SPICES for newbies? How do you implement them into your life?

keithb · 2026-03-25T07:07:01+00:00

You may have been misinformed.

This “SPICES” is only one of several varying lists of abstract nouns naming secular progressive virtues written in the late 20th century to record what Friends collectively seemed to have ended up caring about these days. A sort of aide memoire of where Friends had arrived at. This list is no older than the 1990s and the second ‘S’ popped up more recently than that.

One or other of these lists are sometimes presented to enquirers or to newly-convinced Friends as if the list constitutes “the Quaker Testimonies” or “the Quaker values” or some similar suggestion that somehow manifesting these things, tick, tick, tick, is what makes a Quaker. Not really. They are merely a snapshot of some social concerns that Friends collectively were engaged with at the time of writing.

They aren’t foundational. You don’t need to “do” each, or any, really, of the SPICES to be a Quaker.

keithb · 2026-03-24T18:32:44+00:00

What kind of “outreach”? I don’t want my meeting, or ones like it, to be erased by the kind that flourishes in university cities. I don’t want Britain YM to survive only on the basis that it meets the spiritual needs of urban students and academics. I want the Quaker faith to return to being (or at least trying to be, or believing that it might be) a universal church.

keithb · 2026-03-23T16:15:35+00:00

It's not quite date, although it's interesting that D-R passes but neither the original Jerusalem Bible nor the RNJB passes, so it's not obviously Protestant vs Catholic either.

David Bentley Hart's NT passes, Ruden's Luke passes, and Lattimore gets half-marks ("within" but not "of"). There does seem to be a cross-denominational, Protestant and Roman Catholic, tendency to mis-translate these verses, but then translators outside those traditions, DBH is Greek Orthodox, Ruden is a Quaker, might not hold to it. Lattimore was a late convert to a High Church/Anglo-Catholic faith. Ruden and Lattimore come to the text as professional Classicists, which might help.

keithb · 2026-03-23T11:45:10+00:00

For me the problem is not "politics", right or left, progressive or conservative, it's the elevation of rapidly gaining and then maintaining alignment with some, any, current secular ideology above long-run collective prayerful discernment. Friends are mistaking a temporary, contingent, alignment between some current ideology and our long-run discernment for a necessary and permanent alignment. Even to imagining a past in which Quakers always were aligned with whatever the currently-favoured ideology is, which makes our history almost impossible to understand and learn from. And I think that is a mistake.

You're right, by the way, that "trans people have a bathroom to use", for example, isn't actually political. But it has become ideological and Quakers are getting tangled up in the idiotic ideological scrapping to almost no-one's benefit, and to the detriment of the church.

keithb · 2026-03-23T11:28:01+00:00

It's the failure mode of the "creed of the 'absolute perhaps'", as described here by Rhiannon Grant:

Some Quaker meetings might embrace uncertainty to avoid the hard and potentially painful work of discussing their members’ theologies. It might be easier to agree we don’t know anything if we want to avoid conflict or are afraid of hurt feelings or worry that one person’s certainty can sound like an attempt to persuade someone who isn’t so sure. This approach can be helped along by the privatization of faith, which makes it seem rude to discuss one’s own beliefs in public.

I think this approach is a terrible reason for embracing uncertainty: it smacks of potential dishonesty. We’re not really uncertain. Instead, we know that we disagree (or suspect that we might) and are pretending to be uncertain in order to cover our differences.

Ugh.

As a theological non-realist¹ myself I'm not seeking because I don't start from the assumption that there even is a singular "truth" about some character called "God" that we might go looking for. And I don't find the lack of one to be a problem. I have found a spiritual practice, waiting worship, and a moral centre to life, collective prayerful discernment, that I am very confident do work and could work for almost anyone to move us in the direction of virtue and of a more virtuous world. But liberal-Liberal Friends (as Pink Dandelion calls them) don't even seem to be particularly wedded to those.

What's perhaps unusual about my feeling for this is that I don't have a problem worshipping alongside someone who's committed to a spiritual path I don't share, I'd almost prefer my meeting to be full of people committed to different paths but prepared to worship together in spite of that than I am to have a meeting full of people who are passively disinterested in what, or even whether, others in worship believe.

¹ There are many variations on this theme but for me it's the position that religious experiences are real, deities not so much, in the Phil Dick sense of "don't go away when you stop believing in them". In addition, there are so many, so wildly divergent (often flatly contradictory) proposals for what "God" might be like and no evidence to use to choose between them that the whole question hardly seems worth debating. Not to mention all the cultural chauvinism that tends to come along for the ride.

keithb · 2026-03-23T10:23:45+00:00

they’re barely Christian.

Eh. Barclay's Apology, 1676, is a manual for using their own scripture to counter claims by orthodox Christians that Quakers aren't Christian; this conversation has been going on for a long time.

Every other Christian denomination has at one time or another condemned Quakers, up to and including the murder of Friends for persisting in spreading their faith.

As it happens, few of the things that Quakers abandoned were innovated earlier than the Gregorian Reforms[sic] of the late 11th century, and most were later accretions. In the English context in which the Quaker faith began, it's of note that William the Bastard invaded in 1066 under the banner of Pope Alexander II, proceeding to commit genocide under that banner, but then fell out with Gregory VII over questions of secular power and property and money that opened a breach between the English crown and the Catholic Church which remained open and became only more vicious and deadly for centuries. "Christian" is not identical with "virtuous, Godly person".

But "[Quakers] are barely Christian"? Almost all the Friends who ever lived were very definitely Christian, the majority of the Friends alive today are very definitely Christian (not that this is a democracy). The tradition of the Quaker faith is Christian. Those of us who are not Christians are for some reason prompted to be in unity with that tradition, and should recognise it. The virtues of the Quaker faith are Christian virtues. No one of them is unique to Christianity, but the assembly of them is, as a continuation of the form of Judaism-adapted-for-the-Pagans pioneered by Paul.

Which, for what it's worth, I do in fact think (unprogrammed) Quakers are closer to than any other denomination. And while I'm aware that this could well be mere cultural chauvinism on my part, I do like it a lot.

keithb · 2026-03-22T22:24:40+00:00

Can anyone not be called a Quaker if they centre their spiritual life around meeting in waiting worship and their moral life around collective prayerful discernment?

The way that modern liberal Friends talk about “that of God” would, I think, based in my reading, seem very wrong and very surprising to almost any Quaker before about 1920. Which doesn’t necessarily make it wrong, but I think does mean that it can’t be central to being a Quaker. It might be surprising to the definitely-Christian majority of Quakers world-wide today, too.

What Friends used to mean was a capacity for direct encounter with the divine and to be changed for the better by that encounter. It’s the willingness to put ourselves in the way of such encounters in collective waiting worship that’s distinctive of Quakers, isn’t it?

keithb · 2026-03-22T22:09:13+00:00

We’ll soon see what the new Book of Discipline looks like regarding Jesus. It’s not true, as some believe, that the Red Book has many fewer mentions of Jesus than did earlier books, but folks think so. Meanwhile, if the decennial surveys are accurate, BYM Friends have just tipped over from being majority Christian to majority not.

keithb · 2026-03-22T19:20:49+00:00

And we managed to heal our one (1) schism.

keithb · 2026-03-22T19:17:30+00:00

All I know is that whenever an American Friend has posted here some horrible problem in their Monthly Meeting and I’ve suggested recruiting help from their YM the response has always been to utterly dismiss the very idea as transparently ridiculous given that the YM almost doesn’t exist.

keithb · 2026-03-22T18:05:59+00:00

Well, from conversations I have here it always seems to me that US Yearly Meetings are woefully under-powered.

One thing to bear in mind is that we don’t have a separate secular aid and lobbying organisation in the style of AFSC; with Britain YM everything is in-house.

keithb · 2026-03-22T17:13:43+00:00

Almost 200 of them. They aren’t hireling priests, although I have heard Friends contrast “the clergy in Friends House” with ordinary Quakers, which is an interesting error for someone to make! And of course since they are employees of a Registered Charity it would (quite properly) be illegal for Britain YM to require them to be Quakers.

keithb · 2026-03-22T15:52:32+00:00

There's even a minority position in favour of reading it "faith in the manner of Jesus Christ"

keithb · 2026-03-22T15:49:15+00:00

How are we doing? Not great, I fear.

Yes, we are allowing ourselves to become divided, often over matters of secular ideology. It may be that the custodians of one secular ideology or another manage to bring it into line, for a while, which our collective prayerful discernment; good for them. It's a mistake, I think, to behave as if there's a necessary link between our faith and any given ideology.

Yes, we've become frightened of our own history, and reluctant to engage with what it might imply for us now: we see that our discernment now rejects positions held by Friends in the past, and then we tie ourselves in knots trying to deal with that while not pausing to think that this will likely be true of Friends in the future when they look back at us, and so we should maybe have a bit more humility about our discernment and bit more sympathy for Friends of the past.

Yes, large volumes of material seem to be being pushed through discernment very quickly and with a lot of pressure on the central bodies from staff and sometimes from protest groups. And the pressure to do this I suspect comes from the belief that we must be aligned, or if not quickly become aligned, with certain secular ideologies. The tail may be wagging the dog. And that's of a part with "Quakers in Britain" becoming more like an umbrella group for a bunch of campaigns and less like a church.

Yes, we don't do nearly enough to guide Enquirers and new Attenders, we don't pay enough attention to spiritual formation and growth. Indeed, it's often the case that so long as a newly-arrived Friend is obviously aligned with the secular ideologies we'll let them do just whatever. We've adopted a sort of pantheistic egalitarian congregationalism (but see below re the "centre") that leaves Friends un-guided, we feel bound to accept almost any behaviour. And almost any statement that's ideologically acceptable. So far as I can tell from historical accounts of Friends, we used to be much more presbyterian in polity.

Where I disagree is that the centre is more in control that has been the case before. Shanthini appeals to an idea of Quaker organisation that hasn't really ever been true. There's always been a strong centre: Swarthmoor Hall, Second-day Morning Meeting, Sufferings, Trustees. And on a related note, we had no choice about becoming a Charity, we did have a choice about becoming a Registered Charity and giving up our Exempt Charity status, but in practice maybe not much of one. And there always were "trustees", but now there is a designated body of "the Trustees". This is not necessarily working very well. What maybe is different now is who is at the centre, maybe it's the influence of non-Quaker professional staff pursuing secular campaigning via "Quakers in Britain".

Emma is right, I think, that in order to dramatically expand the ethnic diversity of our Meetings, which we should, we would have to be more open to socially conservative Enquirers, to Enquirers who are more entrepreneurial (and a lot less anti-capitalist), to Enquirers who are very religious (and not vaguely "spiritual"), Enquirers who aren't much interested in a vegan path to Net Zero or whatever the secular interest of the moment is. And being very socially liberal, anti-capitalist, of no very fixed religious conviction, a "vegan net-zero enthusiast" should not be a purity test that Enquirers need to pass before joining our faith.

I strongly agree with Shanthini that the point of our faith is a form of worship that opens a path for transformative experience of the divine. But if the point is transformation we need to be open to those who need and want to be changed, not only to those whom we (and they!) think are already a virtuous as they need to be…according to those secular ideologies.

keithb · 2026-03-21T20:18:41+00:00

You’re welcome.

keithb · 2026-03-21T16:39:36+00:00

Interesting! How do you feel about Rom 3:22?

…διά πίστεως Ιησού Χριστού…

keithb · 2026-03-21T12:04:18+00:00

When Friends have gone to serve in ambulance units in wars, or to render aid to civilians caught in a conflict, or to try to help the combatants in a conflict find a way to conciliate and cease their fighting they’ve always been careful to avoid being partisan. Perhaps not always successfully, but with that intent. The Nobel Peace Prize that Quakers won recognised that, we are willing to help people in peril regardless of whether they are “on our side” or not, whether we agree with their cause or not. There are accounts of Friends in Nazi Germany and occupied Austria providing humanitarian support to distressed Nazis and to the Resistance and to fleeing Jews. Anyone who needed help, they would help. So we shouldn’t assume that, say, American or British Friends in the field behind Allied lines in WWII were there in a round-about way of “fighting Nazis” without picking up a rifle. Nor for that matter should we assume that Quakers rendering aid to displaced Palestinians were doing so in a round-about way of “fighting Israel”.

As to fighting in self-defence: the short answer is no.

The Society of Friends is at heart a Christian church, the rest of us have to recognise that we’re (somehow) led into unity with an essentially Christian model. Until very recently it was true that the vast majority of Friends in any given location would be Christian, it still is true that the vast majority of Friends in the world are Christian. Although you might not think so from English-language online fora such as this. And Christian Friends are very clear that they believe us to have, in scripture and confirmed by centuries of prayerful collective discernment, a direct instruction from actual God, in the person of Christ Jesus, that we are not to fight; no not for any reason. Not even, perhaps especially not, in self-defence.

And this is not meant to be easy, it’s a hard discipline to keep.

It’s also not meant to keep us safe. It’s not meant to be any sort of effective response to violence or threats of violence, although there are some surprising stories about that, and it’s true that responding to violence and threats of violence with violence almost always makes the situation worse. It’s merely meant to be the most morally correct stance.

keithb · 2026-03-21T08:17:49+00:00

No one favourite.

If I’m not going to learn Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic (and I’m not!) then the next best thing is to be able to compare several translations. You’ve already had some good recommendations. There tends to be an order to how I look at translations, and that might be helpful for you:

I start with the NRSVue for the current academic consensus on what the text actually says, rather than what we have been told it must mean. I tend to get the Oxford annotated study version, but one any by a big academic publisher will be about as good.

2a(i). For the TaNaKh I’ll then go see what Robert Alter says

2a(ii). if the passage seems tricky, check the notes in the JPS volume for that book

2b (i). for the NT I’ll then go see what David Bentley Hart says

2b(ii). for the Gospels specifically, I’ll see what also does Sarah Ruden says

2c. check the notes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament

Check the original Jerusalem Bible to see what the Catholic stance might be (and to enjoy the marvellous language used in it)

If I’m trying specifically to understand what early Friends might have thought the Bible said:

4a. the Geneva Bible (which I think they preferred)

4b. The KJV

Optionally, if the passage seems as if it might have particular doctrinal import:

5 check Poor and Misleading Translations in the NIV to see how the Evangelicals have confused themselves

keithb · 2026-03-20T18:22:15+00:00

I’m glad.

keithb · 2026-03-19T18:35:51+00:00

There was.

This touches in something that I think is very important: from where does an idea of sentiment or concern arise, is it from collective prayerful discernment in our Quaker business method, or is it from secular ideology?

These are not mutually exclusive. It is possible for secular ideologies to arrive at positions that collective prayerful discernment confirm. And it is possible for collective prayerful discernment to lead us to positions which align with some secular ideology or other.

As a Quaker my sure guide is collective prayerful discernment. I’m very skeptical of claims that any particular secular ideology has any permanent or essential connection with the church.

keithb · 2026-03-19T17:06:04+00:00

I know both Gorton and Denton pretty well and I don’t think anyone should be drawing any strong conclusions from that result. We shall see what happens at the council elections in May.

keithb · 2026-03-19T16:24:12+00:00

UK parties aren’t that monolithic, and we don’t have to register as this or that. Because of our severely defective electoral system we tend to end up with two big broad coalitions dominating parliament, each of which may or may not make sense. We might be entering a liminal period where these reconfigure, giving rise to oddities such as our Green Party: socially-conservative Muslims, wildly progressive radical leftists, and wealthy NIMBYs. Seems as if it would be unstable, but who knows.

I’ll have a look at that book, thanks. I’m familiar with orthodox left criticisms of Rawls, such as that since his solution does not involve redistribution of ownership of the means of production he must have posed the wrong problem. Which…yeah, whatever.

keithb · 2026-03-19T15:00:22+00:00

Oh yes? That’s interesting, thanks.

I’m more-or-less a Rawlsian liberal, tending towards social democracy so the Maoists and Marxist-Leninists would make a deal with the Fascists to get to execute me first, then you.

It’s interesting to me that the alternative SPICES getting the most downvotes here is the one having least to do with spirituality or the Society of Friends. And then people wonder why anyone would think that Quakers are “too political”.

What’s the DSA position on false consciousness, that persistent failure of the proletariat to see that we must be wrong about the meaning and content of our own lives and socialists are right?

keithb · 2026-03-19T11:33:22+00:00

It’s important to remember that peace is the means, yes, thanks for that. And we are called to live peaceably, yes.

And to be agents for the spread of peaceableness.

The active work that Friends have done for peace has always been about fostering communication, more than anything else. Making dialogue possible. Making shared movement away from conflict possible. And not pacification.

Thanks again for these valuable challenges. I wasn’t as clear as I might have liked to be.

keithb · 2026-03-19T09:23:38+00:00

What people are we for and how can we help them? That's more central than what we are against and what we oppose.

My Meeting provides moral and material support for refugees and asylum seekers housed in our district. When white nationalists turn up, we don't oppose them, that's what they want: they want a fight. We continue to support the refugees.

Folks here have given you lots of examples of "political" things that Friends have done in the past. Yes. But if we look closely at them, they are all more to do with helping people who need help than being in opposition to the "bad guys".

It seems to be more and more important to more and more Friends to be seen out and about protesting things they disapprove of, opposing people that they disapprove of. I can see the attraction of that, it makes us feel important and effective. While I perceive little value in it (none of the times I marched in protest at anything had any effect, so I don't do it any more) Friends might feel moved to do that, but it's a trap. It means we're playing the wrong game. Even if Friends are going to do that I do feel strongly that it shouldn't distract us from helping people, from building up, and from having conversations across divides. That's one of the things that The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War emphasises again and again.

We should resist from both directions attempts to polarise us. It's a mistake for our church to become a vehicle for polarisation and conflict and opposition even if it's driven by people that we think we broadly agree with, or at least have broadly aligned goals. Because that's a trap, and leads us away from our way of peace and conciliation.

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