Bayard Rustin and the Friends we shared

Sam Smith – Adam Gopnik’s excellent  New Yorker article on civil rights activist Bayard Rustin revealed something I had never imagined we had in common:  we are both raised in part by Quakers. As Gopnik notes:

Rustin was born in 1912 and raised by his grandmother in the Black Quaker belt not far from Philadelphia. His mother was a fluttering, spectral presence in his life … and he never knew his father. His grandmother was a devout Quaker, and a critical context in which to place Rustin is that of the African American Friends. Rustin was as much a representative of this creed as King was of the Black Baptist church.

I was raised as an Episcopalian but spent six years at Philadelphia’s Germantown Friends School and have come to realize what an effect that place had on me. The other day I asked myself: if I could only have gone to one of my teen schools – GFS and then Harvard – which would I have picked? In a second I realized that GFS was far more important to my life. It was not just the quality of the classes – including in ninth grade one of two high school anthropology courses then taught in the US – but the way the teachers helped you learn to think about issues and problems. They were not just instructors, they were role models.

Further, Quakers are not particularly strict about beliefs. For example, Friends Publishing site notes:

The thing about the lack of religious dogma among Quakers is that what may seem like a simple “yes/no” question often has a more ambiguous answer, like “maybe” or “sometimes” or “it depends.” Do Quakers believe in God? is definitely one of those questions. Most Quakers believe in… something. It’s when you ask if that something is “God” that the answer becomes more complicated…

So can an atheist be a Quaker? Sure! …  After all, you can believe that there is something more to reality without assigning it a personality or even an identity, and (perhaps more importantly from our perspective) you can believe in ethical principles without requiring them to have a holy source. Even if you are a hardcore materialist, who believes there is nothing more to existence than our physical reality, you can still believe in ethics, as expressed in Quaker testimony.

It’s even easier to be a Quaker if you’re agnostic—if, rather than completely rejecting the possibility of the existence of the divine, you have your doubts, or you simply can’t be sure one way or the other. The Religious Society of Friends recognizes that uncertainty; part of believing that everyone is capable of experiencing the divine is believing that everyone’s journey to that experience is unique, and takes place according to its own timetable.

That’s the sort of stuff this Seventh Day Agnostic likes to read. And even though the weekly meetings seemed tedious for their lengthy stretches of silence, when someone spoke hardly anything was presented as God’s answer, but rather as a human struggle for good values.

As Gopnik writes:

Rustin’s civil-rights work was shaped by the practice of Quaker consensus-seeking. With no set dogma available, members of the Society of Friends have to consult their inner light to navigate, and the many boats are expected to knock against one another as they glide. The necessarily schismatic nature of the civil-rights movement, encompassing godless socialists as well as evangelical Christians, was exactly the right place for someone with a Friends background to flourish. Finding a way from individual crankiness to a working consensus was, as Harold D. Weaver, the leading scholar of Black Quakers, has made plain, a regular Quaker practice.

And later he notes:

All this was part of Rustin’s central understanding: pragmatism and principle intertwine to make progress.

Speaking of Rustin’s divisions with Malcolm X, Gopnik writes of “the division in any national liberation movement between the charismatic absolutist and the pragmatic pluralist.”

Or as I sometimes tell people, “I don’t care what your faith is; it’s what you do with it that matters.”

This has been the big division in my life. Introduced to politics and action while stuffing envelopes in a campaign that ended 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia I learned early that change came in large part from small actions rather than just grand ideology. I was happy to compromise when no damage resulted and to delay my distant dreams for what we could do next week.  

I have annoyed a lot of people including most recently some members of the Green Party, which I helped start, who believe I should be backing Jill Stein for president even if about all she can do is make Trump’s election more likely.

It is this blending of long term belief with finding consensus with others today that I learned in no small part from the Quakers. As with Ruskin, this has gotten me in trouble from time to time but as both the Quakers and some smart activists  taught me, change without good alliances doesn’t work.  Which is why, perhaps, Quakers are called Friends.They certainly were for me.