I like talking with people who have changed religions. Here is one of them. Previously: Tamelonie Thomas.
Rebecca is a Quaker living in Atlanta with her wife, two dogs, and cat. She is an aspiring children’s librarian.
Hi, Rebecca! Can you tell me a little bit about your religious background growing up?
I grew up super fundamentalist, like, almost Quiverfull, and am now an atheist Quaker. My wife and I were married under the care of our Quaker meeting a few weeks ago, and if a few years ago, someone had told me I’d have a religious wedding ceremony, I would have laughed at them, but now I can’t imagine having done it any other way.
I grew up in a Christian tradition that taught that people are broken and worthless and that it’s only God’s love that makes us good. I think people are good. I don’t think we need a Deity to make us that way.
It took me a while to find my worldview after becoming an atheist. There were a few years of “Okay, I don’t believe in God. Now what?” A lot of atheist writing didn’t inspire me or offer good answers to those questions. It wasn’t until I started researching Quakerism that the pieces really started to fall into place and my worldview as an atheist took shape. The basis of Quakerism is that there is that of the Light in everyone. (What the Light is is up to the individual. For some, the Light is the Christian God, for others it’s simply the capacity for goodness and compassion in everyone.) And I really loved that. There is goodness in me naturally. It doesn’t take a God to make me good. It doesn’t take a God to make me worthy of love. It doesn’t take a God to make me want to help people. Those things are a natural part of me and it’s my responsibility to bring those qualities out in myself and to help people find those qualities in themselves.
Knowing that my good qualities are an inherent part of me and not something I only have because of God has been a relief as well as a responsibility. It can be easy to let those qualities become hidden under selfishness and anger, so I have to take care of them and foster them. They are my responsibility.
Can you tell me a bit about when you first learned that there were spiritual/non-religious options other than the tradition you were raised in?
I don’t remember when I first heard about atheism. I always knew there were people who didn’t believe in God, and I always knew they were The Enemy. The first atheists I met were probably in high school, kids who I realize now as an adult were rebelling for the sake of rebelling, not because they were giving any great thought to theology and philosophy. I remember getting into debates with them, working so hard to convince them that God was real while also being envious of their non-belief, the freedom they must have felt from it. I was always jealous of atheists, though it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I took it on for myself.
There was a period of time in my late teens and early twenties when a lot of awful things happened to my family. For several years we had a streak of one person a year ending up in the ICU and none of us knowing if they would wake up the next day — illness, overdose, car accidents, a different person each year. The comments and “encouragement” I saw in cards and Facebook posts were horrifying. “Can you imagine how much worse it could have been if God wasn’t watching over you?” “Satan tries his hardest to knock us down, but we have to get right back up!”
I realized during that time that I didn’t see the world as a battlefield for cosmic forces. Satan was not attacking my family and God was not fighting back for us. I was very angry for a couple of years. Angry at religious and the awful lies I had been told for so long. I’ve leveled out a lot in the past few years. I’m not bothered so much at the idea of God or whether or not people believe in one, but I do still get angry about the lies believers tell, the lies I believed for so long, about gender and sexuality and morality, that you constantly have to be pleasing to God and that only God makes you worthy as a person.
So how did you become a Quaker?
After I got over the initial thrill of being an atheist (because it was thrilling, finally feeling that freedom I’d always been told I’d find in Christ, but never did), I started missing parts of religion, mainly the community and ritual. There’s so much value to be found in ritual; it can be very grounding and comforting. I tried out a few gay-affirming congregations, and I tried a couple of Unitarian Universalist churches, but the services felt really cheesy to me. My journey to Quakerism honestly started when I remembered reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond and figuring that if the Quakers were burned as witches, I would probably like them.
I went to a few meetings sporadically over the year or so and really loved them. I loved how the meetings were open and affirming and solemn. The Atlanta Friends Meeting has unprogrammed worship, which means that we sit in silence for an hour and if someone feels led to give a message, they speak. I was worried at first that this might mean speaking in tongues, but it doesn’t. At least not that I’ve ever experienced. Sometimes we can have whole meeting with no one saying a word, and sometimes there will be meetings where it seems there was more speaking than silence.
It wasn’t until I started seriously dating my wife that I started going regularly. She grew up in a similar Christian environment as me and went through a lot of the same hurt from it that I did, though her faith in God is still very strong. We started talking about what we wanted for our future family, what kind of community we wanted our kids to be brought up in, what we wanted them to learn about faith and religion. I mentioned that I’d gone to AFM a few times before, and she said she’d gone to some Quaker meetings when she lived in Philly. So we decided to try it together. Our first meeting together was like finding the puzzle piece that completed our relationship. We knew where we wanted to go and what we wanted to be together.
My favorite thing about Quakerism is that it is a place for doubt, but it’s not a sorrowful doubt: it’s a joyful doubt. When I was a Christian, it was ingrained in me that the answer to every question is in the Bible. It was okay to have doubts and ask questions, just so long as you got your answers from the Bible and took them as the final word. With Quakerism, it’s perfectly okay if you questions are never answered, if your doubts are never assuaged. Maybe every god is out there, maybe no god is out there, but either way, we have each other, we have this community, and we can work together to be the source of strength and stability we each need.
Hey Friend!
I think “My journey to Quakerism honestly started when I remembered reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond and figuring that if the Quakers were burned as witches, I would probably like them.” is my favorite explanation for how someone came to Quakerism. I remember being so psyched there were Quakers in that book in grade school. Although it being set in the 17th century did reinforce my classmates assumptions that I did not have electricity in my house…
Thanks! I went to a newcomers’ dinner when I first started attending meeting, and I remember another new Friend saying she’d been nervous there wouldn’t be any furniture at the house. It’s funny to me how little most people know about Quakers when they’ve had such a huge impact on our history.
Ahah no furniture? That’s extra funny cuz I’ve definitely had people mix up Quakers and Shakers and assume I handcraft all my furniture out of aged mahogany.
Always fun to get the awkward question: ‘…so… y’all are the elegant-wooden-furniture-and-no-sex folks, right?’
Hi Friend! I am also an atheist Quaker, though I come at it from a very different background than you. This was great to read and I’m glad you’ve found something that seems to suit you so much better. I especially like the line of joyful doubt. Continuing revelation!
Continuing revelation is my favorite. The idea that it’s okay for your beleifs to change from day-to-day and that it’s okay to never be 100% sure what you know and you can STILL be a Quaker is so wonderful to me.
EXACTLY. We don’t know what’s going on but we are all trying our best and are being compassionate about it. 🙂
I feel like my understanding of Quakerism (and pretty much every other religion) was very misinformed by my Catholic upbringing, as in like, it died out with William Penn. So thank you for this much more modern view of it, I think it’s something I could be much more interested in in it’s modern form than my previous view of it as just the people who burned witches and ate oatmeal maybe?
Oh man, William Penn was just the start, there were Quakers in the Continental Congress and mad numbers of Quakers throughout nineteenth-century America. Moby-Dick is full of them, incidentally. And then there was sort of a surge in interest in the religion in the 1960s, in sync with the antiwar movement. We’ve even had two presidents from Quaker families, both in the twentieth century, though unfortunately they were Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. (A modern Quaker will be quick to point out that neither one was actually a practicing Friend.)
Nowadays the largest numbers of Quakers are evangelical Friends concentrated in the global south–the country with the largest Quaker population is Kenya.
*bursts into room panting*
“NEITHER WAS A PRAC- Oh. Oh okay cool, you got it.”
So quick to point out. Almost too quick.
anyone want to yell about oatmeal with me??? another Quaker hill i will die on, yelling
Aha was just doing that in another comment.
Stupid oatmeal. Stupid Quaker oats. Stupid 5th grade classmates and their stupid jokes.
This recent cease-and-desist exchange between Quaker Oats and a Friends Meeting running “Quaker Oaks” is amazing.
YES I love this.
It’s recently popular, but that link’s been up for years.
Ahhhhahah oh man that is the Quakeriest response to a corporate lawyer ever. Thank you for this.
It is one of the statements I can set my watch by, like how every year some dude will tell me “Die Hard is a Christmas movie,” or if anyone publishes an article referring to fedoras a commenter will reliably pipe up with “It’s not a fedora, it’s a trilby.”
(Or, in a Quaker context, how if I say “I should register for yearly meeting before the deadline” someone will reliably tell me “Oh, the deadline doesn’t matter.”)
OT and a day late but Die Hard is one of the hills I’m willing to die on. Every year.
JUST BECAUSE IT TAKES PLACE DURING CHRISTMAS DOESN’T MEAN IT’S A “CHRISTMAS MOVIE.”
*follows you into room panting*
Did you know that Herbert Hoover was one of the world’s leading humanitarians before he ruined his legacy by being president? And that his wife was a badass geologist who was fluent in Mandarin?
If there’s one thing I’m quick on the draw with, it’s Hoover facts
Those are such good facts!
The Hoover Museum (West Branch, Iowa, represent!) is so interesting! I had no idea!
It is! And it’s next to a really lovely prairie reserve.
I always figured there was probably a lot more to it but Catholic teaching of other religions, from what little I remember of it anyway, was basically, “these are some other religions in the world, many of them no longer exist [probably untrue], and here are where the rest differ from Catholicism and are therefore Wrong [also not true].” The more I think about it the more I realize I kind of have no idea what my parish/school back home’s stance is on other religions. I feel like they kind of just skated around the issue.
It’s really easy not to learn about any of this stuff in public school, too. I was lucky to go to a public high school with a World Religions class, which was treated like any other social studies subject, and it seemed like there were constantly angry Christian parents who wanted it cut from the curriculum.
I got that wishy-washy “world religions” course in Catholic school too. I later transferred to a public school where I met a number of Quakers, from whom I was only able to draw vague conclusions, like “seem to always have the good weed??”*
*apologies for having only the most glib of remarks about what I’m certain is a lovely faith tradition
Better watch out, if you offend us Quakers we’ll give you the silent treatment.
*high fives self in the face*
I grew up in a super liberal ELCA Lutheran church that had a comparative religions sunday school class where they would take the middle schoolers around to other local services and discuss the differences in belief. It was kind of limited due to being in central Montana–we talked a little about religions that we couldn’t go directly observe, but the focus was definitely on other locally practiced faiths. It was shockingly open minded, even if we were mostly just learning about other flavors of (mostly protestant) Christianity.
The oatmeal thing, oh lord the oatmeal thing.
Quaker Oats has zero affiliation with the Society of Friends. Some dude just picked the name because he read Quakers were associated with integrity and fair business practices.
Still, ain’t a whole lot of us bopping about these days, something around ~360,000 globally I think, and that represents a pretty diverse set of communities. Fair amount of difference in practice and belief between different groups of Quakers.
To be fair, Quakers WERE very associated with integrity and fair business practices and actually selling you what you requested at a fair price (see also: Cadbury, Barclay’s, etc.). I’m not arguing, it’s just more than just hearsay (afaik). Quakers: known for being honest (shocker).
We invented the price tag! (As opposed to haggling. You could send your 8 year old to pick up groceries and be sure you’d given the kid the right amount of cash and that the kid wouldn’t get fleeced in haggling.)
Oh to be sure, I only say ‘read’ because the founder evidently literally read about Quakers in an encyclopedia and was like, alright, these guys sound cool.
Oh, I didn’t know that. With all due respect, eff that guy.
Last week in Meeting someone spoke about there being that of God in everyone, even if it’s a minority share. That has helped me be more patient with people, including this encyclopedia reader. *deep sigh*
“Encyclopedia reader” is a great non-insulting insult.
I know a Friend who says “we are all part of the Body of Christ, but even the Body of Christ has an ***hole.”
I’m learning so much today!
I never even knew that this was a thing! This sounds pretty amazing, thanks for sharing!
As a theist Quaker, thanks for the interview.
…figuring that if the Quakers were burned as witches, I would probably like them.
That is probably the best reason behind joining a religion that I’ve ever heard.
My favorite is my friend who started coming to meeting because one night she was very drunk after a party, and right before she fell asleep she bolted up in bed and said, “I should be a Quaker!” She had no idea where that idea came from, but she followed through with it and is one of my favorite people at meeting. 🙂
While I have always liked Quakerism from afar, I never looked into it enough to realize that there was room for atheists there!
I think the convert series will be what I miss most about the Toast.
Room for everyone!
I mean, depends on where you are for sure, but in my East Coast unprogrammed Quaker circles there are atheists all over the place.
Came here to say exactly both of these things.
I (unexpectedly) love this series. I miss it already.
Me, too.
Not fully Quaker, sorta Quaker-adjacent in that I’ve had my kids in their schools for a decade. Unprogrammed Meeting is the very thing for folks recovering from an overly religious upbringing: no clergy, no gospel, nobody banging on about your immortal soul, just time and space to reflect with open-minded reasonable folks, then coffee and cookies. It has healed what Father Charles had torn asunder.
Thanks for sharing your journey.
Seconding this! Nobody telling me what to think, but pretty much everyone I talk to having cool opinions on important things, and also weekly lunch afterwards yay! This is the sort of thing I can do.
I’ve considered going to a meeting and this article is making me more interested in doing it. Trivial question – what is considered acceptable to wear?
Anything is acceptable! The general look is pretty casual, at least here in the Midwest. I often wear dresses to meeting because I like them, but there are always many people there wearing jeans and t-shirts or sweaters.
As a child I frequently wore pajamas and no shoes to meeting and it was fine. I don’t go anymore as an adult but I feel like pajamas and no shoes would be ok.
I have too!
One of the Quaker tenets is “Simplicity” — no need to get all duded up for meeting. They’ll be appreciating your Inner Light and give not a single F what you are wearing.
If you’re trying to go Quaker incognito around here, it’d probably be either a ponytail and tie-dye t-shirt or a sweatshirt your grandkids gave you.
I loved this. Thank you!
If a person was interested in learning more about Quakerism, are there any books people would particularly recommend? (Beyond, naturally, The Witch of Blackbird Pond)
I haven’t read it yet, but a lot of people in my meeting are really enthused about Rex Ambler’s The Quaker Way.
Ben Pink Dandelion’s little book Quakers: A Very Short Introduction is very good. https://www.quakerbooks.org/book/quakers There’s also a series of videos called QuakerSpeak in which various Quakers talk about Quakering. And (separate from these) I happen to love the very silly video What Does George Fox Say, which is surprisingly comprehensive and uses a lot of founder George Fox’s words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhsvqbCIaAs (The phrase “guardian angel” is a weird one, though.)
Also, liberal or unprogrammed Friends are not the only kind! Lots of Quakers with ministers and more interest in Scripture in the Midwest US and Kenya, for example. For a religion interested in unity, we sure have had a lot of rifts and schisms.
I love What Does George Fox Say! It’s like it goes in through the back door of the goofy/mock serious original song to create something sincere.
I also love how even Quakers who don’t know much about Fox know about his shaggy hair.
That’s probably because of the song. “With your old leather britches and your shaggy shaggy locks you are pulling down the pillars of the world George Fox”
I’ve never even heard of that song before, but that is the third song lyric I’ve heard/read that incorporates The Hair, and the second to rhyme “locks” with “Fox.”
There are a few different versions of this song, sometimes called “George Fox” (or “The George Fox Song”) and sometimes “Walk in the Light.” Sydney Carter, who wrote Lord of the Dance, wrote it.
The chorus in Carter’s original goes like this:
Old leather britches, shaggy shaggy locks
Old leather britches, shaggy shaggy locks
With your old leather britches and your shaggy shaggy locks
You are pulling down the pillars of the world, George Fox
But I think the Quaker hymnal (Worship in Song) has the version Jon sings below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5LgEIg61U
Walk in the Light, wherever you may be
Walk in the Light, wherever you may be
With your old leather britches and your shaggy shaggy locks
You are walking in the glory of the Light, George Fox
Any chance that’s the other lyric you heard rhyming locks & Fox?
Haha, thanks for the link but no, the other song was a Quaker Twelve Days of Christmas as written and performed by a First Day School class at my meeting 🙂 I think it took the place of the Five Gold Rings.
I’m a relatively new Friend and there aren’t very many birthright Friends at my meeting, apart from the kids, so I’m unfamiliar with a lot of things like the songs you learn at Quaker camp. But maybe I’ll learn some at FGC this summer!
I’m a convinced Friend of 6 years. My yearly meeting has quarterly “let’s spend all day Saturday singing for fun” things that rotate through different monthly meetings, so I learned some songs that way. And the meeting I go to now does 15 minutes of singing before worship every week (the old one did it once per month starting a few months before I left). Does your meeting have the Worship in Song hymnals? They’re green. If you dig through, you’ll find Thank Thee Kindly, Friend Lucretia to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
But I did date one and marry another birthright Friend, so I might’ve picked some stuff up that way too.
Being a Quaker (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00CPVOB8Y) and The Quakers (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0199206791) are both really good!
WOW those links did not work at all. let me try that again NOT from my phone this time.
Being a Quaker by Geoffrey Durham: https://amzn.com/B00CPVOB8Y
The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction by Pink Dandelion: http://amzn.com/0199206791
Thank you for this – it was really interesting! I’m really glad you have found a community that makes you happy and are no longer having to deal with hurtful fundamentalism.
I find Quakerism really appealing, and if I ever did want to join a religion, it would be that. I like the fact that it has space for, as you put it, “joyful doubt”, and that one can be an atheist and a Quaker. The close association with social justice is also something which is very important to me. I don’t think I would ever actually become a Quaker (I would prefer to follow the ideals I am drawn to without doing so within a religious framework, and I would be uncomfortable being part of a belief tradition that did include theists and was considered by most to be part of Christianity. Also, I am not remotely spiritual), but it sounds really great all the same.
I didn’t know you could be an atheist Quaker! What I’ve read of the Quakers has often appealed to me. I might start looking up local friends meetings.
Also: I was just thinking about The Witch of Blackbird Pond recently! I loved that book in middle school, so much that I bought a copy for myself. I lost it in some move or another, and now I think I might replace it.
You can! It does depend on your meeting. There are conservative as well as liberal Quakers. Def research Quakers in your area to see if there are liberal/unprogrammed meetings around.
I need to re-read it. I haven’t read it since childhood, and it obviously had a huge impact on me, though I can’t really remember the details of it. 🙂
OH MAN. I did a quick google of friends meetings in Portland and:
“We value our “radical diversity.” Our core belief is that the Divine Spirit is accessible to all. Most Friends are Christians, but many are not. We come to Friends from many faith traditions. Most of us began our spiritual journeys in some other tradition or no tradition at all.” From here: https://www.quakercloud.org/cloud/multnomah-frien…
And they do unprogrammed!
WELL.
Generally the way it works is the ones who are A-OK with non-Christian Quakers are unprogrammed. And there’s a tiny group called Conservative that are unprogrammed but very definitely Christian. And then there’s the programmed ones, which I’ve never heard of being not-Christian (they range from mainline protestant to full-on Evangelical).
The Witch of Blackbird Pond A+++, so wish I had read as a child. And Quakerism is definitely one of the options I researched for my partner and I when we became atheists, before realizing we just like to sleep in and go on long walks in the stead of religious services. But I filed it away as a maybe, someday.
My wife and I definitely have mornings where we choose to take hikes or go to the Farmer’s Market instead of going to Meeting. Find your peace wherever feels best.
What a lovely piece. I’m sorry to say I knew nothing at all about Quakers (to the point of naively assuming the oats *were* related to them), and am so glad to read about something so new to me!
Quakerism sounds amazing. Is there a map of meeting houses, or a way to find the closest one to you? And are visitors usually welcome?
The main thing i learned about Quakers in all my childhood reading (which involved a lot of older literature) was that they used thee and thou. Does anyone know when that died out, or do some places still use that language?
http://quaker.org/ is a really good place to start! And I unfortunately don’t know about the language, but I do know it existed at least long enough for there to be a ton of Quaker jokes in The Philadelphia Story, which came out in 1940!
FWCC has a way to find a meeting near you! http://www.fwccamericas.org/meetingsearch.aspx
People don’t use thee and thou (called Plain Speech) any more. It started as a way of demonstrating equality (because people used thee and thou to talk to people who were lower in social class than them), but hundreds of years after everyone else decided to use “you” all the time, we finally gave thee and thou up! I don’t know about in England, but in America, by the mid nineteenth century, Quakers only used plain speech within Quaker communities and families, and it died out completely by the mid twentieth century. (Sorry about the long answer–I get very excited about Quaker history).
Also, if you want to visit a Quaker Meeting, you would be more that welcome! We love visitors! http://www.fgcquaker.org/connect/quaker-finder is another useful site for finding Meetings near you, and it will take you to the unprogrammed type of Meeting, which is what Rebecca Burley talks about.
Very rarely, among older folks mostly in the Conservative branch of Quakerism in the US, you still find people who use “thee” and “thou” when talking to other Quakers, but that’s about it. Otherwise, it hasn’t seen much use in the last 100 years.
For the US, http://QuakerFinder.org and http://QuakerMaps.com both exist, though the latter is using an older Google Maps API so the US-wide map doesn’t display and you have to actually click an individual yearly meeting (regional body) to see pins.
Visitors are *definitely* welcome. There might be pamphlets or someone at the door to explain Quaker worship for visitors.
You’ll find the occasional individual who feels led to plain speech, just as you’ll find some who feel led to plain dress (actually do think of the Quaker Oats box this time), but it’s rare.
(Attender on and off over the past 20 years, making serious plans to visit my local meeting this weekend…)
“The comments and “encouragement” I saw in cards and Facebook posts were horrifying. “Can you imagine how much worse it could have been if God wasn’t watching over you?” “Satan tries his hardest to knock us down, but we have to get right back up!””
Uggggghhhhh! I HATE those kinds of “encouraging” comments. I know they come from a place of good intentions, and I know some Christians (and maybe members of other faith traditions) don’t know how to do faith without Calvinism and similar “God was/wasn’t watching you” lines of thinking. But it really can be so discouraging and hurtful and just make you angry at God when people keep insisting in so many words that something terrible happened in your life because God wanted it that way. I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m glad you found a faith tradition you feel at home with.
The first time I went to a Quaker meeting, I worried that I wouldn’t be welcome or worse (for me), I would be “too welcome”. My fears were quickly allayed. I felt comfortable right away. Everyone was welcoming without being overbearing. One thing I was told and that I find to be very true is that it can be very hard work to be Quaker. There is no creed, so all the work in determining truth is up to the individual. It is both liberating and exhausting!