Quaker Theology #32: Lost Cause? Is AFSC A Lost Cause For Friends? Probably

No sooner had the AFSC's Centennial bash gotten underway in spring of 2017, when somebody rained on their parade: another multi-million budget shortfall was acknowledged, with the expected fallout of more job and program cuts. This was getting to be an all-too familiar story; almost as familiar as the empty promises to "re-connect" AFSC with actual living Quakers. What had happened? In marketing talk, the answer is straightforward: besides foolishly wasting millions of dollars, AFSC had trashed and squandered its brand, and is paying the price. And what was that brand? Look at the name: It wasn't "American." It wasn't "Service. And by god, it wasn't "Committee." It was "Friends. And more than that: the Society of Friends. Still more; the Religious Society of Friends. (Or RSOF.) What's all this got to do with Quaker theology? Everything. The thesis of this compilation is that it is theology - or whatever is behind that term, which makes Quakerism real, and this this difficult-to-pin-down "quotidian" is what animates Quaker witness and service; and that without it, the service is fatally compromised. And that AFSC, in cutting loose from the RSOF, in all its messy "quotidian" (yet through which somehow the Spirit seems to work; after all, it birthed AFSC) has undermined the most precious aspect of its brand: its authenticity. Marketing experts agree that without that, the group is like a cut flower, the roots severed. This cutting is not a new phenomenon. Clarence Pickett, its most revered Director, said as far back as 1945 that "there is no legal connection between the S[ociety] of F[riends] and the AFSC." "Theoretically," he admitted, "the AFSC could become composed of non-Friends entirely." As, in practice - not theoretically - it almost entirely has. What had happened? As one Board member put it in 1991, "If you look down the list of major donors, people say again and again, 'I'm giving money to AFSC because it's a Quaker organization and when Quakers do peace work, they do it right. . . .'" Well, maybe they once did it right. But in AFSC, Quakers aren't doing it anymore. Alas, while drawing up their latest list of experts, AFSC has overlooked two of the most experienced analysts in the field, namely: professor H. Larry Ingle, and Chuck Fager. We stumbled into this assignment in1979, when a discussion of AFSC unexpectedly broke loose. I was the convenor, Larry an enthusiastic participant. We've been on this unfolding case ever since. This collection brings together most of the major pieces we have produced. Reading AFSC internal documents, it looks more and more like AFSC's "anti-oppression" thrust has indeed displaced "the formal Quaker identity" as the group's sacred center. Certainly it's been endlessly useful in internal politics. As one exasperated CEO put it in 2008 in an uncharacteristically candid moment: "There is a culture of white guilt in this organization that is stifling and patronizing." But what if this exaltation is misplaced? What if the legacy of racism is a problem to be worked on rather than the successor to Quakerism as the group's religious center? And what has happened when a culture's sacred has been sucked out of its vessel, replaced with a farrago of imported and shifting notions, given over to outsiders, and the vessel is then paraded around to collect money from the credulous? Larry and I are aware that our work has not endeared us to many at the higher levels of AFSC's rickety staff ladder, and likely frightened some at lower rungs who fear for their jobs (probably rightly, but not on our account.) It is a kind of consolation to find in its records evidence that some of its higher-ups have occasionally put in serious effort at not taking us seriously. No doubt our worst continuing offense is that we have insisted, unlike almost all the internal reshufflers and reformers, in doing our work openly, in the public prints, and online. And here we are, doing it again.… (more)