Godless for God’s Sake is the title of a new book, to be published this spring, consisting of especially commissioned essays by British, US American and Australian Quakers who are committed to exploring and promoting a nontheist and non-supernaturalist understanding of religion in general and the Quaker tradition in particular.
Even within the liberal and diverse community of Friends, the book is likely to shock as well as challenge. Its editors and contributors – and I am privileged to be among them – have no intention of trying to convert the Religious Society of Friends into a covert arm of the international Humanist movement. But they are all frank about their own rejection of belief in a supernatural, objective God or ‘Spirit’, and firm in their advocacy of a religious pluralism that extends to a welcoming recognition of nontheist, nonrealist or non-metaphysical perspectives on religious faith and practice.
Some sofia readers may be surprised to learn that Quakers, with their proud three-and-a-half-centuryold tradition of resistance to creeds, dogmatic theology, spiritual hierarchies, Biblical literalism and clerical leadership, can be no less troubled by the challenge of nontheism than other ‘faith communities’. But for all their long record of radical social engagement, Friends can be every bit as conservative as the mainstream churches when it comes to ‘doing things our way’ and clinging fondly to the familiar language of founding fathers and mothers. The flip-side of Quaker emphasis on silent worship is that it can serve to conceal sharp theological differences which may seem all the more shocking when they come into the open. To many Friends, then, the nontheists’ radical re-envisioning of God as wholly subjective, and of the holy Spirit as the wholly human spirit of ‘mercy, pity, peace and love’, can seem an affront, an assault on everything they hold most dear and precious.
So one important aim of the book is to show that, far from attacking or denying much-loved Quaker tradition, the ‘devout scepticism’ of nontheist Friends is a positive re-evaluation of that tradition for the twenty-first century. For more than three and a half centuries Friends have refused to formulate their own creed or assent to anyone else’s. Even as minimalist a creed as ‘I believe in God’ breaks with Quaker tradition. Deeds rather than creeds are at the heart of Godless Quakers – for God’s Sake The flip-side of Quaker emphasis on silent worship is that it can serve to conceal sharp theological differences, says David Boulton in this article about Quakers who don’t think God exists.
Most Quakers who described themselves as nontheist were not newcomers to the Society but seasoned Friends, members or attenders for, on average, 28 years!
Quakerism. Friends have always claimed or aspired to a way of living rather than a set of beliefs, seeking commitment in action rather than assent to propositions or ‘notions’. Quakers may experience God or the Spirit in traditional theistic ways, as objective ‘maker, defender, redeemer and friend’, or in nontheistic ways as a subjective projection of human ideals, the imagined embodiment of wholly human values – or simply as the pure poetry of the seeking soul, a poetry that convicts us of the pathetic inadequacy of what we are while pointing us to what we might be, and what the world itself might be if we did our bit to build the republic of heaven on earth.
Publication of Godless for God’s Sake is merely the latest in a series of developments aiming to explore the experience of nontheism, religious humanism or secular spirituality within the world-wide Religious Society of Friends. Quakers have always had a strong presence within the Sea of Faith Network, but have only recently begun to network among themselves.
Occasional articles in the open-minded weekly The Friend, or lectures and workshops given at the invitation of the more adventurous Quaker institutions, have brought nontheism to wider attention. In the 1990s the Woodbrooke Quaker Theology Seminar tackled nontheism and published a number of papers, both affirmative and critical. The Quaker Universalist Group published my pamphlet The Faith of a Quaker Humanist in 1997 and a collection of ‘essays in radical Quakerism’, Real Like the Daisies or Real Like I Love You? five years later.
The following year Woodbrook Quaker Study Centre published a major survey by an American Friend, David Rush – also an active member of SoF UK – of nearly 200 nontheist Friends in Britain and America. Perhaps the most surprising result of the survey was that most Quakers who described themselves as nontheist were not newcomers to the Society but seasoned Friends, members or attenders for, on average, 28 years! Many were clerks and former clerks of their local or regional meeting, and even of Yearly Meeting, the Society’s governing body.
In January 2004 some 37 nontheist Friends attended a workshop at Woodbrooke ‘to explore the experience of nontheism in the Society’. I reported in The Friend: ‘Not all were wholly content with nontheism as a label. Some preferred atheist or Quaker humanist, some emphasised that God, understood as a symbol of our most cherished human values, remained central to their religious life. There was strong emphasis on the rejection of supernaturalism as a relic of an archaic world-view’.
The workshop minuted that ‘With joy we affirm that people can live wonderful Quaker lives while holding a variety of religious views, and that we find this diversity is no bar to unity in the Meeting community.’ A small steering committee was formed to maintain contacts, and from this emerged an international email discussion list (subscribe free by emailing nontheistfriendssubscribe@topica.com) and a website, http://www.nontheistfriends.org, with links to the various SoF websites.
Woodbrooke held a follow-up workshop in January 2005. But perhaps more importantly its Quaker counterpart in the USA, Pendle Hill in Philadelphia, hosted a similar event in 2005 for American nontheist Friends. Quickly over-subscribed, it rekindled a flame that had first been ignited back in 1976 when the first ‘Workshop for Non-Theistic Friends’ was organised at the annual Gathering of Friends General Conference, followed by similar workshops from 1996 on. If these developments challenged some aspects of Quaker tradition, they did so by renewing and refreshing it.
Over the last two years I have had the privilege of addressing meetings in California and Oregon in the USA, and Queensland and New South Wales in Australia, following publication of The Trouble with God (a new international edition of which will be in the shops in January). Friends around the world have taught me much about the value of sharing our stories.
As I write, a vigorous correspondence is continuing in the pages of The Friend, following an account I wrote of my ‘pilgrim’s progress’ into membership of the Society. Almost every day I receive emails from Friends telling me joyfully of their ‘coming out’ as nontheists or nonrealists. Sea of Faith exists to promote as well as explore religious faith as a human creation, and where better to promote, to speak our own truth, than in our own religious communities? And in the face of the present tidal wave of toxic fundamentalisms polluting our social and political life, what better contribution can we make to the creation of a strong, confident, wholly human spirituality rooted, inevitably, in the myths and grand narratives of our pre-scientific, unreasoning past, but transformed to fit our own times and help create a world where supernaturalism, superstition, magic and metaphysics can be properly and effectively challenged? Let there be light!