A Quaker author chat. Evan Welkin’s article, “Shining Our Light Before Others: A Quaker’s Thoughts on the New American Papacy” appears in the September 2025 issue of Friends Journal.
Martin Kelley and Evan Welkin explore the intersections of Quakerism, cultural identity, and the implications of a new American pope. They discuss the unique perspectives of Quakers in North America compared to those in Latin America, particularly in relation to liberation theology and the historical context of faith. The dialogue emphasizes the importance of understanding diverse experiences within the Quaker community and the need for deeper interfaith dialogue to bridge gaps in understanding. They also reflect on the future of Quakerism and the growing influence of Friends from the Global South.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Quaker Perspectives
02:43 Exploring the New American Pope
05:03 Cultural Contexts of Faith
07:37 Liberation Theology and Its Implications
10:09 Historical Reflections on Faith and Identity
12:34 Bridging Gaps Between Quaker Communities
15:12 The Future of Quakerism in a Global Context
Links
- Previous Friends Journal articles by and about Evan Welkin
- Friends World Committee for Consultation (Section of the Americas)
- 2025 Backhouse Lecture with FWCC General Secretary Tim Gee
Bio
Evan Welkin is a member of Olympia (Wash.) Meeting of North Pacific Yearly Meeting. While living in Italy, he joined the staff of the Friends World Committee for Consultation, Europe and Middle East Section (EMES) and the FWCC World Office facilitating the Global Quaker Sustainability Network. In July 2024, he was appointed executive secretary of the FWCC Section of the Americas.
Transcript
Martin Kelley: Hi, I’m Martin Kelley of Friends Journal and this is another Quaker Author Chat and today I’m happy to be with Evan Welk and welcome, Evan.
Evan Welkin: Thank you, thank you for having me.
Martin Kelley: Sure, now Evan, your latest article for Friends Journal is “Shining Our Light Before Others, Quakers’ Thoughts on a New American Papacy.” And I should give the bio here. Evan Welkin is a member of Olympia Washington Meeting, of North Pacific Yearly Meeting. While living in Italy, he joined the staff of Friends World Committee for Consultation, Europe and Middle East sections, and the FWCC World Office, facilitating the Global Quaker Sustainability Network.
Martin Kelley: July 2024 he was appointed executive secretary of the FWCC section of the Americas. So tell me why did you want to write an article about a new American pope, a new US pope?
Evan Welkin: Yeah, so this the timing of the papal transition happened to align with a trip that I took to Bolivia this spring and I found that the threads of conversation that I was having in Bolivia at that time related to my experience of re-entering the US talking with particularly North American Quakers about theology and their understandings of Latin America. As I was returning to the United States, getting to know my section here in the section of the Americas, we cover the whole Western hemisphere. And so all of those things kind of converged on this experience of traveling in Bolivia. And so I felt that…
Evan Welkin: this article really was something that came up for me from a number of those different threads.
Martin Kelley: Sure, well from the US perspective, the announcement of this pope was sort of a shock, know, sort of familiarity. Chicago native, a White Sox fan, went to Villanova. I’m a Villanova grad myself. So you know, this kind of like, can almost really kind of associate with him. So that was a surprise after popes from all over other places. And I guess in the US, you know, there’s a lot of Catholics, so we interact.
Martin Kelley: As friends with Catholics, my meeting often has a lot of newcomers who come from Catholicism. So one of the first conversations we have is what’s the same, what’s different? What’s your experience in the American context that way, the US context? I should specify.
Evan Welkin: Yeah, so I actually vividly remember in college, I studied at Guilford College in the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program, and we really explored sort of the range of Quaker faith and practice from unprogrammed liberal traditions all the way to evangelical traditions and.
Evan Welkin: And this question of the fact that many people come to Quakerism from other backgrounds, including Catholicism, was discussed. There were, you know, close friends of mine that, for example, described particularly liberal, unprogrammed Quakerism as in some ways being so different than the sort of liturgical
Evan Welkin: rote approach of Catholic mass that in some ways they diverged so far that they came back and met around the other side was the way this person described it. I think beginning in those conversations at Guilford, but all the way up to my experience of coming into this role right now, that may be true, especially for unprogrammed friends in terms of the sort of mystical quality that can be a part of.
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Martin Kelley: Really?
Evan Welkin: the experience in mass or Catholic tradition. I think it’s a very different question for friends who live in countries in Latin America where the Catholic Church is still so much a part of the power and leadership structure of those countries themselves all the way back since colonial times. So part of what I wanted to get at in this piece was that
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Evan Welkin: I think there’s a difference there in terms of also just the kind of level of charge or where we may in North America sort of have a kind of more live or let live kind of approach to everybody’s face tradition and folks are invited to sort of come at spiritual questions from a range of different places. I think the
Evan Welkin: The fact that the Catholic Church has been so tied up in governance of the state historically in many Latin American countries means there is a difference in terms of the kind of charge or weight of these conversations, which is what I hope to get at a bit in this piece.
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Martin Kelley: Sure, and around here, doesn’t necessarily matter. I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter what religion someone is, but we don’t have, as you say, that weight. There’s no one forcing you to conform to their culture one way or the other. But how is it in Latin American countries? You mentioned Bolivia and other countries where the relationship is much more, perhaps, fraught between Quakers and an established religion.
Evan Welkin: Yeah, so I mean, I think I got my first clear signs of this within my first months in my role. And I mentioned in the piece, but there was a casual reference by a North American Quaker to using the shorthand of, this is a sort of liberation theology approach to…
Martin Kelley: He
Evan Welkin: Christian storytelling actually was the context that this person was describing. I don’t actually think that they intended that to be explicitly Catholic at all, but I think as a result of the growth and influence of liberation theology in North American consciousness, you know, in the 1980s and beyond, there was, I think,
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Evan Welkin: just a sort of casual reference on the part of this friend to, I’m kind of thinking about this as, you know, Christian social justice, et cetera, and using the term liberation theology.
Martin Kelley: Sure, that’s how we all talked about it and thought about it back in the day. Sure, it’s this kind of interesting things happening out of Central America, yeah.
Evan Welkin: Exactly. for this
Evan Welkin: Exactly. I think, think honestly, amongst many, maybe progressive Quaker circles, there’s been, you know, decades of interest in central and South America in that context of, you know, partnership projects, relationships between yearly meetings, you know, desire to support sort of progressive, you know, movements in Latin American countries.
Evan Welkin: That then therefore struck me in conversation with this friend from El Salvador as I then basically just translated the words liberation theology to that person and they said, well, you know, for me, when I hear that term, it reminds me of the civil war, you know, in which my brother was killed. Not like progressive approach to Christian.
Evan Welkin: storytelling, for example. And that just really struck me and began to encourage me to think more about not just the explicit story we tell ourselves about theology or about progressive politics, but also the wider cultural context, which I think it sometimes gets lost or forgotten. I mean, you mentioned, for example, also like
Evan Welkin: It was kind of a big deal when Kennedy was elected as our first Catholic president. indeed, just in the space of these decades since, maybe that wouldn’t be such a big deal. When Biden became elected, it wasn’t really a big issue as it was before during the Kennedy administration. So I think…
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Martin Kelley: Yeah, 40 years before.
Evan Welkin: I think maybe these are things that have moved more quickly or changed in a more dynamic way in the North American context, whereas my perception is that in Latin America, it is still challenging to be a religious minority, know, non-Catholic in Latin American countries. It is still definitely a sort of minority position. And then I also reference in this piece
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Evan Welkin: My personal experience is not at all, you know, completely analogous, but I myself spent the last many years living in Italy, in a Catholic country, as a religious minority and a friend. And so I draw some parallels in the piece between, you know, my own experience of living so close to the Vatican at that time and what it felt like to feel that sort of strong influence in my day-to-day life.
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm. Did it feel oppressive though in a way that maybe it does in some Latin American contexts?
Evan Welkin: I don’t think so. think largely because of my personal privilege as a immigrant with a lot of resources and ability to make and influence my own life choices without a lot of concern for the state. I did see other religious minorities in Italy struggle much more, particularly in that time that I was in Italy.
Evan Welkin: there was a huge discussion about the increasing number of immigrants from Muslim countries in Italy and this existential fear of the identity of the Italian culture and the Italian state as a result of immigration, which interestingly, I think is a part of what is going on now in the United States as increasingly.
Evan Welkin: sort of anti-immigrant rhetoric has been thrown up. I think a lot of that has not explicitly related to anti-Catholic conversation because many of the folks who are targeted from Latin American countries right now are a part of actually growth in the Catholic Church in this country. But I do think that there is a subtext.
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Evan Welkin: to this kind of question of who are we and what does it mean to be American and what does it mean to be Christian and are there more or less acceptable forms of Christianity that the state basically gets to make a decision about.
Martin Kelley: It’s fascinating. This is just reminding me of some of the conversations in colonial eras around slavery and what happens when the slaves were then converted to Christianity. Did we have to free them? Did we have to treat them differently? These are questions that some of the early friends who were slaveholders had to wrestle with and some of the other different groups.
Martin Kelley: wrestling with identity and what happens when we do have Christianity and ethnicity and everything mixing together and what is our stance to who is us and who is them and it’s an age old question.
Evan Welkin: And I think at times as friends, and you and I have talked about this over the course of knowing each other these many years, times that we as friends, I think, can try to rest on our laurels or look selectively at our history a little to feel like we’ve always been on the right side of these conversations or somehow more morally superior.
Evan Welkin: But there has been an evolution in all cases towards, you know, our understanding of slavery. I was just in Jamaica, visiting Jamaica yearly meeting last month and speaking with friends about the history of Quakers that held slaves there on that island during colonial times and that George Fox visited there and Barbados at times when significant number of friends were holding slaves and participating in the transatlantic slave trade.
Martin Kelley: Hmm.
Evan Welkin: which is not something we commonly talk about or acknowledge within Quakerism. And I think that does also relate to this understanding of how we remember our history with regard to being religious minorities or not, because I think what it means to be a part of a relatively small
Martin Kelley: Right.
Evan Welkin: Faith tradition means something very different for the average North American or Northern European Quaker than it does for those of us who are the majority of friends living in the global South, often with other faith traditions that are much more dominant and with more significant influence in the local politics or power structures in the countries where they live.
Martin Kelley: And so how can we get more dialogue going so that, you know, we North American friends aren’t quite so clueless in what we say to Latin American friends in your example of liberation theology? It seems like partly this is lost in translation, but also we don’t really understand one another as well as we should. Are there ways that we can change that and start to communicate more clearly with one another?
Evan Welkin: Well, I promise that we didn’t set this up ahead of this interview, but I will take this opportunity to really commend Friends Journal’s new effort to hire a Latin American correspondent. And I’m eager to see what is the plan for more content coming from Friends Journal, from Latin American Friends perspectives, because I think simply hearing those voices is something that can really help us. I mean, I think without those opportunities to meet and share
Martin Kelley: This is kind of what you do, I guess, yeah.
Evan Welkin: opinions and perspectives. And we do have less opportunity simply to exchange and connect. FWCC is also a place where we offer regular opportunities for friends to consult and meet and travel to understand Quakerism more broadly across our section, not just between Latin American
Evan Welkin: friends and North American friends, but also across theologies within our own country, within our own communities. Friends, think at times are not even aware of that Quaker meeting or church across town that could be worshiping in a way that’s different than we do. And I think that’s another opportunity that friends might take. I think then also we are currently in a moment in the United States where there’s
Evan Welkin: tremendous discussion about sort of the heart and soul of our society and what it means to be a U.S. citizen, what it means to be a part of the broader community in the United States right now. And I think that one of the parts that I touch on in the piece is that at times I think the temptation is to kind of
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Evan Welkin: cut to shorthand and say, we just need to get along or, you know, we all need to respect each other’s beliefs, which is absolutely true. But I think at times we say that and we water down our differences in a way that may make us feel good in the short term.
Evan Welkin: and based on kind of superficial understandings of who is the other. But I think that ultimately we can gain a much richer understanding through actually meeting each other where we are. So by greater shared media and communication about others’ experience, by greater opportunities to actually meet people in person through events or activities, and an actual effort.
Martin Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Evan Welkin: on our part to reach outside of our comfort zone. I think we will at times find ourselves uncomfortable with that which we find, differences in theology, differences in perspective, which may not immediately feel reconcilable or happy or easy, but ultimately is transformative. Yeah.
Martin Kelley: Right, we will be challenged and it will be messy.
Evan Welkin: And I experienced that myself living for many years abroad. I don’t think everybody has that opportunity necessarily to live so long outside of one’s comfort zone. But I think in different ways, we have opportunities to go outside of our norms, our sort of commonly expected understandings. And ultimately, I believe that is an opportunity for us within Quakerism more broadly.
Evan Welkin: as we reflect on our faith as a whole. mean, I think friends, particularly in North America have been asking ourselves questions for some time now about the future of our faith and what’s it going to look like to be a Quaker in the next decade, in the next 50 years. Tim Gee, the general secretary of FWCC in a lecture recently,
Evan Welkin: put out some predictions of what he imagines Quakerism looking like in several years’ time. he, amongst other things, and I agree with him on this, see that increasingly our leadership and overall face of Quakerism globally will look and be directed more by Friends in the Global South, where we see the greatest growth and enthusiasm for our Quaker identity.
Martin Kelley: Sure.
Martin Kelley: Yeah, there’s a lot of, mean, historically there’s been a lot of parochialism living in the Philadelphia area. And now there was always that thing like, those other Quakers aren’t really Quakers. And I think that has been chipping away. And I think there is a more interest in knowing all the different Quakers and really communicating, reaching out. The internet, it’s actually, I think helped because, you know, we can have more direct communication. So it’s, yeah, it’s exciting to see where this is going, you know, 350 years later, Quakers are still.
Martin Kelley: learning and evolving. It’s exciting.
Evan Welkin: And indeed, if friends are interested, there are plenty of ways to plug in and learn more about Quakerism via FWCC. And I’d be really happy to speak with anybody and offer as many opportunities as I can to help people get more involved if they haven’t already been so.
Martin Kelley: Well, we’ll definitely have lots of links in the show notes for this. Well, thank you, Evan, for taking some time to write the article and then talk with me here about this. It’s nice seeing you again.
Evan Welkin: Thank you. Thank you, Martin. Yeah, happy to be here. Really appreciate the chance.
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