little later, but long before my personal conversion, I used to listen to a Sunday night church service on my favorite top-40 rock station, WCFL, the voice of the Chicago Federation of Labor. Normally, I would be listening to that station to hear Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs sing “Wooly Bully” or “The Hair on my Chinny Chin Chin,” or Herman’s Hermits sing “There’s a Kind of a Hush All Over the World Tonight,” or Tommy James and the Shondells’ unforgettable classic “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky,” or Wilson Pickett’s oh-so-suggestive “In the Midnight Hour.” Among my favorite memories of sheer escapism was the sublime chaos of Ron Britain's unique style of DJ'ing. I still remember this particular broadcast.

I also relied on WCFL for broadcasts of Chicago White Sox baseball games, via the voices of announcers Bob Elson and Red Rush. I dutifully recorded results in my diary, and was especially happy when my favorite relief pitcher, Hoyt Wilhelm, got credited with a save.

Source.  

But Sundays at 11 p.m., something different was on the air. It was the weekly service of the First Church of Deliverance, with the warm, magnetic personality of the Rev. Clarence H. Cobbs leading the service. Years later, Rev. Jesse Jackson called Clarence Cobbs his “spiritual father.”

Obviously, I kept my being part of Rev. Cobbs’ radio congregation a secret from my family. I attended the First Church of Deliverance while in bed, listening with my little single earphone, with my head under the blanket. I loved the church's theme hymn, “Jesus Is the Light of the World,” which was my first exposure to Black Gospel music. I also remember "Jesus Is a Healer," "How I Got Over," "I'm going to Make It," and "Let Us Sing 'til the Power."

What really intrigued me was the pastoral prayer for “the sick, the shut-ins, the bereaved, the incarcerated, and all those who love the Lord.” Although I did not know intellectually whether I was included in those last words, they always gave me a distinct tingle.

My oldest memory of this kind was from sometime between the ages of two and four, during the years I lived with my mother’s parents in Stuttgart, Germany, before my parents came to claim me and take me to my new home in Chicago. I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap in our home at Robert Bosch Str. 104, and she was teaching me how to tie my shoes. And while she was doing that, she was talking to me about the Good Shepherd. I clearly remember that this was how she talked about Jesus. I like to think that these experiences of God rising into my field of vision for just a short time despite the obstacles, formed a golden thread that usually ran below the surface of my life until the day I came to know that I could trust that very same Good Shepherd, and eventually led to my being willing, even invited, to write and talk about God in public.

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Source.  

I used some of this essay in a sermon at Spokane Friends Meeting last Sunday. One of the slides I used that morning during the sermon was this painting by Willem Drost, sometimes interpreted as being a portrait of Timothy (recipient of New Testament letters from his mentor, the apostle Paul) and his grandmother Lois. I can't help associating it with my own grandmother, thanks to whom I caught one of my first glimpses of God.

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Related posts:

Radio shorts

April shorts

A song of quiet trust

"The devil doesn't like it but it's down in my heart."

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Out of the many books on aging, Nancy Thomas has a specific recommendation.

(I continue to recommend John Yungblut's On Hallowing One's Diminishments for the specific aspects of aging he deals with. I wrote about that pamphlet here.)

Comments on the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine ... from Heather Cox Richardson, and from Jeremy Morris. The latter writes about the typical errors of commentators on Russia and Ukraine, and summarizes what he himself got right and got wrong over the past few years. As usual, his dense prose rewards careful reading.

Meanwhile, Timothy Snyder says that Donald Trump is "failing at fascism."

Collaborate or collapse: Matt Hisrich points to a possible new path forward in an era of shrinking markets and closures in higher education.

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Top three Winter Olympic teams judging by medals, snipped from this page.

This past weekend the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy came to a close. Team Norway, as usual, did their  (my) homeland proud. Among the other statistics describing the Norwegian triumph, I noticed something nobody seemed to comment on: Norway got 41 medals with a team of 80 athletes, while the USA got 33 medals with a team almost three times as large, 232 athletes. Here's The Guardian's rather routine analysis of Norwegian Olympic success. Timothy Snyder writes about watching the Olympic Games in Ukraine.

Now that I've got Norway's triumphs commented on, I can return to my usual conceit of being a citizen of the whole planet.

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First Church of Deliverance is on the air! This recording takes me back to my teenage memories of listening secretly to these broadcasts. "Lift up your heads! Don't be afraid!"

Fiercely inspirational

Source.

Source.

Two writers in two countries, published 64 years apart....

Lamorna Ash.

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Sometimes, as I sat in the outer ring of chairs during my silent Sundays at the Muswell Hill meeting [London; link added], I wished I could have seen Quakerism as it was in its beginning: an exuberant, fiercely heterodox expression of the Christian faith. [Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion (2025), page 136.]

In line with the secularisation-theory sociologist Steve Bruce, Dandelion notes how liberal forms of British Christianity are contributing to their ‘own demise through diffuse belief systems, poor belief transmission and the lack of seriousness’, all of which discourages conversion. He includes Quakerism among this trend. And while Quakerism might function as a gateway drug to ‘religious seriousness’ for the 47 per cent who come from ‘no immediately prior religious affiliation’, it is often the features which first draw the non-religious to Quaker meetings—a laxity and neutrality in the place of dogma and formality—which then sends them off to other denominations, looking for services with a more robust structure, elders and leaders who might help teach them how to believe. [Page 128.]

The year reached its end, and I was still attending St Luke’s [West Holloway, London, link added] any Sunday my hangover did not intern me to bed. I learnt the order of ceremonies. Each time I felt something unlock within me as I admitted my guilt for whomever I had harmed that week alongside everyone else in the congregation, after which the associate priest, Rev. Martin Wroe, would say, ‘Whatever it is, whatever it was, whatever it will be, God forgives you. Forgive yourselves, forgive each other,’ and then offer us the sign of the Cross. Not every time, but most times, after taking communion I felt a further unlocking, even a coming together of the disparate parts of my life. [Page 280.]

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Albert Fowler.

Members of the Society of Friends are increasingly disturbed by the comment that Quaker Meeting is a fine place for seeking, but one must go elsewhere if one’s object is finding. [Two Trends in Modern Quaker Thought: A Statement of Belief (1961), page 12.]

Much has been made of the argument that the universal variety of Quaker belief is the growing edge of the Society of Friends. Large numbers of convinced Friends have come in through this door. That the universal may also be the dying edge of the Society is seldom mentioned, but many would-be Friends turn away when they find the Christian ties of a Meeting no longer binding and the drift toward what John McCandless calls practical atheism running strong. Paul Lacey tells of people he has talked with who have found the Society of Friends a kind of incubator where they can develop just enough to realize that the real conditions of life and worship lie outside it. Many of these people, having looked to the Quaker Meeting as a source of inspiration and deepened faith, pass beyond it to find fuller meaning elsewhere. [Page 19.]

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I first heard about Lamorna Ash in the pages of The Guardian. The opening teaser for Ash's edited excerpt in The Guardian, "Could I become a Christian in a year?", was irresistible:

After two friends unexpectedly converted, Lamorna Ash discovered a new generation of young people turning to faith. As she investigated the phenomenon, one of her first steps was to spend a week on a working retreat on Iona. And then something strange happened…

This intro is a bit misleading. In just about all of her fourteen chapters plus prologue, introduction, conclusion, and epilogue, strange things are happening every few pages, so the intriguing part of the teaser is not the "something strange" dot dot dot, but "a new generation of young people turning to faith." This is not your typical glib summary of contemporary church life in Britain. In any case, the excerpt sold me: I had to buy the book. And, most likely, so should you.

Ash makes me think about what a conversation between Francis Spufford and Flannery O'Connor might be like. Her survey of Christianity in the UK ranges from rigidity with a happy salesface, to bass-driven ecstasy, to personal histories of toxic power games, to encounters with mysticism ancient and modern, to utter serenity, and everything in between. Her 60 interviewees have variously been converted, disillusioned, reconverted, with all levels of investment in making—or not making—their personal experiences and confessions congruent with the institution they're in at the moment. She candidly reports how this research and writing project is affecting her own life, even as she awaits a diagnosis on her mother's symptoms that suggest dementia may be coming.

She is not simply reporting on what Christianity looks like to some of her Generation Z contemporaries. She's also wrestling with Christianity's own primitive and sometimes compelling strangeness, and its multifaceted persistence. She thinks about the difference between the Nicene theologians wrestling so deeply with the nature of Christ, and those Christian thinkers of our own era who can't get beyond sex. And she wonders out loud about her own path. Should she remain an outside observer, or should she be open to crossing the line into conversion territory; and is she being influenced by what we, the readers, might think?

Lamorna Ash's paternal grandmother "was the last true Christian in our family. She went to an Anglican church every Sunday of her life, except for the few years she attended a Quaker meeting in Muswell Hill." For part of the time of Ash's writing project, when she wasn't on one of her many research visits elsewhere, she attended that same meeting, which led to some very interesting comments about British Friends. I couldn't help remembering some of Albert Fowler's words from his 1961 pamphlet on Two Trends in Modern Quaker Thought, quoted above.

I don't want to press the parallels between Ash and Fowler too hard, because I know that many British Friends are already aware of contemporary liberal Quakerism's weaknesses as well as its strengths (and the same goes for Friends in the USA), and I personally know that some of them would certainly not fit into the "laxity and neutrality" description. Also, I'm not sure those early Friends were "fiercely heterodox" exactly, since Fox and others were arguing for a more faithfully biblical Christianity. "Fiercely nonconformist," maybe. Even so, I am grateful for the frank assessment from this clear-eyed young commentator who has seen Christian alternatives many Quakers would either not know about or perhaps shrink from with horror.

Lamorna Ash has a lot of credibility with me simply based on the homework she's done. (I'm sure she'd have a more fun way of putting it.) You already know she references Ben Pink Dandelion, who has, she suggests, "the best name in academia." She also knows one of my favorite contemporary British books on Christianity, Francis Spufford's Unapologetic. (My comments on his book are here.) Her other sources include Harold Bloom, Julian of Norwich, Gillian Rose, George Fox, Rosemary Moore, Thomas R. Kelly, Karl Rahner, William James, David Bebbington, Tanya Luhrmann, Krista Tippett and Eugene Peterson in conversation, Pope Francis, and two Augustines.

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Yesterday's MAGA scandal of the day (or at least in the top five): According to the Washington Post, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to be sure that no federal disaster relief money would go to agencies or nonprofit organizations that help undocumented immigrants.

Also among the top five: Chaos at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Mark Russ and Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre team up for a six-session online course: Whose Friends are we? Mark explains on his blog: "Emerging from my PhD research on Quaker theology and Whiteness, I’ve developed an online course for Woodbrooke reflecting on what it might mean for Quakers to be friends of God, Christ and each other in the 21st century." Mondays, October 13 to November 17. More details here.

Discipline and Punish: Kristin Du Mez assesses James Dobson's legacy.

Cherice Bock explains the background of the chapter she wrote with Catalina Morales Bahena for the new book Hungry for Hope: Letters to the Church from Young Adults, due to be published today. Their chapter is entitled, “Reclaiming ‘Enough’: Away from Scarcity Toward True Abundance.” For more on the book, visit hungryforhopebook.com.

Abolitionism and compromise, a Jay family/Indiana Yearly Meeting case study. (Thanks to Martin Kelley for the link.)

John Kinney at Spokane Friends, speaking on contemplative prayer: "If we don't get this right..."

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Flaco Jiménez and Raul Malo, "Seguro Que Hell Yes," a video we sometimes used in class in Russia for its specific glimpses of USA culture. (And it's a song I can always recall to kill earworms.)

A clip from Flaco's memorial service. From puroconjunto210's caption on YouTube: "Flaco Jiménez, conjunto legend passed away July 31, 2025. A memorial service was held in San Antonio at the Carver Community center. Artists included Santiago Garza, David Lee Garza, Dwayne Verheyden, Max Baca, and Josh Baca all played their hearts out celebrating his Life!"

"Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace"

William F. Buckley (Firing Line) interviews prominent atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 1971. Screenshot from source. Also see "Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That We Need Not Fear the Religious Right," 1993.

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The U.S. president, on February 6 of this year, ordered the creation of a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. The first two paragraphs of Section 1 of his order gave the legal underpinnings for this task force's mission, then went on to say, "Yet the previous Administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses." The first impression left on me by this order is not the voice or reflection of Jesus; it is venom toward the previous administration, laced with false witness.

Aside from the merits, or lack of merits, of these cases of "targeting peaceful Christians," the most glaring problem with the president's decree is that anti-Christian bias is the only sort of bias to be "eradicated." There are no mentions of other faiths (except possibly in Section 3iii and 3iv, but even there, nothing explicit).

A first report from the Task Force was due no later than 120 days after the order, but I've seen nothing that purports to be this initial report on its work. Instead, the Justice Department organized a Task Force hearing on April 22, with three witnesses complaining about their treatment during the Biden administration. The Baptist News Web site summed it up: "‘Anti-Christian bias’ task force focuses solely on grievances of evangelicals." (More commentary on The Convocation Unscripted.)

With this background, you might forgive me for some initial skepticism about the more recent "Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace" memorandum issued by Scott Kupor, director of the U.S. federal government's Office of Personnel Management. Indeed, the first paragraph includes what seems nowadays to be an obligatory tribute to the president's leadership on the issue.

News coverage of the memorandum reflected this crediting of Donald Trump as the inspiration for the policy. (CNN headline: "Trump administration allows federal workers to promote religious beliefs.") However, beyond that nod, the memorandum seems moderate and defensible, and the examples of items that federal workers are allowed to wear or display go beyond specifically Christian symbolism. The guidance seems to protect faith expressions in general. It also places limits on those expressions: reserve work hours for actual work, and don't try to persuade anyone of your beliefs when they've asked you to stop. Also, "Title VII does not cover all beliefs. For example, social, political, or economic philosophies, and mere personal preferences, are not 'religious' beliefs within the meaning of the statute."

Wearing religious jewelry, having a Bible or rosary on your desk, or a religious poster on your wall, may seem a bit aggressive in a U.S. culture that privatizes religion and frequently treats it as some kind of inadequacy. However, whenever two human beings have business with each other and no prior ties, there are always risks involved, as well as (we hope) mutually beneficial rewards. It would seem like a sad—and impractical—accommodation to those risks if we end up expecting all public servants to adopt a bland exterior that reveals nothing of their individuality, personality, and values. What we can expect is that they treat us with the same fairness as the director of the Office of Personnel Management expects their co-workers and us to treat them.

Other familiar conflicts can arise when someone decides to take offense at a religious expression. I remember a U.S. Supreme Court case I wrote about here, Town of Greece v Galloway, where I agreed with the majority that the town was within its rights to allow religion-specific prayers at its legislative functions. But I had another priority as well. (Quoting myself!)...

But in any case, I think it is time to challenge the idea that being offended is, without evidence of actual coercion, a trump card in political discourse. If you are offended by someone else's religious speech, maybe managing your feelings rather than suing for relief is part of the price you pay for being in a country where there is religious freedom for the local majority as well as the local minority.

Maybe you're thinking, "OK, Johan, that's easy for you to say; you're too often in the majority; you don't know what it's like to be in the minority." And you're probably right. But you might be surprised by how easy it is to offend me. Just say "Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists." Call me an anti-Semite for criticizing Israeli apartheid. Put a Hitler moustache on a picture of Obama. Tell me I shouldn't say "Merry Christmas." Label Quakers as "heretics" or evangelical Christians as "theologically bankrupt" as people have done to my face. I keep having to remind myself what a therapist once told me: "People have a right to be wrong."

Back to the case at hand, Scott Kupor's memorandum. It has two major gaps, to my mind. 

First: what about people who don't identify with any religious faith? Could atheist federal workers have on their desk, for example, a clearly visible copy of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian? 

Are atheists and agnostics covered by this policy in the memorandum's second section? ... 

Employees may engage in conversations regarding religious topics with fellow employees, including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature.

Consistency would require attempts to persuade others of, say, Bertrand Russell's viewpoint as equally protected, but I'm not sure that was contemplated in preparing this policy.

The second gap: the policy is naive regarding the power differentials involved, both between supervisor and employee, and between the employee and citizens requiring a service. It is not hard to come up with a hypothetical.... In a federal employee's office, would a picture of Trump at his desk with Jesus standing behind him, hand on Trump's shoulder, be just this side of coercive? Would a plaque quoting "Those who curse their mother or their father shall be put to death, Exodus 21:17" in majestic calligraphy be a bit over the line? Would that one be okay in the Department of Transportation but not in the Department of Justice? The subordinate or client who would be tempted to argue in more equitable circumstances could well decide, "I'll stuff my feelings rather than argue and lose my access to the services I need." Is that acceptable? But on the other hand, would the cost of preventing outliers smother the more general freedom Kupor's policy is designed to protect?

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I'm always puzzled by some Christians insisting on what can come across as in-your-face religiosity, which seems far more likely to repel than attract. Just because your favorite Christian celebrity, or Scott Kupor, or Pam Bondi says you can make your affiliation obvious in your workplace doesn't mean that it actually serves the cause of evangelism. Here's a passage from a former atheist who became an advocate for "permission evangelism." ...

Many times in my life, actually most of my life, when people tried to evangelize me, it caused more harm than good. Many of the scars I carried through my life that kept me away from seeking truth in God were delivered at the hands of well-meaning Christians. They had no idea who I was or what I was seeking, but they interrupted me and tried to force their beliefs down my throat. I've never bought a product that way, and sure wasn't apt to buy God that way. If going to church subjected me to hundreds of those kind of people, I definitely wasn't headed there. Like much of today's society, I chose not to be come assumptive and insensitive, so I incorrectly chose not to be a Christian.

The very next day after I accepted Christ, I prayed that God would never allow me to forget what it was like to live a life without knowing Him. I asked for the emotions and experiences to remain present with me so that I could always relate to non-Christians, forever remaining empathetic. I have prayed that prayer numerous times in my life, and God has always honored that request. Now I was given the insight to use the heart God had provided to be as effective as possible. It is exciting to use the methods of the world to reach the world, yet see eternal results.

The purpose of permission in evangelism is to create trust, get around the legal and social barriers to discussing your faith, and most importantly, to discern the leading of the Holy Spirit in someone's life. ... Evangelism, when asked to tell someone about Jesus, is easy and resembles giving an answer for the hope that you have, rather than forcing an answer on a person yet to ask a question.

— Michael L. Simpson, Permission Evangelism: When to Talk, When to Walk.

Note to Quakers: If your reading tastes were formed by the likes of Thomas Kelly and Caroline Stephen, Michael Simpson's book might come across as cliche-ridden and glib. (Who wouldn't?!) Give him a chance! I believe his insights, suggestions, and his reframing of marketing in the service of ethical evangelism, are valid, or at least worth putting into the mix. If we actually care to help our communities be more accessible, and spread the message of grace to heal the wounds left by white Christian nationalism, and the resulting cynicism we have to contend with, his book might be very helpful.

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Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic: Who counts as Christian?

Adria Gulizia: Spirit-led evangelism.

Jade Rockwell in Friends Journal: Risking Faithfulness: Quietism and experimentation in unquiet times.

Early Friends were led to start our movement as a way to recover a wayward Christianity that they felt had taken too many wrong turns for it to be reformed from within the existing churches. But despite the inspiration of early Friends, it is the Quietist period that I think in many ways has most shaped the beliefs and practices that we cling to in our meetings and churches.

Windy Cooler: Angela Hopkins tells the truth about the hidden costs of ministry.

Israeli author David Grossman now "can't help" using the term genocide.

Racism: an informal five-question survey.

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McKinley James with his own song, "This Is the Last Time."

Digesting 2024

Aurlandsfjord in July.

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As usual, in this last post of the year, I've picked out twelve blog posts from this past year as a sampling of what I've been up to on this site during the year. This was the year "Can You Believe?" celebrated its twentieth birthday. (Today's post is number 1,110.) I'm grateful for your company and always eager to hear your own thoughts and responses.

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JANUARY: Pure intention, part three: Fox, Penn, and deconstruction.

Back in 1974, as an enthusiastic new Quaker, I was eagerly immersing myself in the journals of George Fox and John Woolman, the book of discipline of London Yearly Meeting, Barclay's Apology, and William Penn's Key, along with the other writings and tracts that I mentioned here. Something in this material struck me in a new way today. Maybe it occurred to you a long time ago! But here's what I realized: the early Quakers might strike us now as staunch defenders of Christian faith, but they themselves did an enormous amount of deconstructing. And they did so at great cost and risk.

Full post.

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FEBRUARY: Saying goodbye to Aleksei Navalny.

Navalny at a court hearing in February 2021:

This teaching—“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied”—appears somehow esoteric and odd, but in fact it is the central political doctrine in modern Russia. Your Honor, what is it, this phrase or slogan, the most important political slogan in Russia? Where does power lie? Power lies in truth.

Full post.

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MARCH: "...Nature cannot be fooled ..."

Sometimes I'm tempted to succumb to a doom mentality. For all we know, extinction might be inevitable no matter what we do. Countries and empires have come and gone, civilizations have perished, species have vanished. The planet itself will survive our misdeeds—as Richard Feynman reminded us in his famous appendix to the Rogers Commission investigation into the Challenger explosion, "... nature cannot be fooled." However, at some point even planets will vanish into their dying suns. Our loving Creator will archive us one way or another (I vote for "heaven"!) but, short of that, nothing about our long-term future is guaranteed.

Before I reject doom entirely (you knew I would, right?), I found this article in Scientific American intriguing: Beyond the Doom and Gloom, Here's How to Stimulate Climate Action, by Madalina Vlasceanu and Jay J. Van Bavel.

Full post.

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APRIL: "Are Quakers part of the Church?"

Just to get a bit more argumentative.... Considering those Quakers who do not believe they're part of the larger Church: do they even see themselves as members of the larger Quaker family?

My understanding of the Quaker movement is that the first generation of Quakers decided to go to Christ directly instead of relying on the Christian establishment of their time. In turn, those founders told their descendants (us) that we could do the same. Along the way, we've learned a lot about what it means to rely on Christ at the center of our meetings, including the ethical consequences. But at the same time, the "establishment" and the other rebels and reformers who preceded and followed us have also been listening and learning—making discoveries and mistakes along the way, just as we have. That's what we are part of, not the creation of a whole new separate religion.

Full post.

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MAY: Looking back at 1968, with the help of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

All of this drama might make for absorbing reading in the hands of any competent historian. But Doris and her husband had deep emotional stakes in retelling these stories for each other—and now Doris for us. They were eleven years apart in age, and at times their disagreements reflected their deepest political and personal allegiances—Richard to the Kennedy family, for example, although the example is an oversimplification; and Doris to LBJ. Many times they had different recollections or interpretations of important events, and their conversations seeking a fuller understanding are part of the sweet essence of the book. They recreate a half-generation of American politics where passionate advocacy for economic and social justice (despite all the hardball political maneuverings they recall together) was worth putting one's whole career on the line. Equally challenging for both of them were the times they had to insist on saying goodbye to a titanic political figure simply in order to reclaim one's own life.

Full post.

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JUNE: The long defeat, part one.

God loves us but does not necessarily restrain our violent hand.

Of course it is true that we don’t necessarily know when God’s intervention did happen, only when it apparently didn’t. So God didn’t restrain the hands of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, though we have to wonder what happened in the minds and hearts of the thousands of soldiers who have apparently deserted since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And God didn’t prevent the loss of thousands of innocent children in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas attack. It just doesn’t seem right to me to say that all of us who prayed our little heads off for peace and reconciliation just weren’t using the right words, or we failed to mobilize enough people to pray enough times day and night to finally persuade God to act. Ever since we ate those apples in the Garden of Eden, too many of us humans think we know better than God how to fix conflicts by eliminating our enemies, and God hasn’t seen fit to set us all straight.

Full post.

Part two.

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JULY: Exceptional shorts. (Quaker exceptionalism and Scandinavian exceptionalism.)

My late cousin Johan Fredrik Heyerdahl and I used to discuss some of the complexities and contradictions of Norwegian identity. My visit to Norway later this year will be my first since his death, and I'll intensely miss his wonderful company. I'm sure I'll have some good conversations with relatives and friends, but in the meantime I've started my preparations by reading Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia.

Some of this territory was well covered by Robert Ferguson's excellent Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, which I briefly described in this post: "Shame is what turns societies around." What I like about Michael Booth's book is his undisguised irritation at the exaggerated admiration that the Scandinavian countries sometimes bask in.

Full post.

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AUGUST: Religion and boredom.

In her important commentary on the passing of old-school church culture and what might be replacing it, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, Diana Butler Bass writes,

...[A]nger is not the only emotion people express when talking about religion. Many people are just bored. They are bored with church-as-usual, church-as-club, church-as-entertainment, or church-as-work. Many of my friends, faithful churchoers for decades, are dropping out because religion is dull, the purview of folks who never want to change or always want to fight about somebody else's sex life....

In all of the fifty years since I started attending weekly services, this has not been my experience at all; quite the opposite. However, I cheerfully acknowledge that I am a peculiar case—peculiarly unqualified to comment on Diana Butler Bass's assessment.

Before I deal with my disqualifications, I should acknowledge that she backs up her comments with statistical evidence of alienation from established religion, and that the trends she pointed to twelve years ago, when her book was published, have more or less continued along the same lines. (However, "boredom" isn't an explicit category in any of those statistics!)

Full post.

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Tree of discipleship. Source.

SEPTEMBER: Growth for growth's sake.

If I honestly believe (backed by experience) that ...

• Quaker faith and practice is a way of knowing and following God;
• Our communities are trustworthy, leadership is based on spiritual gifts rather than social distinctions, and the pathways for new people to become members and leaders are made clear;
• We have a message and a practice that is very different from the toxic agendas of white Christian nationalism and other distortions that have brought the word "Christian" into disrepute;
• I have found healing and hope in this faith and the community it has shaped...

... then, shouldn't I feel an obligation to care about growth? I believe so. It seems urgent to me to work toward ensuring that our faith and the communities formed by that faith are accessible to anyone who might need that kind of community.

There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers' virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don't need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.

Full post.

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OCTOBER: A song of quiet trust.

Psalm 131 (New Revised Standard Version)

1 O LORD, my heart is not lifted up,
    my eyes are not raised too high;
  I do not occupy myself with things
    too great and too marvelous for me.
2 but I have calmed and quieted my soul,
    like a weaned child with its mother;
    my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. [see note]
3 O Israel, hope in the LORD
    for this time on and forevermore.

[Note: Or my soul within me is like a weaned child]

... One of the reasons I am so fond of this psalm, especially in the context of preaching, is that it reminds me that, when I speak in meeting for worship, my job is to be faithful, not clever. My task is confined to two things: first, to point toward trustworthy sources of inspiration and vision, and, second, to suggest some implications of those sources as a way of encouraging you to do the same, to consider the implications for yourselves. It is not my purpose to do your work for you, to show off my own cleverness (as obvious as it is), or to one-up someone else, or to even hint that I’ve covered all the possibilities.

Full post.

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NOVEMBER: Saying goodbye.

[Sarah] Rainsford's book encompasses the last years of Alexei Navalny's activism in Russia, his poisoning in 2020, followed by treatment in Germany and his return to Russia and immediate arrest on January 17, 2021, and, eventually his death in prison in February of this year, and his burial in Moscow. 

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Navalny's own account of his life and activism, Patriot: A Memoir, also touched me at a personal level. I loved Sarah Rainsford's book in part because of something we share: a nearly lifelong interest in Russia, as students and then as visitors and residents. Both of us have had to wrestle with the realization that somehow Russia includes both a capacity for extraordinary humanity and self-sacrifice as well as a capacity for systemic cruelty on a mass scale, fueled by greed and assisted by centuries of dysfunctional relationships between those with power and everyone else.

At least that's what it looks like from the outside. Navalny, on the inside of this reality, seemed to have made a decision not to tolerate this contradiction. If Russia is to flourish, cruelty and arbitrary absolutism must be confronted and defeated. The first two-thirds of his book recounts how he came to this conclusion; the last part shows how he paid the price for his convictions, through his prison diaries and many of his Instagram posts right into this year.

Full post.

Also in November, some guest reflections from Judy Maurer on resources for Quaker discipleship from the early history of our movement, as we consider the repercussions from the U.S. presidential election.

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DECEMBER: More on deconstruction and curiosity.

I was stunned by the painting's blatant colonialist condescension, an observation that I'm hardly the first to make! The original intention was surely to elevate piety and charity as noble characteristics of the Empire and its self-attributed civilizing mission. And if it were possible to neutralize the imperial agendas from Christian missionaries' work in the golden age of Western missions (some would say not possible!!), there were cumulative blessings in many places. (See Robert Woodberry's "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.")

But it's equally true, as historian Michael Ohajuru quotes in the "Black History Walks" Youtube video on that painting, "When England came to Africa, they had the Bible, we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."

Part of what shook me at the gallery was the realization that, had I been around in 1863, when this painting was first exhibited, I probably would not have been shocked....

Full post.

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Richard Beck on the colonialism of disenchantment.

Is literacy in decline? Here's Karen Swallow Prior on how the church can help meet the need.

Michelle Boorstein considers the "prosperity gospel" and its influence on pro-Trump Latino voters. (Washington Post gift link.)

Becky Ankeny meditates on the meaning of the crucifixion and what it means for us: taking up the cross and dying, not necessarily "heroically" but by "ordinary virtue," by daily choice.

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Sean "Mack" McDonald pays tribute to Albert King during this wonderful concert in France:

Prayer and place, twelve years later

Underground prayer cell, Transfiguration
Monastery, near Buzuluk, Russia.

I wrote my first post on prayer and place in the context of the Pussy Riot controversy twelve years ago in Russia, when the dissident rock band of that name managed to get into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, near the Kremlin, and performed their musical prayer against Vladimir Putin.

In the post, I confessed my "mixed feelings about the very concept of sacred space." In my final post about the controversy, I wrote, "I have grown to have a lot of respect for them [the dissident musicians], but it's a complicated respect." I also wondered whether we Westerners with our diminished sense of reverence (is this fair?), were qualified to comment.

On reverence (freely expressed or compulsory), I also wrote a separate post.

All of these related themes came back to me when I read Mark Russ (Jolly Quaker) posting about Thicc places: a Quaker on pilgrimage. My best service to you now would be to reduce my own verbiage in favor of persuading you to read Mark's post. I'll just add a couple of thoughts:

First: I utterly agree with Mark that both the journey and the destination are important, for the reasons he expresses so well. I also want to take into account our varying temperaments. For some of us, the regular pilgrimage, perhaps every week, to our usual places of worship, and the anticipation and fulfillment of the worship itself, are all that we need. Those who go on pilgrimage to a more remote or special location might anticipate a more immersive experience than they experience in that regular cycle; are those of us who find no such need in ourselves qualified to deny them?

My red flags would go up only if those pilgrims inform us on their return that they're now superior to the rest of us. That's never happened in my experience; what actually happens is that they're eager to share the riches they've gained with the rest of us, and we listen eagerly, to everyone's benefit. It was wonderful to hear my cousin Johan Fredrik Heyerdahl talk about walking the Camino de Santiago when he was about the age I am now. I experienced a somewhat similar pilgrimage without leaving home when I read Timothy Egan's marvelous book A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith.

In my experience, this last century of Russian history, with religious repression followed by Orthodox triumphalism and state-church enmeshment, has intensified and complicated all concepts of sacred space.

Second: Might it be true that those who argue for a flat and fastidious Quakerism, one that denies any forms of specialness, are often perfectly happy to go on holiday to interesting and, to them, exotic destinations? Maybe they would be willing to consider that traveling with a spiritual intention or hope would be equally legitimate? This line of questioning does have its own complication: the cost of such travel, whether or not it is for spiritual gain, surely puts some forms of pilgrimage beyond the reach of many people.

I'm reminded of my dislike of the way spiritual books are sometimes marketed. See my comments on Richard Foster's Sanctuary of the Soul—go to this post and scroll down past the movie stuff.

If I'm making unfair correlations, let me know!

We Quakers generally downplay sacred actions as well as sacred places, but maybe you'll see why I loved this Threads post from Karen Swallow Prior, which I present not to one-up anyone, but simply as a reminder to remain tender:

My parents love their church immensely. For health reasons, however, they’ve had to join the service online for some time now.

Yesterday, I was taking them lunch and unintentionally arrived before the service had ended. It was communion Sunday.

When I saw the two tiny cups of juice and two tiny crackers my father had set on the kitchen table, I felt like I had entered some of the holiest, most sacred ground I’d ever been honored to enter.

Now, please go to the post that provoked these thoughts, from Mark Russ.

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While we're enjoying Mark's good company, here's more to think about: Dirty religion.

Other related items from my own blog: To see light more clearly. Memories of Buzuluk. Quaker communion.

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Helen Benedict on Israelis, Palestinians, and ending the cycle of revenge.

Issa Amro: "It's a miracle that I even exist." His organization, Youth Against Settlements, has just won the Right Livelihood Award, one of the prizes sometimes known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize."

Forum 18 reports that a wide range of religiously-oriented Web sites have been blocked to Russian audiences. (Also: the Discord messaging platform is now being blocked in Russia.)

If you would like to join Friends United Meeting's "Living Letters" group, visiting Cuba in January 2025, the registration deadline is November 10.

Becky Ankeny finds comfort and consolation in the blunt words of Micah chapter 3.

The Washington Post's guide to helping people in distress owing to hurricanes Helene and Milton.

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This afternoon at St Olave's Church and its free concert series every Wednesday and Thursday, we heard a wonderful piano concert by Kanae Furomoto, including the famous "Raindrop" prelude by Chopin. Here it is performed by Alice Sara Ott: