Forum, August 2024

How has truth evolved?

As we know, George Fox reasoned that Truth comes to us by the “inner guide” that brings “God’s presence” into our lives as individuals and communities. We refer to that Truth as “that of God in every person.” That’s a good starting point, although we also know that enormous amounts of scientific information have come to humanity in the centuries that followed Fox’s lifetime. So we’ve got to ask ourselves: what exactly is the Truth today? With Fox’s 400th birthday this year, maybe this a good time to reflect on what Truth meant to him and how that Truth has evolved to our time. Maybe we want to reflect on the five characteristics of truth (lower case) specified by the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford says truth encompasses “faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity, and agreement with fact or reality.”

Tom Louderback
Louisville, Ky.

Reminders of Quakerism’s birth

Thanks so much to Marcelle Martin for the wonderful insights in “The Radical Original Vision of George Fox” (FJ June-July.). Indeed, current Quakerism has lost so much connection from the first generation of Quakers. Just look at how George Fox was calling people to Christ Jesus. That boldness of spreading the good news of Christ Jesus seems to have faded away.

George Busolo Lukalo
Bura, Kenya

Wow! What a bracing reminder of where we Quakers came from. I feel like a flashlight with a weak battery compared with Martin’s description of the blowtorch faith of early Friends.

Signe Wilkinson
Philadelphia, Pa.

I enjoyed this dive into Quaker history as accompanied by divine guidance. However, in starting this article with pinning Liberal Friends as a singular entity, I felt there was a missed opportunity for bringing together our varied theological perspectives within Quakerism. If there was only a sense of humanity being all we needed, why would Quakerism and Quaker worship still hold such power and unfold so many of us into relationship with Spirit? As someone who didn’t used to be able to use the word God, let alone have a vulnerable conversation about God and spiritual life, Liberal Quakerism brought a variety of perspectives and allowed me to let go of past constrictions. The beauty of God for me is in openness and enoughness, not in judgment, and only through finding that in my cultivation am I able to be here today reading your words and writing mine. Thank you again for your exploration of this!

Mia Bella D’Augelli
Standish, Maine

Going beyond the metaphor to truly sup with one another

Fox is correct to emphasize a marriage supper with God as the first priority (“The True Last Supper” by Barbara Birch, FJ June-July). However, we cannot forget Jesus taught us that the best way to love our neighbors, and particularly for building trust with enemies, is to share real and fulfilling meals together conversing about God, morality, ethics, religion, etc. Cheap token symbols lack the bounty of God’s love. At least invite your neighbors to share a monthly potluck communion, which is different from communing with God.

George Gore
Chicago area, Ill.

Racism then, seen from now

Thank you for this enlightening essay (“George Fox Was a Racist” by Johanna Jackson and Naveed Moeed, FJ June-July). It seems to me as an archaeologist and historian that almost everyone of note in the historical past held attitudes and was a participant in practices, such as racism and enslavement, that we find repugnant by current standards. When thinking about such people, it is important to understand them as products of their own time and place. I think in most cases it is necessary to have our eyes wide open to both the good and the bad, and try to weigh the totality of their actions and contributions when considering if it is appropriate to remember and memorialize such personages. We need to try to understand them as complex and sometimes contradictory in their attitudes and actions. Some will be remembered despite the evils they participated in or perpetuated, and others will perhaps fall into well-deserved obscurity.

John McCarthy
Frederica, Del.

Thank you for your research into the truth. So often narratives are changed and the realities are suppressed by mainstream historians and educators. When this happens—as it does in colonized countries, and under empires that consist of one group of people dominating another—we perpetrate the damage that was originally wrought. Denial leads to ignorance, and ignorance allows for harm to be perpetrated.

The slaves were never compensated. Their so-called owners were. Yet the word owner is a fallacy, a travesty. When we learn the real history we have a chance to go forward differently, and only with that pure truth can the Spirit move and guide us. The Spirit cannot move in contaminated waters. Thank you again for your brave, good work.

Saige Vendome England
Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand

There is a power to someone expressing the words “George Fox was a racist” that is liberating. I am sure most Friends will ignore this article, but it still means something that it was written and that it was published.

How often have Quakers over the years read the words of Quakers before them and pretended not to see what is so plain: the white supremacist ideology. That is what was so surprising to me reading some of the old documents: just how confident Friends were in their own sense of superiority and the superiority of the white race and white religion. All of which is a total betrayal of the Christ they say they believed in. It’s surprising that so many Friends still believe in “Quaker exceptionalism,” which seems very similar to white exceptionalism. Perhaps this is why many Friends still cannot handle any criticism, even criticism toward Quakers who are long dead. White exceptionalism and pride goes hand in hand with fragility.

This history is essential in understanding this religion and yet few Friends have any interest.

David Raymond
Ottawa, Ont.

I wish to acknowledge the remarkable research done by Johanna Jackson and Noveed Moeed in their article, which adds to an acceptance of how we are all flawed. Likely Fox was a product of his environment, as we all are, without considerable reflection and willingness to stand up for what we recognize and see as flawed. My heartfelt gratitude to those who speak the plain truth and stand for freedom from oppression for everyone. What was once history need not be repeated.

Roberta Llewellyn
Sebastopol, Calif.

The title that calls George Fox a racist is intended to grab us and chasten us. In that it succeeds, even as it stains, diminishes, and simply ignores the rest of his enlightened ministry. Notwithstanding the fact that the words racism and racist did not exist prior to the twentieth century, their use here exposes a critical flaw in the entire premise of the article. When we evaluate the behaviors and understandings of human beings of the seventeenth century by the understandings of the twenty-first century, we distort both the history and the conclusions. The writers repeatedly speculate and make baseless assumptions about Fox’s motives and intentions, such as he was “frozen into apathy,” without any actual or provable knowledge of such assertions beyond writings that are now more than three centuries removed from their cultural context. This from Johanna Jackson is telling: “From what we know, however, Fox did not enter Barbados with that kind of humility.” Perhaps we need some humility in the present.

George Fox was no saint. William Penn was a slave owner. Throughout the centuries that have passed since our founding, Quakers have often come up short in living the ideals we espouse. The list is endless. Indictments and confessions are part of a process, but we can be certain that by themselves these strategies are wholly ineffective in bringing about the changes we desire.

It is essential that we acknowledge and absolutely trust in the leadings of our Divine Guide and to the Love we encounter there. This Love is the only hope of ever achieving actual healing and reconciliation for the evils of racism and uncountable other sins.

Quakerism will never cure racism or any other evils we humans commit. There is one cure, unchangeable and eternal, and does not belong to Quakers. George Fox did not create it and neither did Jesus. We know that “there is a principle which is pure,” and that it is our only hope for a world to be transformed by Love. Let us reach together into the stillness for communion with the Divine Light—what Fox called the Spirit of Christ—and there under that cover we will discover the perfect Love that engenders hope, humility, compassion, forgiveness, and healing. Neither racism nor any other evil can survive in the Presence of that Leadership.

Don Badgley
New Paltz, N.Y.

I am fascinated by the different ways we read the same article. I have no need to defend George Fox or the Quakers in Barbados. They, like us, were trying to live up to the Light they had given their cultural constraints. None of us in any generation has the complete answer in bringing about “the kingdom of God.” But I treasured the suggestions the article gave on how to oppose the cultural constraints I don’t recognize while I am living my part of the chain of existence.

I welcomed the invitation to see “patterns of oppression” and to understand them by breaking them into small steps. We are then challenged to think what the opposite of that pattern is and where people are living that opposite. I will definitely be using that advice. We were also challenged to question what we call “respect” when the person we are respecting is harming others. I liked the reminder to not let those who are suffering to be relegated to the background of our lives and the concept of “over-meekness.”

I thank the authors for a truly thoughtful article.

Cherie Dupuis
Portland, Ore.