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e Friends have an inside view of Quakerism. We don't think of our Religious Society as isolated, or "in a box," but we do maintain a sense of being a cohesive religious body through participation in meeting and by the inner workings of our business affairs. Do we know as well our exterior: the side that the public perceives?
What if we could get "outside the box"-get atop of our inward communities-and look at the face of Quakerism from this other perspective? Would our decentralized community do things differently on local levels if we had access to an ongoing, comprehensive, and timely outside view of our wider Religious Society of Friends? Would we welcome fresh feedback from this new viewpoint as we would from a visitor to our religious community?
News reporters are paid to record events. Feature writers dig deeper to glean more complex meaning from outward appearances. Both reporters and feature writers have published telling pieces about Quakerism in the period during which I've electronically collected news and comments mentioning Friends. I've named this collection Quakers in the News.
've used search algorithms, or software instructions on a search engine, to parse a two-month history of 4,500 newspapers, news websites, and TV and radio news reports. News is published each minute of each day on computers around the world. These computers and their software instructions are linked by the web of networks and the series of communication protocols that are the Internet.
How Quakers in the News Is Collected
I used a single query over the Internet for a one-year intensive period (May 2003 through April 2004) to retrieve news about or mentioning Quakerism. The query looks like this: quaker - "quaker state," - "quaker -foods," -sports, -chemical, -pepsico, -bancorp, -oats. It means: search for any article with the word "Quaker," and without "Quaker State" (to eliminate Pennzoil-Quaker State Company), without "Quaker Foods" (as in Quaker Foods, a subsidiary of Pepsico), without "Chemical" and "Bancorp" (as in Quaker Chemical Co. and Quaker Bancorp), and without "oats." Because Quaker-founded college sports teams are often named "Quakers," I eliminated the word "sports," to exclude most search results about college games. Other names such as Quaker Fabric, Quaker BioVentures, and Quaker parrots don't relate to the Religious Society of Friends, so I don't want those results returned to me; but one problem with this "beta" or "in-testing" search engine, which is free, is that the service does not allow more than a small number of delimiters in the query.
This beta news-search service is far from perfect. There is plenty of room for improvement in search technology as the information age progresses. Still, these results are useful, and I send the results of Quakers in the News to an expanding group of Friends via electronic mail as they are published.
Friends now have the ability to look at Quakerism in a new way, from a new viewpoint. Will this tool or "mirror" change the way we feel about our outward Quaker activities? Will it affect what we do in the world? Will this view from outside the box affect our inward selves?
What I've Learned by Compiling Quakers in the News
First, since the fraction of Quakers in the world's population is very small, it is not surprising that the fraction of news stories about Quakers among total news stories is also very small. Despite this, Quakers continue to make a unique and important contribution to the wider world.
The fraction of Internet news pages (2,600,000) in the total number of Internet pages (8 billion) is also very small. Concerning religion in the news, if one searches for the word "Catholic," one gets back around 25,000 Internet news page results. "Methodist" returns about 10,000 results, "Presbyterian" about 5,000, "Unitarian" about 5000, and "Buddhist" also about 5,000.
If one simply searches for the word "Quaker," one finds around 1,500 Internet news page results-still too many through which to wade. The modified query mentioned earlier with what not to report back narrows the results to around 700, depending on how active Quakers are in any two-month period before a query is submitted.
econd, it is evident that Quakers spread their very limited numbers and time over many areas of concern.
To explore this, I began to compile data showing the range of Quaker attributes each news article addressed. The chart quickly encompassed so many columns that the task of naming and logging the results of a one-year collection within my own lifetime would have been impossible. Concerning this, the automation of the naming and logging of Quaker attributes to each article would be impossible to fully code into software. Some amount of time-consuming manual work will always be needed.
The numerous columns of Quaker attributes in my study were marked with headings like: Historical, Quaker School, Anti-War, Peace Activity, Protest, Business Integrity, Simplicity, Iraq, Slavery, Underground Railroad, Immigrant Rights, Civil Disobedience, Conscientious Objection, Prison Reform, Death Penalty, Book Review, Gambling, Alcohol, Christ, Conflict Resolution, Raised-a-Quaker, Real Estate Development, William Penn, and many others.
hird, I learned that activities related to Quaker peace concerns are alive and well, but those related to other Friends testimonies are mostly not reported. Can Friends find a way to equalize or integrate our commitment to community, integrity, truth, equity, simplicity, and care of the Earth—and to allow these to be as widely covered as our peace activities?
The Most Widely Reported Stories
During the one-year collection period from May 2003 to April 2004, the most widely and frequently reported story was about Nathaniel Heatwole, who in October 2003 was arrested and arraigned in Federal Court for planting box cutters and other apparently dangerous materials aboard commercial jet airliners. He was reported on TV, and in large and small newspapers worldwide, to have attended a Quaker college, Guilford, in North Carolina. He claimed that his was an act of civil disobedience to improve airline safety. The net effect to public perception was that "Quaker" is associated with higher education, and with civil disobedience. Some Friends found doubtful Nathaniel Heatwole's understanding or interpretation of civil disobedience. In June 2004 he was given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to a lesser charge.
A distant second, but important, story came from Friends Committee on National Legislation and its senior fellow on military affairs, retired Col. Daniel Smith. He is a Purple Heart recipient and a graduate of the Army War College. In a June 2003 article, he publicly questioned the U.S. military's strategy and logistics in Iraq as unsafe for U.S. lives and unsound in pure military terms. FCNL, like American Friends Service Committee, sometimes adds a tag line in press releases including the word "Quaker" in a brief description of its mission, assuring that these stories are picked up by my search.
Stories including Quakers and war resistance were likely more numerous in the news during the time of my search than they would have been in a period without U.S. military action.
A Strange Story
The Catholic Church, from coast to coast, has recently been rocked by sexual abuse scandals. The Religious Society of Friends also suffered a shocking story, which came and went without wide national coverage. The story, published in June and August 2003, was about a Friend from the Cincinnati area who was charged with 48 counts of "creating and receiving child pornography."
The remarkable aspect of this story, in my opinion, was that the Friend pled guilty to 49 counts on the condition that the Federal judge double his sentence. The female judge accommodated him, and his sentence was changed from 35 to 70 years in prison. The Friend was reported to have said of his request that it was the only way to stop "the evil monster" possessing him.
I recounted this story to a Catholic work colleague as we walked through the slush of a New York City winter afternoon. We had been talking about sexual abuse scandals in churches. My colleague lifted his glance from the slippery sidewalk, looked me in the eye, and said, "At least he's honest."
An Inspiring Story
March 2004 brought forth the story of George Ellis, a South African mathematician, cosmologist, and Quaker who won the $1.4 million Templeton Prize for "Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities," religion's version of the Nobel Prize. Some said that George Ellis's prize-winning theory of kenosis, or self-sacrificing love, scientifically codified optimism. According to him, kenosis is a force permanently embedded in the universe and capable of inspiring humanity to reach ever higher. He gave an example of his theory: "In the history of our country, there was very good reason to give up hope for the future. But in fact, the right thing to do was to hope it would come right. And hoping it would come right was already part of the force that helps to transform." He cited other examples of spiritual power being capable of overturning rational expectations for the future, including the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and India's war for independence from Britain.
In Ellis's view, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and even scientific fundamentalism all have a similar effect in how they polarize. In response, he said, "What I am really about is trying to get people not to have fundamentalist positions. You claim partial truth as the whole truth and you therefore dismiss the partial truths that other people might offer."
Limits of this Search
The Quakers in the News intensive survey began in May 2003, two months after the invasion of Iraq. The results I obtained in this time period were skewed in that I did not search on complementary queries such as "Friends Church," "Society of Friends," "American Friends Service Committee," or "Friends Committee on National Legislation." Sometimes a reporter will omit the word "Quaker" from a story about AFSC or FCNL. I now use all of the above-mentioned queries in my searches.
About that "Box"
Will our outward Quaker testimonies and actions continue to bind us together even though Friends, at times, see different inward truths or parts of the Truth? If we take all the partial views and look at them together, from "outside the box," will we become Quakers in the news with more diverse concerns or more focused ones? Will we become Quakers in the news less or more often?
he future of electronic searching is wide open. Will more thorough searching allow Friends to make better sense of the ever-expanding universe of knowledge? Will improvements in search software advance us in our spiritual quest? In this regard, maybe knowing what we seek will someday be harder than finding it.
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This is a feature article from the
August 2005 issue of Friends Journal.
