Why I'm a Quaker

I.

I’m a Quaker.

I’ve hesitated to write this series, because I’m not a very good Quaker. I worry that people will look at my behavior and assume that that’s what all Quakers are like. But people keep asking why I’m a Quaker and what I get out of it, so there’s clearly enough interest that I shouldn’t wait until I can reliably remember I’m a pacifist.

II.

The story of my teenage spiritual experiences was very important to me and shaped the next fifteen years of my life, and I didn’t write it down or share it with anyone who could go “hey, wait, that’s not how it happened...” So this story is going to, unavoidably, be very narrativized. I ask for your forgiveness and say that it’s at least emotionally true.

When I was in middle school, I loved Greek mythology.¹ So I read voraciously about the Greek gods online. I discovered—to my shock and pleasure—that people today really worshiped these gods. So I decided I would worship them as well, and I would have a special devotion to the goddess Artemis.

How I picked Artemis, I don’t remember. Certainly from my perspective today, as a promiscuous lacto vegetarian who hates nature, the virginal goddess of the wilds and the hunt seems like a weird choice. But Artemis it was.

I knew, from reading the writing of modern Hellenistic pagans, that the Greek gods were kind of bored—as far fewer people worship them today than in their heyday—and so any serious attempt at worship was likely to lead to the gods paying very close attention to you indeed. And Artemis did pay attention to me. I felt her presence. She spoke to me. She loved me.

I was continually drawing up plans for how I would venerate Artemis and then equally continually failing at them after the first week, probably because I was a suicidal twelve-year-old. But I knew that Artemis loved me regardless and unconditionally. I was Hers.

Eventually, I failed at a plan and never wound up making another one, in what is perhaps the most ignominious deconversion from Hellenistic polytheism in human history.

A year or so later, I wound up reading C. S. Lewis.² I learned that Christians believed that God had become a human being and He had been tortured to death in one of the most horrific ways imaginable, in order to earn me forgiveness from my sins.

It seemed obvious to me that I was a horrible person, that I had been born fundamentally twisted so that, no matter how much I loved and intended what was good, I would inevitably end up pursuing evil.³ I loved the Christian story because it said to me “you are exactly as horrible and broken as you think you are. But so is everyone else. God loves you regardless. If you trust in Him, then He will make you good and whole.”

And so I prayed, and I felt the love of God in me. God spoke to me and told me that I was His beloved child, that my sins were forgiven, that I had no reason to hate myself, and that I really ought to do my homework. I want to be clear that this is not a metaphor. There was a Being, outside of me, who was speaking to me when I prayed.

I started to take myself to the Episcopalian church on Sundays, much to the bafflement of my parents, who had not really expected a teenage rebellion in the form of their child attending a church with the average age of 65.

(Now, you might wonder how all this related to the veneration of the goddess Artemis. Lewis actually talks about this! To Lewis, the pagan gods are prefigurations of Christianity foreshadowing and paving the way for Jesus. Clearly, Artemis was prefiguring Jesus in my own life.)

About two years passed. I was sixteen or so, and I got into an argument on the Internet about whether God existed. Over the course of several days of argument, my interlocutor—whose name I have sadly forgotten—pounded into my head: you shouldn’t believe things unless you have some specific reason to think they’re true.

(I don’t know why this was such a revelation to me, because I had been occasionally reading Overcoming Bias for at least several months at this point, but this is when it finally took.)

Once I really internalized that statement, I realized that I’d never believed in God because I had evidence that God was real. I’d believed in God because I’d loved the stories—Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and Jesus’s death on the cross—and because it filled an emotional need in me, to be loved unconditionally, to have a hope of being better. I’d never considered if they were real the same way a chair was, and when I thought about it I knew they weren’t.

True, I’d talked to God. But any atheism had to explain the observation that some people talk to God. It wasn’t more evidence because I’d felt it personally.

And so I deconverted and became a Singerian utilitarian, because my days of being obnoxious to my poor parents sure were coming to a middle.

Two years later, when I was eighteen, I went to a performance by the band Cobra Starship. For those who don’t know the ancient lore, Cobra Starship frontman Gabe Saporta claims that Cobra Starship was founded when Saporta had a vision of a giant space cobra from the future, who knew that humanity was about to go extinct and had tasked Saporta with making sure that humanity goes out in style by teaching the emo kids how to have fun and getting the hipsters to stop taking themselves so seriously.

So I went to the concert and the giant space cobra from the future spoke with me?

Obviously, there is no such thing as a giant future space cobra. I drew one of two conclusions. One: ‘I am speaking to the Divine’ is a thing my brain predictably does in certain situations, usually involving singing and mythology and a mindful focus on the present moment. Two: the Divine had, for inscrutable reasons of its own, decided to confirm me in my atheism by appearing to me in the form of a giant future space cobra. Either way, I would go through my life as an atheist.

Giant space cobras from the future aside, I spoke rarely with the Divine. A secular life simply doesn’t have enough opportunities for singing and mythology and mindfulness. For a while, I was sure that Cobra Starship concert was the last I’d hear from the Divine; a goodbye that was a confirmation there was no one there at all. Later, I discovered that I could speak with the Divine at Secular Solstice. It was a once-a-year treat.

And then I discovered that the Quakers had been right about almost every major moral insight of the past four hundred years. I decided to read more about them, and picked up an Introduction to Quakerism book. It said, “so, you know that thing where you speak with the Divine? Yeah, follow these instructions and you can do it every week.”

So I went, I followed the instructions, it worked, and I became a Quaker.

III.

Introduction to Quakerism⁴ books all cover the same material. They talk about how to participate in Meeting for Worship, briefly discuss Quaker ethical teachings, and explain how to conduct a Meeting for Business. Optionally, they might give a capsule history of Quakerism. Notably absent is any sort of discussion of God’s nature, how salvation works, the afterlife, miracles, the Problem of Evil, Biblical inerrancy, or what one might think of this Jesus fellow other than that he was a pretty cool dude.

From a mainstream Christian perspective, this is very weird. Normal Christian denominations consider the Trinity to be vastly more important than the correct procedure for deciding who is to host the church picnic.

Religious studies scholars distinguish between orthopraxic and orthodoxic religions. In orthodoxic religions, such as mainstream Christianity and Islam, religious practice is fundamentally about believing the right things: reciting the Shahada, assenting to the Nicene Creed, or accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. In orthopraxic religions, such as Judaism and most historic polytheisms, religious practice is fundamentally about doing the right ritual: celebrating the holy days, following the dietary rules, avoiding taboos.

Modern, unprogrammed Quakerism is very possibly the most orthopraxic religion I’ve ever encountered.

The central activity of Quakerism, the thing that makes you a Quaker, is going to Meeting for Worship.

You enter a Meeting for Worship and take a seat. Chairs or benches have been arranged in a semicircle so that everyone can see each other. Post-Covid, the front of the room is typically taken up with a Zoom meeting, for people who are unable to make it to the Meetinghouse.⁵ The room is otherwise unadorned. We see no crucifixes, no pictures of saints, no inspirational statements about God’s love. More Christian meetings may have a Bible in the center of the room for general reference.

Around you, others are taking a seat as well, perhaps somewhere between three and forty people. The room is silent.

You “center down.” Ideally, you have had some spiritual practice during the week—journaling, praying, meditating, long walks in nature—which has prepared you to make the most of your Meeting. Each Quaker centers down differently, and most have a bag of tools they choose from depending on how they feel each day. You might internally recite a set prayer, such as the Lord’s Prayer or Psalm 23. You might go around the room and pray for each person at the Meeting, either in words or by visualizing the light of love surrounding them. You might focus on your breath, or on a mantra such as “love”, “presence”, or (for the less Christian Quakers) even “om.” You might focus on the present moment and how you feel in your body. You might review your past week, giving thanks, asking for what you and others need, and noting what you’ve done well and what you’ve done badly.

Sometimes, you spend the entire time distracted, rehearsing your to-do list, ruminating on your anxieties, or cataloging the misdeeds of the people you’re most irritated at.⁶ But sometimes you become aware of... Something. Quakers have a lot of names for it. The Holy Spirit. The Presence. The still small voice. The Inner Light. That of God in everyone. The thing I called Artemis, and Jesus, and a giant future space cobra.

You rest in the Inner Light for a while. You are strengthened. Your problems seem simpler, or your awareness is drawn to considerations you overlooked. You realize something you’ve done wrong that you really would rather not admit to yourself. Your vague, quiet misgivings strengthen into a sense that something is wrong, or fade into meaningless anxieties. I personally always end up coming home with a dozen new items on my to-do list.

Eventually, most of the time, someone will stand up and say a few words. This is called “vocal ministry.” Quakers aren’t permitted to prepare their vocal ministries ahead of time; you must speak only if the Inner Light moves you to speak at that very moment. This is a discrete, physical feeling, and it is very clear what it is once you’ve had it. In general, I’ve found the quality of vocal ministries is quite high. Most Christian denominations have one person who is supposed to talk every week regardless of whether they have anything to say or not. Quakers have three to forty people who are only supposed to talk when they have something interesting to say. Whether or not you believe in Divine intervention, it makes sense that the latter would lead to more insightful statements.

You pay attention when there is a vocal ministry. Afterward, you prayerfully consider whether it “speaks to your condition” (whether this was a message intended for what you are personally struggling with). If not, you charitably assume it was intended for someone else in the room.

After an hour, two people stand up and shake hands, which means the Meeting is over. You shake hands with those sitting near you, and then it’s time for announcements.

If you’re a Quakerly sort, you go out into the world and for the next week you’re a little bit calmer, a little bit kinder, a little bit more likely to do what you ought.

IV.

Quakers don’t really do theology, not because there’s anything wrong with theology per se, but because it’s a distraction.

The thing that Quakerism is is building a relationship with the Inner Light, the Presence, that of God in everyone. Fussing about what precisely it means for there to be Three Persons in One God and that Jesus was begotten and not made is like obsessively reading God’s dating site profile: you might accumulate lots of information about what traits God has, but you aren’t forming a relationship. A relationship comes from speaking with the person, listening to them, and spending time together—and if you do lots of that, it doesn’t matter if you can guess what they’d say is the weirdest present they’d ever received.

You can be a Quaker and an atheist. The Inner Light clearly exists—I’ve experienced it. It’s immaterial to the practice of Quakerism whether there is a supernatural explanation for the Inner Light; I believe there isn’t.

Dialectical behavioral therapy calls it “wise mind.” Other traditions call it “the voice of God” or “the conscience.” I think metta meditation is often trying to access it. From everything I’ve read, it doesn’t seem to be enlightenment.

It is very difficult to describe the Inner Light. Once you experience it, it is unmistakable.

The Inner Light is the best part of you. It is kind and compassionate, brave and determined, self-controlled and forgiving, generous and honest, honorable and humble. And it always knows what the right thing to do is.

Let me be careful in my claims. Unless you believe in God, the Inner Light has no knowledge you don’t. Even if you do believe in God, God seems willing to arrange the occasional coincidence, but is perversely uninterested in divinely guiding people towards smallpox variolation, oral rehydration solution, or the source code for an aligned artificial superintelligence. You can faithfully follow the Inner Light and do less good than you could, or even do harm, because you are unaware of crucial facts. The Inner Light won’t tell you that donations go thousands of times farther in Africa than they do at your local soup kitchen; it won’t tell you that upzoning Marin would be better for the environment than donating to the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. The Inner Light might make you more curious and less defensive when you encounter the weak points of your belief; that’s all it does, on the factual correctness front.

But very often we underperform what we could do, given the facts we have.

When I first read the dialectical behavioral therapy skill “effectiveness”, I thought it was a nonsense therapeutic applause light. You’re supposed to “do what works”? No fucking shit. Who deliberately doesn’t do what works?

Well, uh, me. All the time, actually.

I say mean things to people I love because I’m mad and then feel surprised when they feel hurt and I feel guilty. I don’t communicate my feelings and preferences to people and then feel surprised when they fail to figure them out through telepathy. I avoid important work tasks that scare me and then feel surprised when the work tasks don’t suddenly disappear and in fact now the deadlines loom terrifyingly close and many people are mad at me because they were counting on me to get the task done. I pick arguments on Discord when I’m in a bad mood and then feel surprised when this just makes my mood worse. I think to myself “I’m lonely, and I never work well when I’m lonely, but surely this time I can white-knuckle through it and get my work done because it’s really urgent”, and then feel surprised when it is 8pm and the only word on my document is “the.” Sometimes I even log in to X!

As Nate Soares once said, “Sometimes, I wonder how successful a person would be if they just did all the obvious things in pursuit of their goals.”

He also wrote, in the same post:

I have often myself found it useful, mid-hasty-decision, to pause, reflect, and ask myself “wait… is this a terrible plan?“

(And then, if the answer is yes, I don’t carry out the plan — a crucial step.)

When you act from the Inner Light, you feel a sense of peace and rightness and what I almost want to call contentment. It’s not that you’re happy about what’s going on. People are often in situations that it would be deranged to expect them to be happy about. A cancer diagnosis, a divorce, the death of a loved one, being abused: no spiritual practice can make those things okay. And the world has bigger problems too. No one is happy about malaria or AIDS or poverty or genocide or factory farming or climate change or existential risk.

But you can act in a way that you’re proud of. You can know that you did the best you could, however the dice fall. If you’ve spent your entire life muddling through, doing what’s justifiable or good enough, I can’t overstate how wonderful it is to do exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

And you can always have that peace. You can take this advice from Epictetus, if you like, but I prefer the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

No matter how awful your circumstances, you have a choice. It may be small. If your circumstances are awful enough, the difference between choosing good and choosing bad may be barely detectable from the outside. Abuse survivors’ acts of resistance may be a gesture or a glance or even a thought; similarly, the inner strength it takes for some depressed people to take a brief morning walk is unimaginable to those who have never been there.

(Okay, sure, maybe you philosophically don’t believe in free will, whatever. But in whatever sense people could be said to “make” “decisions”, you can always make a good one.)

Unlike Frankl, I’m not a concentration camp inmate; all my problems are my own fault. So what I find comforting is the corollary that I can’t cut myself off from the Inner Light either. However much I have sacrificed my inner freedom and dignity, however many of my choices have been cruel or unwise or simply fucked up, I can in every moment make the choice to be kind. And if I fail to do so in this moment? Then I always have another chance in the next.

I have known people who lived always from their Inner Light. None of them are Quakers; I don’t know how many of them have some recognizably Quakerly spiritual practice and how many of them are approaching the Inner Light some other way. But they’re some of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever known. They always have a gentle word for everyone. They can be completely honest without being brutally honest, because they don’t have the kinds of beliefs that make honesty brutal. They are productive at their work. They are humble, really humble, not as a synonym for self-hatred, but because there is something that matters more to them than their position in stupid monkey status games. They seem very happy. They shine, a bit. You become a better person for being around them.

...and I think basically all of them are wrong about a lot, and none of them are directing their efforts in the most effective ways to improve the world, because the Inner Light doesn’t protect you from being wrong, and unfortunately in this world being right matters as much as being good. But I don’t have any secret to rightness, and I do have a secret to goodness. So I’m a Quaker.

1. Anyone else read Edith Hamilton?

2. Screwtape Letters continues to be one of my favorite books.

3. This was mostly about not doing my homework. Suicidal thirteen-year-olds can be pretty melodramatic.

4. Here I am primarily discussing ‘unprogrammed’ Quakerism, which is the original form of Quakerism, the one I have the most experience with, and the most common form in the Anglosphere. Most Quakers worldwide are ‘programmed’ Quakers, whose practice looks more similar to standard evangelicals. I’m not qualified to explain how programmed Quakers interpret historical Quaker beliefs.

5. Since the average age at many Quaker meetings is something like 65, lots of Quakers can’t attend Meeting.

6. The latter two can often be redirected to prayers for, respectively, strength to endure whatever happens and the well-being of those you’re irritated at.