🚚 To Move Beyond Quaker Values

Dear Friends,

I hope that you are all safe and well. I know that many of you reading this are currently being impacted the fires in the Northwest. We are holding you all in prayer and hope that the circumstances will change soon.

Today’s newsletter is a continuation of last week’s issue on The Problem with (Quaker) Values. This article is meant to offer some possible responses and ways forward through the challenges these institutions face.

Thank you for reading and please share with folks you think might be helped by this conversation. I welcome you to reply to this email with questions, comments, and feedback for this topic.

-Wess

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In the previous issue of the newsletter, I called for a moratorium on values language within Quaker founded institutions or at least de-centering this language in favor of a more robust set of practices that can help shape these institutions. I believe this is needed because values language, for whatever good reasons they might have been adopted, they have run their course.*

My argument is that “values” are too simplistic, too rootless, and inadequate to guide communities in this time. They are too cheap in a time when “costly discipleship” is what is called for. Besides living through COVID19, we live in the midst of crumbling imperialism, crushing poverty, climate devastation like we have never seen, deeply divisive politics, ongoing and constant devaluing of African-Americans and people of color’s lives, all due to the distorted narrative of the religion of empire. “Simplistic, rootless, cheap” are not words that come to mind when I reflect on what it means to survive and resist in this time (link to my book Resisting Empire).

This is the reality (and future) we face.

This is what our children and our students are living through, growing up in, and will be graduating and going out into the world to change. Telling them we have the value of “stewardship” or “peace,” and putting it on a poster or a flag somewhere will do little to collectively stand up against the religion and liturgies of empire.

These secular values are not strong enough or robust enough to challenge the ideological machinations of empire, because they are themselves used, distorted, and weaponized by the religion of empire. If our communities are to resist and change our world for the better, we need a more potent and robust set of strategies and practices. When I say to resist I mean very deliberately communities that are non-violent, non-reactionary, not caught up in the rivalries, ploys, and plots of empire. To resist is to create alternative communities: what Revelation calls the Multitude and what we call in the Poor People’s Campaign a Fusion Coalition.

Here there are five suggestions for helping institutions with a Quaker heritage recover more than a flimsy link between past and present in order to help renew and revive these institutions in these times: Understand and interrogate history, discern new and appropriate business models and size, create robust onboarding procedures, recover and teach regularly core stories, develop and focus on core practices.

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There is a history to be told about each institution and the compromises, adaptations, advances and retreats in its rich identity of being “Quaker.” There was a time before these institutions adopted values language. Was it that they had no values prior to this? How did the school function in a way that was more or less in line with the Quaker tradition prior to values language? What were the creation and adoption of values in response to?

I think one of the most interesting and challenging questions is: what does it mean to call a school or an organization “Quaker,” or “Mennonite,” or “Catholic?” Can institutions themselves be one of these things? If so how and why and when might that ever change or be called into question?

There is not time nor space here for that question, but how would you begin to answer this? And can institutions be more or less Quaker? If so, how? In what ways? Is the only option, the thinnest possible version of the tradition or is there another way?

This reminds me of the work of Baptist theologian James Wm. McClendon Jr. who writes about this from a Christian perspective but I believe the sentiment is useful beyond that tradition:

At Guilford it was only since the early 2000s that this language was adopted, signaling the end of a long era of decline in the institution in terms of its adherence to Quaker identity. I’d posit that the adoption of values was a last-ditch effort to shore up some kind of Quaker(ish)ness in the college in the face of dramatic decline of Quaker students, staff, and faculty, and an overall assumed understanding and practice of the tradition.

Beyond knowing the history of the institution’s relationship to its tradition overtime, consider also race, class, and other social aspects of its history. Again, at Guilford, many of us have been working together to interrogate our history (and mythology) around race and the Underground Railroad in conjunction with our painfully slow integration of African and African-American students. Knowing this history and speaking truthfully about it challenges some of the Quaker myth embedded within our institutions and forces us to more meaningfully own up to the whole story. Slapping "values” on the wall is a very cheap way of dealing with major injustices and complex histories. Fighting over who holds the key to the values falls prey to the distorted mythology while not getting to the root of the issues.

I’m struck by the lack of creativity in terms of business models I witness from many of these institutions. It seems that when looking at how Quaker-founded institutions work from a business perspective they are not much, if any, different from other private schools built on the growth treadmill. If the main goal - as it is for many businesses in late-stage capitalism - is growth-at-all-costs coupled with lowering expenses (especially labor expenses), then these institutions are not going to look any different. They will be private schools with a “Quaker” sheen.

Why not use the constraints within the tradition to explore and even create new models of business? What is the history of Quaker business practices? Is there any creative insight to draw on there? Adjusting to appropriate, smaller sizes that are more likely to be sustainable given the disruptive future we all face. Consider Triple B Corps, Co-Op models, employee owned businesses like Bob’s Red Mill, and even lessons from unique tech companies like Basecamp that aim to remain small and do what they do well creating a cap on how much they will do and take on. Why hasn’t (and couldn’t) a Quaker institution write a book like “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work?” When I look at so many of Quaker institutions it is clear that business as usual is failing. It is time to allow the wisdom of the Quaker tradition and insights from alternative models of business to guide in this area.

In the past, Quakers seldom prioritized size and growth, especially when that got in the way of Truth and the needs of the community. We need to apprentice and hire leaders who believe the truth of this deep down in their bones, who are willing to get creative and rethink entire business models and reject the economic system that continues to disadvantage everyone except those at the very top.

One of the challenges with many Quaker institutions from schools and non-profits, and even meetings and churches, is that when they operate under a model rooted in birthright culture they lack any kind of serious onboarding procedures that help bring people fully into the community.

Birthright culture works from the assumption that those in the community are family, have shared cultural experiences, and already know what is expected of them. This may have been largely true for Friends back when everyone in the meeting was born Quaker, however, Friends institutions today need to shift to a new model and outlook on what counts as Quaker.

Alternatively, convincement model expects that there will be new people interested in participating in these institutions - they will not have the pedigree or the right last names and cannot name their family’s legacies - and yet this kind of culture is ready and prepared to bring new people fully in as true (new) insiders. Convincement culture isn’t about trying to convert people to its ways, it is interested in making the resources of the tradition as widely available and accessible as possible so transformation can happen from within. This allows for each person - regardless of background, experience, and identity - the ability to take ownership over the tradition along with the rest of their community. This approach understands that new people have very little to no understanding of the tradition (starting out) but are, in most cases, are here because they want to be a part of this larger story and community.

One illustration that comes to mind is mixtapes. I think a lot of Quaker institutions today are like a 6th generation duplicate of a mixtape. The songs on the tape are faint, the labels and song titles are too faded to read, the story about the mixtape decontextualized from who originally made the tape, and why. A robust “onboarding experience,” or if you prefer apprenticeship program, would walk people back through those generations in order to get them as close to the original as possible so that they knew better what they themselves would be remixing in the future.

In many institutions with a Quaker background onboarding procedures (around the tradition) are more-often-than-not a 15-minute spot, or a morning staff retreat every few years - to talk about the “5 Quaker values” of the school. If all the tradition gets is a crash course it is no wonder that the institutions themselves on a crash course.

An onboarding process rooted in a convincement culture would be more like ongoing opportunities that help develop and invest in staff overtime, slowly inducting people into the tradition, believing that good practices, processes, and procedures rather than strong personalities and protecting legacies is the way to pass on tradition and help these institutions survive. It also makes for more equitable, more stable, and more participatory organizations because everyone knows what is expected and no one or two leaders run the show.

Finally, we come to core stories and core practices.

In order to build a robust culture, the ability for more moral reasoning, and deeper shared language that can help guide institutions through these challenging times, I suggest drawing on core stories and core practices as the key to what we do.

Core stories or narratives should be among the first things developed. Many of the schools and institutions that suffer from the challenges under discussion have really powerful and important stories in their history. Stories that go back to why and how the school or institution was founded. Challenges they have overcome along the way. Points in time when there were big decisions that impacted the community and how that was handled. Major failures and breakdowns in leadership.

When I say core stories, I do not mean retelling stories of hagiography: the over-simplified stories that reinforce the mythology and often (Quaker) Exceptionalism of a place. I mean the far more complex stories that arise from communities trying to be faithful, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, dealing with their own shadow-sides, and revisiting those stories over and over again to mine them for new truths, new perspectives, and even more complex versions of those stories.

As Alasdair MacIntyre calls it, interrogating the tradition’s

I touched on an example of this earlier when I mentioned the story of the Underground Railroad we tell at Guilford College. There is a hagiographic way of telling the story - look at these good white Quakers who were early to work of abolition. But there is also a more powerful version that allows this story to become a “core story” in the way I mean when we tell the fuller story of the ways in which there was creative and redemptive aspects as people were faith to God, and ways in which corruption and rebellion against the justice of God was also at work.

In this second version, the Coffin family was among a few Quakers in this our area who were immediatists in their abolition. Many other Quakers were either gradualist, did not want to engage the issue, or were in favor of enslavement as was true throughout Quakerism up to that point. You then re-center the stories of the enslaved and emancipated Africans who worked closely with the other abolitionists (who were not just Quakers!).

Finally, trace these stories to the present struggles with racism, poverty, moral reasoning, and more. Investigate how the ways the institution has struggled and sometimes seriously failed around race and other justice related concerns, including the fact that a school - like Guilford - which was active in abolition did not integrate until the 1960s.

My colleagues Krishauna Hines-Gaither and Gwen Gosney Erickson did a fantastic presentation a couple years ago that shows how this kind of narrative, by mining it and developing it through multiple lenses and perspectives, can become an important core story to a community: Complicating Legacies: Slavery, Equity, & Inclusion on a Southern Quaker Campus.

I believe that these are the kind of stories that are powerful enough to shape the moral imagination and practices of a community long into the future.

Core practices work similarly and should be used to align with the Core Stories wherever possible. Instead of saying, we value Stewardship, develop institutional practices, procedures, and policies that are clear to anyone looking at them (and no less, participating in them) that these are indeed rooted in a community that is committed to being good stewards of what they have. Practices move beyond the surface, they are communal, adaptable, invitational and powerful. The whole community, whether you are new or born into this community long ago, can participate and in their participation will be shaped in the direction of the good of that community or tradition.

Another possible core practices for institutions wanting to be Quaker is to rethink their structures in ways that allow for a truly communal practice of decision-making. Rejecting the hierarchy, as usual, will not be easy, but taking structures that government or secular organizations and agencies use and trying to retro-fit Quaker practices onto it is a recipe for disaster.

Being practice focused allows the institution to rethink the whole thing - how can we integrate these practices in the best possible way? To practice community-wide decision-making well, people need to be onboarded well. People need to understand the core stories behind these practices. A practice focus is inclusive because it allows for those who are good or learn how to do the practices well to move from novice, to apprentice, to teacher and leader. One need not be an insider to participate in a practice in the same way that one needs to be an insider to understand all the unspoken rules, limitations, and barriers within an institution operating out of a birthright culture. Core stories and practices become the centerpiece and space where all of what we have discussed is integrated and put into action.

My hope is that there are things in here that are helpful whether you are in a Quaker organization or another faith-based group struggling with similar issues. These are very difficult times and very difficult practices to implement within larger institutions but as some of my friend Willie Baptist says: the struggle is the school.**

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This and the previous article are a distillation of my thinking and experience over the course of many years, which not only explains why it is so long, but why I may be still missing things (I have not yet experienced or been able to articulate)! This is an open-work! Please feel free to reach out with questions and feedback if you have any. Let me know what you think.

I am going to take next week off from writing the newsletter so that I can give you enough time to work through this, share it out, and ask questions and give myself a little recovery time. I have a great guest coming up for the last week of September who was mentioned above: Gwen Gosney Erickson.

*As an aside: For those of you interested in some of the scholarship that has influenced my thinking here, see Dandelion’s article, Testimony as Consequence, Not Values.

** Thanks Adam Barnes of the Kairos Center for illuminating me on this concept.

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Thank you all for reading!

Wess Daniels

Greensboro, NC (Haw River Watershed)

You support this newsletter by reading it, sharing it with friends, and/or by contributing financially to the making of this newsletter, and my other ministries. Thank you! -Wess 💚☕️