The Atheist’s Guide to Quaker Process: Spirit-led decisions for the secular, by Selden W Smith

Author: Selden W Smith. Review by David Boulton.

Pendle Hill Quaker Center has a long tradition of publishing Quaker pamphlets that challenge, inform and inspire. This one, number 472, ticks all three boxes. Its target readership is the growing number of non-Quaker nontheists who are employed by Quaker organisations: the men and women recruited partly because there aren’t enough Quakers, but also because ‘the Quaker institution rightly seeks the wisdom and skills to be found outside Quaker circles’. But can a faith-based practice be adapted for use by nontheists without being rendered meaningless? Yes, says Selden W Smith.

Selden attended a Quaker school and served on the American Friends Service Committee. His disbelief in God was no obstacle to his service. As Janaki Spickard Keeler writes in the preface: ‘Seldon Smith may not have a faith in God or a divine Source, but he does have a faith: he has faith in humanity and in our ability to access a deeper wisdom collaboratively through Quaker process. At the time when we are seeing the detrimental effects of collective societal decisions that have prioritized short-term gains and individual greed, Selden’s faith in humanity to do better is a faith of radical hope.’

The aspect of Quaker process most relevant to these non-Quaker employees is collective decision-making. Employees more familiar with decision-making by debate and vote may feel unable to take part in what could seem a mystical process. Nontheist Quakers may feel the same. Smith recognises that nontheists may have difficulty in finding common ground in a process ‘based on a God concept’, but, he says, ‘the unifying principle is not actually all of us believing the same thing (we don’t), but all of us attempting to reach beyond ourselves, our egos, our personal goals, and our pride’.

Whether secular or religious, whether we experience it as wholly human or holy spirit, we can all discern ‘the sense of the Meeting’. Aided by a ‘higher authority’ or by ‘the embrace of the profound but generally hidden capacity within our own heads’, we can avoid every group decision becoming a battleground. ‘We can open ourselves to its revelations, and even when they do not come, the conscious exercise of yielding puts the nontheist in the same mental space, with all its attendant benefits, as the worshipful intentions of the believer. True, they may have different notions of what they are yielding to; but then, that is true even when all present profess belief in the divine. Far more important is that when the nontheist and the believer are both giving up the desire to dominate.’

Secular or religious, it hardly matters what word we use. It is in the process itself – what we do and how we do it – that theist and nontheist can find unity and community.

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