Chuck Fager

Quaker Theology, Double Issue Chuck Fager

"Quakers & Resistance": This double issue is an effort to recover some momentum that's been lost since mid-2016. Our "mission statement"says our intention is to publish two issues per year. What accounts for the misfire here? The answer is straightforward: your editor, like many others, was knocked for a loop by the earthquake in the public sphere which was gathering as Issue #29 came out, and then became an unthinkable, but unavoidable reality in Eleventh Month (November) of 2016. Its aftershocks are still continuing. Among the most disturbing effects is a set of vigorous assaults on programs, norms, laws, rights, and whole groups of people, which are unraveling some of the most basic aspects of our social order. We won't try to list them all here; there's not enough space. Further, we will not "relitigate" the buildup to this eruption. Intead, we start from the premise that Quakers have faced oppressive settings before, and resistance is not a new response. The sketches are not meant to be comprehensive, and are grouped here under three headings: The first is "Updates"; a catching up with reporting we have been doing on recent strains and schisms in some yearly meetings. Then follows "A Sampler of Quaker Resistance." This stretches back into the 19th century, to start with Lucretia Mott, and an episode showing how some of the most intense opposition she faced came not from slaveowners, but from other Quakers. There also shows up the abiding Quaker conceit, very widespread among liberal Friends, of Quakers as always being on the "cutting edge" of progressive reform. It's humility time: many, if not most Friends of her day were well behind the "cutting edge," and even fought to hold back what she saw as "progress." It is not much different today. It seems right that this section covers more than a century of witness and resistance, for even if the worst currents of today's events were to be soon turned back (by no means certain), it would still take a long time to repair the damage, and move toward a fairer, safer social and constitutional order. Thus we also offer three "Broader Views of Quaker Witness & Resistance. " The first reflects on the first organized, long-term Quaker resistance campaign, for religious freedom; the second reports on an imaginative survey of recent Quaker thinking; and the third undertakes to learn about peace work by studying the military and its classic text. The issue concludes with several reviews, also mostly of works about resistance figures, or, in one case, a target of resistance. For many of these Friends, the path of resistance was often a lonely and likely discouraging one, even among Friends: Lucretia Mott, Benjamin Lay, Tom Fox, Ham Sok Hon, plus almost all the draft resisters who heard a jail door clang shut behind them. Their records bring to mind a comment by a contemporary Friend, Bowen Alpern: "Much of what we tend to regard as the achievement of Friends as a whole was, in fact, the work of individual Friends, or small groups of Friends, often in the face of opposition or neglect of their monthly meetings. (One of the most positive - if often tedious - aspects of Quaker culture may be its capacity to produce or attract individuals who are willing to stand up to it)" (in Godless For God's Sake) And Lucretia Mott's reflection, after being rebuked by the elders of a neighboring yearly meeting in 1842: "Still with all our [Quaker] faults, I know of no religious association I would prefer to it. . . . I would rather hear of [a Friend] laboring very faithfully, and with all Christian daring, in his society, than withdrawing from it." These can serve as epigraphs for this journal. I hope it begins to fill the gap of a year-plus hiatus, driven by trauma, and will be of use to Friends and others who today are being called, however reluctantly, to the often long, dim and solitary path of protracted resistance.