One of the trickiest things before the Society of Friends today is how to embrace our diversity without losing our Center or that which defines us as a faith. Since the times of the great splits in Quakerism we have not handled this well. The scar tissue is present and in some cases contributes even to this day to our difficulties.
A look at almost any page of Fox’s journals shows that our founder most definitely saw himself in a personal relationship with an Inward Christ and that he had memorized the Bible from which he quoted frequently. It is hard to argue anything other than he defined himself as a Christian. This explains why historians list Quakerism as a Christian church. Yet the heart of his message, that we could know the Truth experientially and personally, embraces a kind of tolerance that naturally allows for and includes a huge diversity of beliefs. Among modern day unprogramed Friends, we find those who identify as Christ-Centered or Christian, as God centered Christians, as God Centered non Christians, Universalist or humanist Friends, and any number of Buddhists, Jews and Pagans who find the local Friends Meeting to be their spiritual home. Most Friends Meetings welcome and include all who come to worship there – sometimes cheerfully and peacefully, and sometimes not without tension and conflict.
Travel among unprogrammed Friends and you will quickly find that various Meetings can become fairly polarized between at least two of the above mentioned groups. You will also see that people can feel quite threatened as to whether their brand of Quakerism is really welcomed and accepted in Meeting, and anxious about whether “those people” will take over the Meeting and destroy that which the individual holds most precious and dear. The conflict is often especially sharp around language – whether God/He or Goddss/She or God/no-gender pronoun should be used and whether Christ or no Christ should be used in spoken messages.
Diversity
One can also hear expressed fears that we have become so tolerant and accepting of divergent views that we are in danger of becoming nothing but a group of nice people who all meet together on Sundays and are politically progressive! (This especially can be seen in the contentious dialogue about whether sweat lodges should be allowed at FGC.) Is it possible to stretch a religious view so far that it no longer means anything? In 2009 would George Fox still express himself in the same way and what would he think about the diversity in our midst? (This is a guy after all who went to other people’s churches, stood up in the pews while the minister was speaking and preached his own Truth of the Inner Christ!) Talk to anyone who has served on a committee to rewrite our Faith and Practice and you will hear how hard it is for us to come to consensus on a statement of our beliefs. (Several Yearly Meetings have Faith and Practices’ more than a dozen years old for I fear this very reason.)
Tolerence
I can only speak to these questions in a personal way. I grew up in one Meeting, sojourned among many, and then transferred my membership some 12 years ago to my current Meeting. I feel that both my Meetings have embraced lovingly the diversity of beliefs in our midst. I was instructed as a child by my parents that Quakerism is a historically Christian religion and that the correct answer to the question “did I belong to a Christian church?” was yes. This was taught to me by my father, who was very clear that he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, but only in the historical Jesus. Jesus was as powerful a teacher for him about non-violence as his other two cherished heroes: Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. My father identified as a universalist and a humanist. I identify as a non-Christian Quaker, with a devout belief in God, who belongs to a Christian church. This maybe confusing for some, especially non-Friends, but it is not at all confusing to me.
Some of my closest friends in Friends have always identified as Christ Centered Friends and this is not troubling to either them or me. It is not a problem because when we speak to each other of our spiritual experience, we find at the heart the same relationship to the Divine. In fact I think when one reads the great sacred texts of any religion you can feel beneath the surface of the words the experience of the Eternal One. I wonder if we could learn to listen to each other this way in Meeting? If a speaker gives a message with different pronouns or descriptors of God than we might use (The Christ, he for example or the Goddess, She) could we learn to hear the Eternal One beneath those words?
The balancing act between tolerance of other Friend’s views and the abandonment of the essence of Quakerism is the most challenging thing before us. It is good that Buddhist or Jewish or Pagan individuals feel they can come and worship with us- that our format is flexible and accepting enough for them to find the Truth as they know it in the silence.
However, I do not feel that being welcome means that one then gets to change what Quakerism is. I do not expect that a welcome guest in my home gets to move all the furniture around. Even though I do not identify as Christian I do not get to change Quakerism from being a Christian religion or claim to the world that it is not Christian. I believe that Christ and universalist mysticism were both central threads in the spirituality and practice of George Fox and early Friends. I do not believe that either group of current Friends can claim that they are the only legitimate inheritors or practitioners of Quakerism. Both threads are woven throughout the history of Friends.
The influence of American liberalism is one of the things that have contributed to confusion among Friends about how to respond to our differences. For the most part the US US
I hope if someone came to Meeting and worshipped with us for a while and then one day came wanting to perform animal sacrifice in the Meeting fireplace because they had found this to be a very meaningful spiritual experience in another setting, that we would say NO! I think that is so clearly contrary to the spirit of the peace testimony or the practice of silent worship that we would be clear to say No to this. However, many Friends equate so closely the posture of Liberalism with the spirit of Quakerism that they are left struggling how to say No because to do so is counter to the spirit of individualism, tolerance and coalition building that is part of Liberalism.
Unlike other churches we do not have dogmas that claim you must believe this to be one of us and if you don’t you are not part. We have testimonies- a more softly held set of beliefs. We say instead, “this is the Truth as we have so far been shown it”, humbly allowing that we may be shown new Light and that our understanding of the Truth may evolve. I am delighted that we hold the Truth in this flexible way instead of as a rigid thing chiseled in stone. And I am aware that it makes it hard for many Friends to even answer the question: “What do Quaker’s believe?” when they are asked this question. I have encouraged other Friends for years to answer from the spectrum and then in the particular. In other words to be able to say: “Some Friends believe X (one end of spectrum), other Friends believe Y (other end of spectrum) and I personally believe Z.” This speaks to the power of Quakerism, that it is flexible and a place of individual encounter with the Truth!
Our testimonies do not define the boundaries of Quakerism, like dogmas do for other churches. Because Friends struggle to even answer “what do we believe?”, Friends are often at a great loss how to respond to attenders who come to us with views or practices disparate from Quakerism and wishing to practice those beliefs within our Meetings. Perhaps we have enough clarity to say no to animal sacrifice or other spiritual practices which are clearly foreign to Quakerism, but practices from the world like voting, Robert’s rules of order type conducting of a committee or simply the secular assumption that our lives our private and not the business of our community are all things which can creep in below the radar of a liberal stance and start to change the nature of Quakerism.
Rooted in Truth
Thus we find ourselves in the very strange position of needing to be able to say to all in our midst: “You are welcome here, the Truth you find is welcome and your expression of it is welcome, and we will not change our Practice of Quakerism unless our whole group is lead in discernment to change it”. Otherwise any time someone dissented from any belief or practice we have, and it had to be laid down, then in fairly short order we would have no belief or practice at our center any more! (In some of our very small Meetings and worship groups around the country I fear this sort of liberal desire to embrace everyone has indeed led to such a loss of belief or practice at our center.) If people are attracted to us for the beliefs and practices we have, then they need to be willing to either learn and adopt those beliefs and practices, or not adopt them, but co-exist in a spirit of tolerance and forbearance to those aspects they are not in unity with. (a posture somewhat like standing aside in business meeting.) This then in the end might be one of the most valuable things we have to teach the rest of the world: a model of how diversity, tolerance and acceptance coexist with a centered position rooted in Truth.
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