Quakers and lesbian/gay "marriage"

Over the last few days, I have been giving some thought to the reports that the Quakers were to allow gay marriages. This is reported on the BBC News website here, though if you visit the Religion and Ethics area of the BBC website - here - you will find that the news report's account of Quaker beliefs in general is not very accurate. So far as I can tell, the account of Quaker beliefs at the Religion and Ethics site is accurate - I have no great expertise in Quaker beliefs, but everything at this site accords with the little that I do know about them. The Times report is here.

The Quaker system is very attractive at first glance, and its emphasis on the presence of God "within" each and every person sounds very similar to Catholic teaching on grace as the presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul.

And the flaws in Quaker belief start at exactly that point. Sustained to its logical conclusion, this emphasis will want to say that God is present "within" even as a person comits the most evil of acts. From the point of view of reasoning, it is difficult to recognise in Quaker belief any place for sin and evil - the presence of which in the world is apparent without the need for execptional study. If it is not pursued to this conclusion, it needs to admit that each person has something of God within them, and also something that is of evil (cf the second page on the BBC Ethics and Religon site); and, from the point of view of Quaker-ism as a system of faith, there arises a need for discerning what it is that is of God and what it is that is of evil. There seems to be no rational way of making this discernment, as it rests within the choice of the individual in responding to "the light within", and therefore remains profoundly subjective. Expressed in terms of Catholic teaching, Quaker-ism does not give a proper, objective place to the doctrine of original sin.

This consideration is closely linked to the next flaw which begins to appear at this point. The human person is of his and her nature a being endowed with reason, and a being who is of his and her nature, communal. Communication between persons is based on this rational and social nature of the person. Consequently, we should expect that God's revelation of himself to human persons will also take part in this rational and communal character of the human person. In other words, revelation will be external and public in its character, and it will be given to a community. This is, of course, what we see in Judaism - God reveals himself and dwells among his chosen people - and in Christianity - where the presence of Jesus in the world is continued in the visible body of his Church. Quaker belief is fundamentally irrational, and reduces God's revelation of himself to a personal subjectivism. The silence of the Quaker meeting is perhaps symbolic of the isolated individualism of the Quaker view of revelation.

The subjective nature of Quaker belief about how God speaks to men and women therefore gives rise to both its major strength and, at the same time, to its greatest weakness. It places a very high value on the human person, and expects an identical high regard to be given by every person to every other person. This is the basis for their stand for non-violence and pacifism, a rather wonderful symbol of which is the Friends Ambulance Unit. It also issues in their strong sense of conscience, which could be seen to be a parallel to John Henry Newman's teaching about conscience as the prompting of God in the soul (though Newman's teaching would have an objective content in relation to the teaching of the Church that would not be there in the Quaker understanding). It has a relevance to, for example, how we might regard the person who is seriously ill. The weakness arises because no one Quaker can really communicate to another Quaker, or to someone outside their religion, anything of objective validity about the revelation of God. One can talk about God as love, and about his presence "within" and about the value that must be given to each and every person, but none of this has any objective content, any external or public form that can be communicated to another so as to demand their obedience. A Quaker is not able to teach their belief to another, or to argue for it by reason. In the modern world, it is therefore quite unviable as a system of religous belief capable of synthesis with a modern, scientific understanding of the world. [Note to myself: I must read up about Michael Faraday's religious beliefs in relation to his science.]

All of which is about my wanting to suggest that, slick and easy as the decision of Quakers to allow gay people to marry may appear, it has no rational basis that other religious denominations can want to follow. It is nothing more than a kind of "collective subjectivity", lacking any really objective attempt to study male-female difference. It reflects the weakness of a purely subjective view of revelation - that, when it does emerge into the public domain without objective structures of belief, it is just as likely to approve what is of evil as it is to approve what is of "the light". In a certain, and very real sense, it can't tell the difference.