Swallowing Fenceposts: |
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SOME LESSONS FROM THE QUAKER PAST
Thomas Hamm
In the Quaker heartland of Indiana, around Richmond,
where I teach at Earlham College, there is a story told about the dangers of
trying to swallow fenceposts. It goes back, as nearly as I can determine, to
the 1880s, to a quarterly meeting held in Dublin, Indiana, when a certain task
requiring considerable intelligence, tact and ÒweightÓ was under discussion.
Suddenly, a Friend whose opinion of his own abilities was higher than strict
adherence to Truth would have merited, stood and proposed himself as the man
for the job. All present realized that this wouldn't do, but not wanting to
hurt the good Friend's feelings, looked for some gentle way to say so. Finally,
one elderly Quaker rose and spoke: ÒFriends, on my way to Meeting today I saw
the craziest thing. It was a woodpecker, and the silly thing was trying to
swallow a fencepost.Ó There is no record whether the meeting maintained
suitable solemnity, but the task was then entrusted to the birdwatching Friend.
This point was driven home to me anew last month, when I
led a discussion of Don Quixote in one of my classes. Don Quixote, you will remember, is
a Spanish gentleman who wants to be a chivalrous knight, and so ranges the
countryside, mistaking windmills for giants, herds of sheep for armies and inns
for lordly castles. At one point, I asked my class if they could think of
anyone today who resembled Don Quixote. Sure, one student responded, the
Quakers. Isn't it quixotic to think that by love you can bring peace in the
Middle East or Northern Ireland, or challenge the military-industrial
complex by a few individuals refusing to pay taxes?
This, I think, points up a paradox. Friends have
succeeded in doing some extraordinary things against extraordinary odds.
Friends created, in Pennsylvania, the first multicultural society in North
America that worked. We helped bring about that great shift by which the
Western world came to see human slavery not as divinely sanctioned, but as a
sin. And we showed the world that a society will do better by encouraging and
nurturing the talents of women than by fearing and repressing them.
On the other hand, Friends have not been nearly as
successful in dealing with each other. During the nineteenth century, beginning
in the 1820s, Friends split into a bewildering variety of fragments. In
Greensboro, Indiana, not far from where I grew up, there were by 1850 four
different Quaker congregations. My favorite example is Salem, Ohio, in the
1870s, which had six: Gurneyites, Wilburites, Hicksites, Mauleites, Kollites
and Progressives. Any reader of the Quaker press will know that many of these
tensions remain with us to the present, especially within Friends United
Meeting, the most diverse of Quaker bodies, which has just survived yet another
attempt to dismember it.
I don't claim to have any special insights about the
solutions to these problems--if I did I wouldn't have waited until now to bring
them forward. As an historian, however, I think that I have some sense of how
we got where we are, of the mistakes we have made. And perhaps more importantly,
I have a sense of what hasn't worked in the past. I think that we as Friends
have spent too much time trying to swallow fenceposts, taking on tasks that are
beyond us, or at least beyond us as we have tried to deal with them. I think
that we have to begin by realizing that change is inevitable, that all of us,
evangelical and universalist, conservative and liberal, are the products of
that change. But change invariably threatens unity. And when that happens,
there are two reactions that don't work. One is to rely on structures and
statements to achieve or maintain unity. The other is what I call ÒQuaker
minimalism,Ó which is an attempt to reduce Quakerism to a simple formulation as
a way of avoiding the hard business of facing and bringing unity out of our
diversity.
That change has come to us there can be no doubt; Friends
have always been changing, and had we not changed there would be no need for a
Friends World Committee for Consultation. The. "Children of
Light" of James Nayler, Richard Hubberthorne, Edward Burrough and George
Fox in the 1650s were different from the 'Society of Friends of Fox, William
Penn and George Whitehead in the 1680s. They in turn were different from the
generation of John Woolman and Anthony Benezet seventy-five years later.
And they were different from Friends of the age of Joseph John Gurney, Elias
Hicks, John Wilbur and Lucretia Mott in the nineteenth century. Friends today, of course, are
different from those a century ago.
Certainly anyone looking at Friends today will see this.
A majority of Quakers around the world are pastoral, and despite all of the
elaborate rationalizations advanced for them (I speak as a pastoral
Friend), pastors are not something that any Friend before 1870 would have
owned, even J. J. Gurney. Music has become an integral part of the worship of
pastoral Friends; if Fox turns over in his grave at the thought of a Quaker
pastor, then he must be on the verge of rising out of it if he knows of a
Quaker choir or a Quaker Òminister of music.Ó Sorrowfully, for many Friends in
Friends United Meeting and Evangelical Friends International, the peace
testimony has little relevance. And even in the past fifty years pastoral
Friends have seen major changes. When I go to Evangelical Friends colleges and
find pool tables on campus, or classes in dance, or a copy of Ulysses in the library, I know that
indeed the earth does move.
General Conference Friends have,
in their way, changed just as much. Worship may be unprogrammed, but it is
different from a century ago. There is music at times. The short talks by a
variety of members and attenders is far removed from the days when virtually
all preaching--and even Hicksites called it that--was done by recorded
ministers, often at considerable length. Diversity has become one of the most
prized characteristics of liberal Friends; in contrast, before 1860, Òdiverse
opinions,Ó even among Hicksites, would have been a cause for concern, if not
for a round of disownments. And the tolerance of many liberal Friends on sexual
matters would be beyond the comprehension of the most open-minded
nineteenth-century disciple of a Hicks or Mott.
Even Conservative, Friends, who rose in the
years from 1840 to 1880 as advocates of uncompromising primitivism, have been
transformed. Plain dress and plain language have become exceptions rather than
the rule. Disownment no longer comes for marriage out of unity. Scattergood
and Olney are filled with non-Quaker students. And when one goes to
Conservative burying grounds and finds tombstones, one knows again that the
world does indeed move.
Change is not comfortable; it is not neat. When it has
come to Friends it has often brought separation and pain. Orthodox and Hicksite,
Gurneyite and Wilburite, ÒFastÓ and ÒSlow,Ó split messily, disowning and
casting out each other with imprecations, if not curses.
These experiences, of course, have haunted Friends for
generations. They explain, I think, why recently Friends United Meeting chose
to continue trying to work together to resolve its tensions rather than
Òrealign,Ó as was suggested in 1991. Iit explains why a number of Friends, of
all theological persuasions, continue to bear with yearly meetings or
associations that they often find uncongenial. But sometimes they are too much
to bear, as we have seen recently with the departure of Southwest Yearly
Meeting from Friends United Meeting, and the subsequent departure of Whittier Friends
from Southwest.
For these reasons, as they face change, we see Friends
desperately struggle to hold themselves together. The courses they have often
taken, however, have not brought the results desired. One of them has been to
rely on structures to maintain unity. The other has been to resort to what I
call ÒQuaker minimalism.Ó
When I speak of structures, I have several things in
mind. We can rely on organizations, whether it be a monthly meeting or a yearly
meeting or a wider association--EFI, for example. It can be a code of behavior,
like a Discipline. Or it can be a statement of faith, of which the
Richmond Declaration of 1887 is probably the best known.
That meeting structures don't always preserve unity is
self-evident from our history. Every separation has involved members splitting
monthly or quarterly or yearly meetings. After the separations of the
1820s, both Hicksite and Orthodox Friends saw unyielding administration of the
Discipline as the best protection against future disruptions. Thus in the 1830s
and 1840s, whenever dissent reared its head, both groups wielded disownments liberally.
Hicksites moved against radical abolitionists, nonresistants and spiritualists.
Orthodox Friends, coming into conflict over understandings of the nature of
justification and sanctification, divided into Wilburite and Gurneyite bodies,
once again disowning each other. And it did not stop there. The Wilburites went
through a bewildering series of divisions in the 1850s and 1860s into Mauleites,
Kingites, Otisites, Kollites and Primitive Friends. The Gurneyites lost much of
the older generation in the 1870s, when revivalism and second-experience holiness
teachings came among them.
Over the past generation, we have
seen the collapse of the last great attempt of Friends to resolve their
differences and guard against new ones through organization, the Uniform
Discipline of the Five Years Meeting. It began with the Richmond Conference of
1887, which was conceived as a way to Òcheck ... growing divergencies in faith
and practice,Ó as one Friend put it. It culminated in 1902, when all of the Gurneyite
yearly meetings, except Ohio, joined to form the Five Years Meeting, a victory
for the cause of Òunification, compactness, strength, stolidity, power of
resistance and an effective wielding of our forces.Ó Rufus Jones and James
Wood, the leading spirits behind the movement, saw it as the first step toward
bringing all American Friends together again. Of course they did not. The
accomplishments of the Five Years Meeting, and its successor, Friends
United Meeting, have been considerable, but of course it has not united all
Friends. In 1902, no one anticipated, I think, just how badly divided the Five
Years Meeting would become over issues of modernism, evolution and scriptural
authority in just the next decade. Indeed, the very existence of the Five Years
Meeting probably exacerbated these tensions by providing a setting for dispute
and a set of bureaucracies over which to struggle. First, some of the yearly
meetings withdrew, then the idea of a uniform discipline disappeared. As
we approach the centennial of its formation, it has become clear that FUM no
longer tries to be a legislative body, but rather an organization that exists
for Friends cooperatively to carry out certain missions. For the foreseeable
future, I think that it will be groups like the FWCC, which are not primarily policymaking
groups, that will continue to try to bring Friends together in common projects.
Faced with these realities, some
Friends have resorted to the opposite extreme, what I call ÒQuaker minimalism.Ó
(I think that that is a term of my invention, but if I have unwittingly
appropriated it from some other Friend I apologize.) Usually this is the fruit
of an altogether admirable impulse among Friends of all persuasions, to refuse
to be divided by nonessentials, the desire to be Òinclusive.Ó Yet it also leads
to new kinds of tensions and risks the loss of any kind of distinctiveness, of
our identity as a ÒPeculiar People.Ó And in fact even the most inclusive groups
often have exacting requirements for inclusion, often as political as they are
theological.
Liberal and evangelical Friends
come to this minimalism by different paths and for different reasons. For
liberal and universalist Friends, who consider tolerance one of the most
admirable of virtues (so do I), and see far too many examples of intolerance in
the world, it is often unbearable to think of excluding some good person just
on the basis of theological opinions. Thus it is enough to be a Òseeker,Ó
to be sincere in the pursuit of Truth.
This sort of minimalism, however, carries risks. There is
the contention that can come when some Friends are not willing to be as
expansive as others. It seems to be an issue among some whether one must even
believe in God, a position that would have mystified any Friend, no matter how broad-minded,
before this century. This raises a question, ultimately, of identity. If
Friends can accommodate virtually any belief, then what does it mean to be a
Friend?
Evangelical and programmed Friends face a different
challenge, one that goes back to the 1870s and 1880s. In those years Gurneyite Friends
were swept up in a wave of revivalism that ultimately stretched from Maine to
California. The roots of this are far too complex for me to address here, but
these dramatic changes brought thousands of new members to Friends, new members
to whom Quaker ways were strange. Thus there was a demand for what was called
at the time a Òteaching ministry,Ó one that would introduce them to Quaker faith
and practice. Of course by 1900 this had developed into the pastoral system.
When Friends ministers were not available, however, meetings often turned to
ministers of other denominations, especially those of a Wesleyan background. A
member of one small meeting near my home in Indiana told me that at the turn of
the century they could afford to pay no salary and opened their pulpit to
anyone willing to preach for free, thus subjecting themselves to an endless
series of cranks. Needless to say, the spiritual life of such meetings often
suffered. The unwillingness or inability of Friends to have their own seminary
contributed, as Friends pastors were educated everywhere from Harvard Divinity
School to storefront Bible colleges.
Perhaps even more importantly, as the ÒFriends ChurchÓ
became just another denomination in small towns and cities, not all that
different from the Presbyterians or Methodists down the street, and Quakers
married Presbyterians or Methodists down the street, Friends came to a new
vision of community. In many places, no longer was it the wider Society of
Friends, but the brotherhood (or sisterhood) of evangelical or fundamentalist
or holiness Christians. Competition for members was often from such churches,
and as some yearly meetings increasingly measured their health from the
carefully compiled statistics of accessions, conversions and renewals,
recruiting new members became all-important. And all too often Quaker tenets
that were not helpful in recruiting members fell by the wayside--the peace
testimony, the ministry of women, our understanding of marriage. It was enough
Òjust to be a good Christian.Ó
Here is where I venture one of my outrageous statements.
I am a great believer in ecumenism and interfaith contacts. I think that the ability
of Friends to attract new members is a measure of health. But I do not think
that it is enough Òjust to be a good ChristianÓ in order to be a Friend. Billy
Graham and Mother Theresa are good Christians, but they are not Friends, and
unless they cast their faith in different ways, would not belong in a Quaker
meeting as members. I think that to be a consistent Quaker requires more. What
the ÒmoreÓ should be is beyond the bounds of the time we have here, but I think
that while Quakerism enjoins simplicity, to be a Friend is not a simple matter.
To be faithful in a complex world that confronts us with very unsimple questions
is a complicated thing. I think that we will do better when we stop trying to
swallow the fencepost of reducing Quakerism to a simple phrase or idea.
What, then, are we to do? As I said before, I don't claim
to know all of the answers. But I think that we may find it useful to keep
these things in mind.
1. Separations may not always be the worst of evils. I
won't minimize the pain that they cause. I think that we are wise to consider
them as the last unhappy resort, embraced only when there seems no other
choice. But they may also be liberating. It is standard for us to lament past
separations. But always involved is the assumption that if Friends had remained
united, it would have been on my basis. The past separations may in fact have
each helped keep alive some part of the essence of Quakerism that might have
been lost.
2. Minimize the chances for number 1 becoming necessary
by not elevating every conflict into one of fundamentals. Differences do not
have to become divisions. Homosexuality is an example of the kind of issue that
is tearing apart Friends at all levels. I won't minimize the implications of
the matter, but I think that our discussion would be better if those for whom
homosexual acts are sinful would not assume that those who disagree with them
are rejecting Scriptural authority or rejecting Christ. They may simply
understand the Bible differently. On the other hand, to hold to a more traditional
view of morality does not make one a hater, and it is unjust to say or assume
that it does.
3. Most importantly, trust the Spirit. Ultimately, unity,
or even peaceful coexistence, must be fruits of the Spirit; human devices will
not secure them. I think that I can do no better than to quote the advices of
London Yearly Meeting in 1735:
It is earnestly recommended, as a
means very conducive to the preservation of Friends as a people of one heart
and one way, for the good of themselves and their children after them, that the
discipline of the church in the several meetings instituted for that purpose,
be kept up and managed in a spirit of love and wisdom. Let all things in those
meetings be done with charity; let the love of God, in an especial manner, rule
in your hearts; and therein, though sometimes different sentiments may arise,
yet will every member have the same thing in view, the glory of God, and the
good of His church and people; and in this singleness of heart, will best promote
the great end and services of those meetings. We advise therefore, upon this
occasion, that nothing be done through strife and contention, or from any
private views; or by the influence of numbers; but in lowliness of mind, let
each esteem another better than himself.
×
Thomas Hamm is a member of First
Friends Meeting, New Castle, Indiana. He directs the Friends Collection in the
Lilly Library and teaches history at Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana. His
book The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends
1800-1907 won
the 1986 Brewer Prize of the American Society for Church History.
Thomas Hamm delivered this talk
as the keynote speaker at the Friends World Committee for Consultation, Section
of the Americas Annual Meeting held in St. Louis, Missouri, March 17-20, 1994.
Representatives from yearly meetings across the Section, which includes North,
South and Central America, are invited to gather each year to conduct the
business of the Section in the manner of Friends. The Section office, located
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is one of four Section offices throughout the
world; the World Office is in London.
The Section of the Americas of
Friends World Committee for Consultation seeks to be for Friends a wellspring
of living waters, moving us ever towards a shared future in the Spirit, a world
community of Friends, whose diversity of tradition, culture and historical
experience serves as mutual education and spiritual enrichment and"whose unity
in God's truth becomes the ground of our varying vocations in the world.
FRIENDS WORLD COMMITTEE FOR
CONSULTATION
Section of the Americas
1506 Race Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102 USA
(215) 241-7250
Fax (215) 241-7285
Email Americas@fwccamericas.org
1st printing: 7-94/500/GS