Quakers point the way

I attended Quaker meetings for 8 years but eventually stopped. I seemed to lack the required spirituality and the ability to sit contemplatively in silence through hour-long Sunday worship. As my wife (a Catholic) says, I am always accelerating, I’m in too much of a hurry.  In the end, I opted to spend my Sunday mornings in the fellowship of cyclists.

A Quaker meeting in session https://wandsworth.quakermeeting.org

But the period spent with the Quakers enriched my life, even in the company of cyclists. The Quaker principles of simplicity, equality, truth and peace have become a guiding light for me.

As I read the history of the Quakers, I also came to realise that this small religious denomination had, through quiet and peaceful action, punched far above its weight in reforming public life in the UK.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the campaign to abolish Britain’s slave trade, which took off in earnest in 1787 and came to fruition 20 years later, in 1807. The leaders were establishment Anglicans like Wilberforce and Clarkson, but they had joined relatively recently. By contrast, the non-conformist Quakers, dressed in plain clothes and addressing everyone with informal language (thee and thou), had done vital groundwork over many decades.

Many Quakers lived in colonies like Pennsylvania and Maryland, and started their campaign by prevailing on their fellow Quakers to free any slaves in their employ.  And when the abolition campaign finally took off in Britain, it was the Quakers and their Meeting Houses that provided all manner of support to Thomas Clarkson as he traversed the country on horseback.

Ending the trade was a major achievement, albeit assisted by slave uprisings in the Caribbean, but I surmise that without the Quaker groundwork, abolition would have taken decades longer.

The first British Church to name the genocide

The old-fashioned garb and speech are long gone, but the Quakers remain active and once again are leading the way for other people of faith. They were the first British Church to describe the Israeli action in Gaza as genocide. In a statement issued on May 27th, they demanded that the Government act to end the crimes that Israel was committing and, in particular, that it stop all arms exports, that it press the Israeli government and Hamas to agree an immediate, permanent ceasefire, release the hostages, and allow aid to enter unhindered.

Various of our members were active in the vital meeting that formulated this statement, reporting a close-run discussion that could have gone either way. The resulting statement was hedged and qualified in ways that were perhaps not fully justified. For example, it pinned all the responsibility for genocide on the Government of Israel, as if the Israeli public had nothing to do with it, and it abhorred any attempt to use the Quakers' words to question the existence of Israel.  

Personally speaking, I would question the legitimacy of a state where one ethnicity has superior rights and seeks to minimise the population of the other group through ethnic cleansing and genocide. Jews should be able to continue living in security in the territory of Israel/Palestine, but under a polity or polities that treat the indigenous inhabitants as equals. Indeed, such a solution would be in line with the Quaker principle of equality.

However, when all is said and done, the Quaker statement is an important step in the quest for truth and justice.

Anglicans seem to be turning

The truth is that all Christian denominations have dragged their feet in following the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth on this matter. Some seem to have held back out of innate conservatism, some suspicious of Islam and many frightened of being accused of antisemitism.

Some, whom we call Christian Zionists, have embraced the far-fetched idea that the return of the Jews to Palestine signals the beginning of the end times, and therefore needs to be hastened by giving unreserved support to Israel’s settler-colonial project. As a local Evangelical Pastor told me, there is no issue of sovereignty in Palestine: God gave the land to the Jews! (not to the indigenous people who have been living there for centuries).

But after a long and painful delay to which we have referred in previous blogs, the Established Church seems to have grasped the gravity of the situation. In a Statement dated 22nd May, the House of Bishops fiercely denounced the siege and starvation being used as a weapon of war, and hospitals and health facilities being systematically targeted.  Britain should stop selling arms to Israel, and the deliberate denial of food and medical aid was an atrocity that defies common humanity.

Even more importantly, the Bishops describe the death, suffering and destruction being inflicted on Gaza as a grave sin that violently assaults God-given human dignity and the very integrity of God’s creation.

The Bishops go on to condemn the selling of arms to Israel, and the dehumanising language of members of the Israeli government, which is dangerous and must be challenged. To maintain the hope of a long-lasting, peaceful solution, governments should now formally recognise Palestine as a sovereign and independent state. To delay further invites despair.

Amen! We pray that all Churches will build on the recent Quaker and Anglican statements and act quickly to bring an end to the slaughter and underlying injustices.