Three Twentieth-Century Revolutions:
Liberal Theology, Sexual Moralities, Peace Testimonies
By Jerry Frost
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Liberals who created FGC tolerated ambiguity in doctrine but they were certain
about morality. They approved of ethics enshrined in the Boy Scout code of
trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, thrifty, brave, clean,
and reverent. Meetings no longer disowned for bankruptcy, but insisted that
business be conducted prudently without undue risk to creditors or customers
and that honesty was the best policy. Hard work built character. There was
suspicion of the effects of great wealth and a strong emphasis upon stewardship;
some disciplines even suggested that after having made adequate money, a Friend
should retire from business and devote him or herself to philanthropy.
Friends then and now would argue that religion is a source of moral teachings. In fact, Friends resemble most Americans, of whom more than 90% tell pollsters that they derive ethics from religion. In 1900 the churches and meeting shared authority over morality with doctors and teachers and newly emerging professions like psychologists and sociologists. Newspapers and secular and religious magazines, including the Friends Intelligencer, conveyed the teachings of all of these groups. The main change in the source of information for social morTs has been the rise of mass media: first movies, radio, TV, and now potentially the web - where stories subtly convey alternative models of acceptable behavior.
Friends in 1900 agreed with other respectable Americans that the family was the basic institution of society and its welfare was crucial to civilization. A key to the survival of Quakerism was a religiously united home in which children were raised in the faith. Most members of meetings that are now part of FGC became Friends by birthright, and children of a mixed marriage had to declare when they reached a certain age whether they wished to be members. Since the 1870s marriage to a non-Friend was not a disownable offense, but Quakers still desired a religiously united home and disciplines devoted substantial space to correct child-rearing and educational practices in the home and school.
Friends did not believe in divorce. A couple, if they could not live in harmony, should separate but avoid any court proceedings. Faith and Practices advised meetings not to marry divorced individuals.
All meetings, whether Hicksite or Orthodox, liberal or fundamentalist, took strong stands against the use of tobacco, drugs, and alcohol. Working for a prohibition amendment was a major theme of the Social Gospel, and Friends supported the rigorous enforcement of prohibition, at least through the Hoover administration. Most Friends continued to abstain from alcohol at least until World War II. Except for a grudging acceptance of divorce, Friends moral teachings continued unchanged through the 1950s, even though allegedly sophisticated Friends now smoked and drank.
All this changed in the 1960s. London Yearly Meeting published in 1963 the conclusions of twelve psychiatrists in Toward A Quaker View of Sex (later republished by FGC) which in essence legitimated a Quaker debate on sexuality. Note it was titled "Toward A" and not "The," and what is most striking today is the tentativeness. The pamphlet was most concerned with ending the association of religion with sexual repression and fostering a healthy view of sexuality. The authors also opened for discussion whether homosexuality should be considered immoral behavior.
The careful debate and gradual evolution of views envisaged by the pamphlet's authors were drowned out by new developments: first, the introduction of the pill which meant that an effective contraceptive would ease the risk of having a baby out of wedlock; second, the rise of a counter-culture symbolized by the Beatniks and then the Hippies who deliberately defied traditional morality, by embracing free love, alcohol, marijuana and LSD and, sometimes most incongruously, combining them with vegetarianism. Then in rapid succession came the impact of the war in Vietnam, the Black power movement, and women's liberation. The New Left scorned the Old Left and a generation revolted against conventional wisdom - whether business, academic, religious or moral. Cleanliness and good manners became signs of a corrupt bourgeois mentality. No one over thirty could be trusted.
Swarthmore College can serve as an indicator of the rapid overthrow of traditional morality. In the 1950s Quakerism still dominated the institution, even though a majority of the students were not Friends. The college and town were officially dry and students were never served alcohol. In the 1940s a presidential candidate withdrew when told he could not serve alcohol in the president's house. Obviously, students could not drink on campus, but since the 1930s students had frequented nearby bars. Since the return of GIs, males could smoke and girls might smoke in their rooms and in certain buildings, but never on the streets. When having a seminar in a faculty member's home, male students normally wore a coat and tie.
The College through the fifties had a policy of quietly asking a male and female student caught having sex to leave. The college had separate male and female dorms, and males were allowed in the parlors of girls' dorms only for a few hours on evenings and weekends. When students asked to extend the time for fifteen minutes, the Dean of Women refused. A coed complained, "What can we do in an extra fifteen minutes that we cannot do before." The Dean's response: "I don't know what you do before but you could do it twice with an extra fifteen minutes." Still by the 1960s a faculty member who served on college's judiciary committee said the burden of proof on sexual misconduct cases was so high that rarely was anyone convicted.
In 1969 there was also a black sit-in. By then students smoked pot, dressed slovenly, wore their hair long as a sign of revolt, stole from the bookstore because the college allegedly had lots of money, demonstrated against the war, and ex-Swarthmore students active in radical groups built bombs. Many professors stopped having seminars in their homes because students were so careless of furnishings. All education had to be "relevant," and relevant meant about the corruption of America.
In 1967 a faculty committee recommended abolishing parietals, but the Board said no, citing the Quaker traditions of the college. In 1970 the College asked parents if it should continue to act in loco parentis. The parents said they trusted their children and the college repudiated parietals. In actuality, they had already ended and legislation was just accepting the reality. Soon after there were co-ed dorms. Supervision of morals ended, as the college just tried to survive a revolution as it educated spaced out students who believed wisdom began with them. Incidentally, the divisions on campus were so bitter and faculty meetings took so long that the faculty stopped making decisions by consensus and began voting.
The same rapid social change occurred in FGC. Chuck Fager describes the FGC in the 1950s as an organization dominated by white men in suits. In the 1960s radicals, some of whom were Quakers, saw the openness of Friends with their anti-war stance as providing a potential institutional base to revolutionize society. Radicals attacked theological liberalism and political tactics of Friends as a cop-out, a surrendering to a dehumanizing capitalism that subverted true religion and an authentic morality. Swarthmore College and Swarthmore Friends meeting, like many local meetings on college campuses, Pendle Hill, the AFSC, and local meetings experienced a generational divide.
The issue for young Quaker radicals was how to revolutionize society - preferably non-violently, but a few openly supported violent revolutions in sick societies - Vietnam, South Africa, and Latin America. For an older generation raised on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, non-violence was moral and there was no distinction between ends and means. A Quaker non-violent activist must be moral, and morality did not mean smoking pot and free love. A few younger Friends created communes and sought to develop a lifestyle of simplicity. Other young Friends seemed more interested in the declaiming against the immorality of Americans while insisting upon their own right to be free. Neither group of young Friends thought that traditional sexual morality was essential. In the late 1960s young Friends termed Quakes held meetings in Arch Street Meeting House in which they would bring sleeping bags and sleep on the floor. Unmarried male and females would sometimes sleep together.
The unquestioned moral standards of the older generations were now open for debate. The change can be illustrated by successive editions of PYM's Faith and Practices. The 1955 and 1961 versions have sections on marriage and home and family, but no discussion of sex. But the 1972 version adds a section on "Sexuality" which recognized that sex is a "natural part of every human being," but stood firm: "Friends have believed that casual or promiscuous sexual relations are wrong. Friends know that such relations are widely practiced today, often quite openly; but they have not changed their belief." The hard line did not last.
Meetings found the issues of sexual freedom easier to deal with after they realized that the traditional nuclear family no longer was the norm for all Friends and perhaps never had been. Quakers woke up to the fact that many members were single because they chose not to marry, were widows and widowers, or were divorced. Children were being raised by single parents or grandparents. A second range of issues deal with the age at which one becomes an adult. Boys could be drafted to fight at eighteen, and the voting and drinking age were lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. So now college freshmen could be described as adults and their sexual relationships were their own, not the meeting's business. Compassion for young members required that Friends adjust their teachings to changing social conditions.
The Liberal questioning of theological doctrines based upon the Bible now was applied to moral doctrines on sexuality and family life. Liberals had insisted that a non-exploitative love was the basis for a marriage of equals. The children of Quaker liberals demanded sexual liberation by claiming that the primary Quaker values were love and respect for others, not the institution of marriage. Sex before marriage and even outside of marriage if done in a love relationship was not a moral evil.
Parents faced the issue of what to do with a son or daughter who cohabited with a member of the opposite sex. At what age did a parent draw the line? So far as I can tell, and I know of no research on the subject and will welcome others' information, Quaker parents who started out saying "just say, no" to teenagers soon were telling college students, "not in my house, you don't", and eventually were resigned to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. At least, they rationalized, sex was better than drugs and parents feared that their kids were more likely doing both rather than neither.
Since it was impossible to find a biblical verse which allowed separating sex from marriage, liberal Friends who were parents ignored the Bible and accepted the new behavior by saying sex was a part of life and Christian love demanded tolerance. They hoped that their child's intimate relationship was healthy and founded on more than youthful lusts. They trusted (correctly it turned out) that eventually their child and his/her significant other would become a married couple and then have children, which would make them more conservative. For the teenager, parents advocated sexual education and pleaded for sexual delay until the person became a responsible mature adult. Besides, what alternative did the parents have, since no institution seemed able to control the youth and mass culture exalted freedom from restraint?
Unlike in early days, clearness committees of Friends did not scrutinize the sexual behavior of people wishing to be married in meeting. What Friends mostly did was entrust discussions of changing sexual morality to professionals and stop the meeting's condemnation of pre-marital sex. This was not a radical change because discussion of sex had never been considered a fit subject for a meeting for worship.
Eventually the meeting acquiesced in the new sexuality. The 1997 Faith and Practice noted that "Friends are wary of a preset moral code,ö condemned "license", and noted that "For many Friends, 'celibate in singleness, faithfulness in marriage' has proven consonant with the divine will." Left unsaid was that for many other Friends the "divine will" required neither celibacy nor faithfulness.
Gay and Lesbian Relationships
In the section on the family, the PYM 1997 discipline for the first time recognized the legitimacy of same sex relationships. This was a major revolution. Through the 1950s liberal Friends preferred neither to think about nor to discuss homosexuality. For example, Bayard Rustin, a birthright Quaker and a leader in the peace and civil rights movements, an employee of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the AFSC, was a clse associate of A.J. Muste, an esteemed radical pacifist who had beginning in the 1920s taught Friends the value of demonstrations and civil disobedience. Rustin was openly gay, a fact known by many Friends who continued to feature him as a speaker at FGC conferences. However, after he was arrested in San Francisco in 1952 and his homosexuality was publicized, Muste and the AFSC terminated contacts with Rustin, believing that his behavior had discredited the peace movement. A pattern of silence remained the norm for Quaker institutions. Throughout the 1960s the FCNL made no mention of guaranteeing the civil rights of homosexuals in its list of discriminatory practices needing change.
Traditionally, Friends, like other churches, insisted that the Bible in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere provided a summary of the moral law, a law used to condemn homosexuality. However, in the early 1970s several scholars issued books arguing that a careful exegesis of the passages that the church had relied upon to condemn homosexuality were based either upon a holiness code in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, whose other prescriptions no one took seriously, or rested upon an extrapolation from Paul (or pseudo-Paul) that had more relevance to first century temple prostitution than modern life. At the very least, scholars showed that there were several alternative interpretations of the Scripture verses on homosexuality.
For liberal Friends, the Bible was a guide for spiritual life, but it was a product of history and many of its strictures were obsolete. The women's liberation movement had long complained about patriarchal language in the Bible and the church and claimed that traditional morality had camouflaged oppression of half of the population. Friends had already accepted the legitimacy of womenÆs protest and sought to create a more inclusive language, referring to a Mother-Father God or Sophia. In addition, most FGC Friends by the 1970s had only a superficial knowledge of the Bible and the few surviving biblical scholars like Henry Cadbury and Alexander Purdy, now old men, had not written on homosexuality. So unlike the continuing discussion of scriptural passages on homosexuality in other denominations and even among evangelical and fundamentalist Friends, the discussion on homosexuality among FGC Friends did not rely upon biblical exegesis. Only opponents of gay rights cited theology and church history.
Instead, the initial discussion was on equal rights. Gay and lesbian Friends who had been active in civil rights and anti-Vietnamese War protests realized that the treatment of gays was another form of discrimination. Homophobia led to an oppressive society that denied civil liberties. With the subject presented as an equal rights issue, it was easier for Friends to conclude that these men and women had to live in fear and were openly discriminated against. As consenting adults, they had a right to privacy. So initially Friends finessed the issues of whether homosexual acts were moral or whether persons became gay or lesbians because of biology or environment or could or should be converted to being straight.
Friends began to discuss openly homosexuality around 1970 at a Conference on Sexuality of the New Swarthmore movement, in articles in the Friends Journal, written by gays using pseudonyms, and in young men's declaring that they were gay in meetings for worship. An ad which appeared in the Journal and New Republic brought a hundred responses. At the FGC Ithaca conference in 1972 gay Friends roomed in a dorm reserved for old folks (away from children) and had their own worship sharing groups.
The executive committee planning the 1972 conference had agreed that unmarried couples could be housed together because Friends had no basis to judge who was married and who was not. This policy was highly controversial and was rescinded after a threshing session of the executive committee. Mixed housing would be provided only for married couples. By 1975 the executive committee recommended that Friends be "sensitive" in making roommate selections, but that their preference would be granted. The high schoolers had separate dorms for girls and boys. College age students were treated as adults.
The decision of gay and lesbian Friends to form a caucus in 1971 and to confront meetings with their presence forced many straight Quakers who might have preferred for the whole subject to go away to face the issue. The alternatives became: do we drive these people away and, in essence, deny that they are children of God, or do we include them and learn to deal with their definition of sexuality?
A weighty Friend told me she began attending the worship periods sponsored by the Friends for Gay Concerns at FGC because she found the larger services too often became ôpopcornö meetings. She and others found the gays had a depth of spirituality, perhaps occasioned by their sense of suffering, that was authentic. Friends soon realized that there were a substantial number of gay and lesbians attending FGC, and that they liked and admired them.
FGC always took pride in its sense of inclusiveness, and the decision to provide a supportive environment came with what for Friends was surprising speed. In 1972, after Quaker Mary Calderone lectured, New York Yearly Meeting endorsed equal civil rights for gay and lesbians. In 1973 PYM authored an ad hoc Committee of Gay and Lesbian Concerns which became a standing committee in 1976. In 1974 Young Friends of North America issued a declaration calling for the "equality of All persons before the Eternal in matters Spiritual regardless of their sexual orientation." In 1975, when the FCGC began issuing a newsletter, FGC had decided that gay couples could room together and pay the same lower room rate as married couples; the next year it scheduled the first discussion group. In the fall of 1975 four AFSC staffers publicly announced they were gay; in 1978 eighteen more came out and received a letter of support from 250 people in the organization. This letter called the treatment of homosexuals a civil rights issue and demanded that within five years there be on all AFSC committees 20% Third World people, 40% women, and a gay presence.
What seems in retrospect a rather easy change of policy for liberal Friends stands in sharp contrast to a more cautious or hostile response from evangelical and fundamentalist Friends. Becoming a public debate at the 1977 Conference of Friends in the Americas in Wichita, Kansas, a controversy over the morality of homosexuality, also involving biblical authority, has embittered relations between FGC and evangelical Friends and occasioned discussions in liberal meetings. In the early 1980s various evangelical groups connected to FUM and FGC failed to change what they saw as the permissive policies on homosexuality in FGC's executive committee. In the 1990's the hostility of holiness-evangelistic Friends to what they saw as non-Christian emphases and support for homosexuality by Quakers in New York and New England lead to a call for realignment of meetings. The purpose of the realignment would be to cut contacts between those meetings associated with both FUM and FGC and the "real" Christians in FUM.
Many Friends who believe practicing homosexuality is immoral now believe in no discrimination and equal rights for gays and straights. Still, the Friends Committee on National Legislation has no policy affirming the need for equal rights for gays, because its goals must reflect the wishes of all American Friends and there is at present no consensus.
In the 1980s the issue for FGC members became: should meetings perform same-sex marriages? Gay Friends wished to gain the approval for their marriages without splitting meetings. Their strategy was to gain the approval of some large meetings in each yearly meeting. Then when conservatives in reaction sought to write a policy prohibiting gay marriages, no unity could be obtained because a few meetings had already engaged in celebrating gay marriages..
Gay marriages remain a highly controversial issue, particularly in those yearly meetings affiliated with both FGC and FUM. Some FGC meetings now celebrate them, others bless homosexual unions but refuse to use the term marriage, and some have managed to ignore the subject. Cambridge, MA. has a policy of making sure there are written guarantees for the rights of siblings, inheritance, and social responsibility in all marriages. Because monthly meetings have become almost autonomous and there are issues of legality in different states, it is likely that there will continue to be considerable variation in practice.
My forecast for the next twenty years is that issues on homosexuality are easier for liberal Friends to resolve theologically than those on sex outside of marriage. The biblical passages on homosexuality are ambiguous, and most Friends oppose discrimination and approve of rights of privacy among consenting adults. So if homosexuality continues as a divisive issue, the cause will be not religion but fear. By contrast, the biblical passages forbidding sex outside of marriage are clear and there is potential exploitation of the third parties, either in or outside the marriage, including children.
The history of divorce may provide a key to the future. Not just the Bible, but Jesus issued a clear command against divorce. Yet in the twentieth-century American liberals, moderates, and fundamentalists have come to accept the legitimacy of divorce. All religious bodies and many family counselors still deplore divorce, though they recognize that it may at times be necessary. With fifty percent of marriages ending in divorce, the results of refusing to remarry divorced people or not allowing remarried people to retain membership would be to jeopardize survival. This would conflict with the primary mission of churches to minister to sinners. So most churches have learned to live with divorce. Liberals would say this is the way religions normally respond to social change and the same process is occurring over sexual mores.
Meetings have already learned to tolerate couples living together who may or may not marry. With a high divorce rate and the legal complications of divorce, youth believe they can justify a trial period. (Statistics do not prove that having living together is less likely to lead to divorce, however.) More difficult to justify socially and theologically is open marriage. My prediction is that Faith and Practices will ignore sex before marriage for older youth, condemn it for high school students, and continue to deplore open marriages. Moreover, liberal meetings, all of which have already abandoned authority over lifestyles in favor of advices, will publicly and privately condemn but also tolerate open marriage.
The future course of events may be determined by whether morally conservative evangelical Friends will be able to keep their youth observing an ethos of sex permissible only in marriage and be willing to bear the social cost of jettisoning members who practice the new sexual morality. Quaker history would legitimate such behavior because there is a long tradition of defying American culture by being consistently sectarian. Standing against cultural norms reinforced Quakers finest moments: opposing slavery, supporting native American and women's rights, defending COs. Evangelical Friends who uphold traditional sexual morality can legitimately proclaim that they are upholding Quaker, Biblical, and church traditions.
For liberal Friends, who had already repudiated sectarianism, decisions to accept new sexual behavior patterns were easier. They already conformed to American culture and could justify the change in terms of other basic Quaker values. For the FGC in the future, the question is whether diversity of opinion and lack of clear guidance on moral issues involving sexuality before and after marriage will cause parents and youth who look to religion for ethical norms to ignore the Society of Friends.
NEXT SECTION: Testimonies for Peace
[Part I: A Century of Liberalism] [Part II: A Moral Revolution (this page)] [Part III: Testimonies for Peace] [Conclusions]
