The Revival of Defiance and the Call to Repair

A Prophetic Challenge for Quakers

Have Quakers been badass challengers of the status quo or conformist colonizers? Or some of both? This question of our participation in an unjust status quo is at the heart of some of the most destructively conducted conflicts about identity and ministry that we participate in as modern Quakers (and is also true for the authors of this essay who are Quaker public ministers and insider critics). What does it mean to revive any aspect of Quakerism, given our complicated history? Do we even know our complicated history?

So much of our common understanding of Quaker tradition—and ourselves as Friends—is through the lens of prophetic defiance, evident in our public ministers like George Fox, Margaret Fell, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Bayard Rustin. But when critical insiders and prophetic messengers defy our Quaker status quo, it is as if prophets invited into the home of Quakers are tied to the bed of the Greek villain Procrustes and then stretched or cut to fit that bed. Wounded, these modern public ministers often turn to panic and rage, a kind of despair that is not a mature lament with trust that our Friends love us as we love them. Procrustes was eventually tied to his own bed by the enraged hero Theseus, so says the myth, and destroyed in much the same way that he destroyed his guests.

We two have felt this pain directly in our own lives and ministry work amongst Friends. More frustrating and destructive, however, is the indirect pain we have encountered through the experiences of many of our closest friends and the stories we have heard from others who have been labelled “difficult,” “challenging,” or even “unquakerly” due to their vital and necessary work as prophets seeking to guide our faith tradition back to its roots: to the cauldron of defiant, prophetic fire within which our community was initially forged and to which our own tradition has continually called upon all of us Friends to reclaim. It is admittedly understandable why prophets are not accepted within their own community, yet what happens when an entire community claims to be prophetic and then fails the prophets in its midst?

The people who love Quakers enough to expose our injustice become—using paradoxical demands that we conform to the idealized myth of Quaker defiance—estranged from our meetings, as these meetings demand that the inherent diversity within them conform to a specific narrative and vision of defiance. These same meetings then become a pale imitation of the idealized Quakerism we praise in our most precious communal stories. Like a hospitable bed, a meeting is a place of Divine dreams. Nevertheless, it becomes a place of unrealized, unhealed despair unto destruction as we cling to unhealthy and uncomplicated versions of what it means to be whole and together.

Defiance, at its core, is a matter of perspective. Whether an action is seen as rebellion or righteousness depends greatly on one’s access to power. When a child refuses to clean their room, is it insubordination or a healthy assertion of autonomy? When an employee questions a directive from their boss, are they undermining authority or trying to prevent a costly mistake? When a member of a faith community resists a group decision they believe violates core values, are they being divisive or prophetic?

This tension between perceived disobedience and moral clarity sits at the heart of both Quaker history and Quaker myth. Early Friends were renowned for their bold defiance of church and state. Figures like Benjamin Lay did not just speak truth to power, they embodied it, often in unsettling ways. Lay’s dramatic protest against slavery—stabbing a bladder of pokeberry juice to symbolize blood on the hands of slaveholders—earned him the condemnation of his fellow Friends. He was disowned by four meetings and dismissed as a disruptive presence.

Yet today, he is embraced as a prophet.

If we strip away the romanticized sepia tones of Quaker hagiography and place such actions in a contemporary context—someone dumping oil on the meeting benches to protest climate destruction, for instance—would we respond with admiration or outrage? Would we listen, or would we seek to silence and contain? It is worth asking honestly: Do we embrace the prophetic voice in our midst or dismiss it for its inconvenience?

Public ministry in the Quaker tradition sits in an uncomfortable space. It is pastoral and prophetic, communal and disruptive, all simultaneously. It is liminal, a space where time folds upon itself: the roots of our tradition, the immediacy of our current moment, and the hope of a future closer to the divine vision of justice for all, all present at the same time. It seeks to nurture the spiritual health of the body while also calling it to account. The public minister serves as a bridge between memory and vision: helping communities reconnect with their most cherished myths and beliefs, while also imagining new futures.

One of the central tools in this ministry is and must be defiance.

When grounded in core values and ethical commitment, defiance becomes not simply rejection and despair but provocation toward love. It disrupts complacency, awakens conscience, and stirs transformation. It is deeply relational, not antagonistic for its own sake. As Margaret Fell once wrote, the call is to “provoke unto love,” a phrase that comes from Hebrews 10:24 (KJV) and encapsulates a vision of communal engagement rooted in truth-telling and moral courage.

Prophetic ministry is designed to be confrontational and uncomfortable and is thus inherently defiant: an intentional tension whose purpose is to complicate and confound comfort, regardless of whose convenience is compromised. Bayard Rustin envisioned this in mechanical terms: a group of “angelic troublemakers” willing and able to shove themselves into the wheels of society’s structures, disrupting the smooth oppression and easy compliance upon which our society (and its government) so often depend.

As Rustin insists, this demand to shove our bodies into the gears of injustice is both literal and metaphorical: whether it be our actual bodies or the power our presence and privilege possesses, our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. Elizabeth Fry is an instructive example for Friends in her holding this tension: she used every tool at her disposal—her position in society; her femininity; the Christian story; Quaker witness; and her own unceasing, defiant insistence on the Divine Presence within all—to demand justice for women crushed under the weight of intolerable conditions, unconscionable for a supposedly Christian society. Yet defiance is not easy to hold in a community. Prophetic voices are notoriously difficult to live with. They resist control and often expose wounds the community would rather keep hidden. The challenge of hosting defiant voices is real in the small, intimate world of Quaker meetings, where identity and belonging are tightly bound. The spectre of James Nayler haunts our community still: the fear of outrunning our Guide that tempers our exuberance with the cold shower of compromising caution. A more recent example of Quaker discomfort toward the prophetic is Norman Morrison, a Friend so committed to the Quaker peace testimony that he willingly set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon on November 2, 1965, in a powerful and disturbing echo of the self-immolations of Buddhist monks in Vietnam a few years earlier. These stories still divide Friends who hold firm to the same principles held by Nayler and Morrison, while feeling shocked and disturbed at the form these prophets chose to express their witness. The sometimes fiery words of Quaker public ministers calling their meetings to remember their prophetic roots seem tame in comparison. Yet, it is precisely in these spaces that the work of repair can begin, if we are all willing to engage with the discomfort that defiance brings.

Prophetic ministry is designed to be confrontational and uncomfortable and is thus inherently defiant: an intentional tension whose purpose is to complicate and confound comfort, regardless of whose convenience is compromised. 

Jonah and Nineveh: A Mirror for Quaker Ministry

The biblical story of Jonah offers a rich metaphor for Quaker public ministers. Jonah, a prophet of considerable privilege and spiritual authority, refuses God’s call to speak to the people of Nineveh. He runs not because he doubts God’s power but because he does not want the Ninevites to be offered redemption. He would rather die than see them transformed. Thrown overboard in a storm of his own making, Jonah is swallowed by a great fish and, in its belly, has a change of heart. When he finally delivers God’s message, the people repent, astonishingly en masse and stupefyingly absolute—even the all-powerful king begs God for forgiveness!—and Jonah is furious. His exclusive vision of holiness is undone by grace. How dare these oppressors, these evildoers, escape their much-deserved divine punishment through the actions of divine forgiveness! How dare the Divine welcome these people with open arms!

Public ministers often feel like Jonah: wrestling with our call, trying to escape its cost, wishing and praying for solitude instead of confrontation. But in many ways, we are also Nineveh: the ones who are willing to repent, to turn toward the Divine, to receive hard truth.

After all, we were formed through the truth of Quaker defiance and the nurturance and hospitality of our meeting communities. We heard from Jonah, and we believe him. In contrast, our meetings, like Jonah, may resist the Divine Guide, even when it is accompanied by transformation and healing. We sulk under withering trees, questioning why justice should come at the cost of our comfort in conformity.

Still, in the silence of waiting worship—the belly of the fish, perhaps—there is space for convincement. It is there that we might remember our calling: to be a people formed by defiance, not for its own sake but in service to the Spirit’s leading toward love and liberation. This love and liberation come from lament married to defiance.

The Cost of Conformity

Quakerism was born in spiritual rebellion against both state and church, but in recent generations, we have become increasingly integrated into the very systems we once opposed. Indeed, in Friend Ben Pink Dandelion’s recent The Cultivation of Conformity, he argues that “as the state began to tolerate Quakers, Quakers began to tolerate the state.” We traded prophetic disruption for institutional stability, often without noticing the cost. We preserved the appearance of a radical faith while slowly absorbing the values of the middle class: order, harmony, and reputation. These are the values of colonizers, empire, or what many critical insiders call “White supremacy” culture. These are the realities and values that stretch and cut in the hospitality of meeting, like Procrustes.

But, you may think, Quakers are on the forefront of confrontations with the world as it is, through our individual and sometimes collective civil disobedience, our belabored minutes, our recent brave lawsuits against the government. Non-Quaker Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke pushes this prophetic critique further, however, warning that many social justice movements have been co-opted and colonized by the professional class. For those of us in privileged positions, activism is often conditional: it serves our interests, boosts our social capital, and then fades once our needs have been met. This dynamic, al-Gharbi suggests, depletes movements of their momentum and leaves them weaker in our wake. U.S. Quakers (amongst whom we both belong; we come from a place of deep and abiding love for the Quaker way), so often well-educated and economically secure, must ask themselves whether our engagement in justice work truly challenges the status quo or subtly reinforces it. Do we welcome a critique of ourselves, especially if it comes from others and not ourselves?

The Discomfort of Truth-telling

Institutional Quakerism in many places now struggles to host the very same defiant spirits that once defined it. Prophetic voices are often met with polite dismissal, subtle gatekeeping, or open hostility. We misinterpret the testimony of equality to mean that no one should speak too loudly, lead too visibly, claim expertise too willingly, or challenge too forcefully. We fear rupture—believing that it threatens community—when in fact, rupture may be the only path to deeper connection and genuine healing.

Public ministry that includes defiance as well as lament and vulnerability invites the whole community into a more mature spiritual life. It insists that we cannot bypass grief to rush to hope; that we cannot remain silent about injustice while claiming to be peacemakers; that we cannot avoid apology, repair, and accountability while professing integrity. This observation convicts everyone equally: Jonah and the Ninevites, Procrustes and Theseus, public ministers and the meetings with which we have become enraged and from whom we have often received the deepest wounds.

From Defiance to Repair

For Quaker communities to thrive into the future, we must learn to hold defiance and repair together. We must do the following:

1. Acknowledge our fear of rupture and recognize that healing comes not by avoiding conflict but by entering into it with courage and care
2. Cultivate the skills of conflict transformation, not only through theory but through embodied practice, as part of our shared spiritual formation
3. Learn how to apologize, recognizing that apology is essential not only for the harmed but also for the one who harms (It is a spiritual practice of grief, accountability, and love.)
4. Break the cycle of urgency and despair, creating space for true discernment instead of reactive decision making
5. Become trauma-informed communities, understanding that trauma lives not only in moments of rupture but also in the absence of repair
6. Provide spaces for patient understanding and co-regulation, where nervous systems and spiritual wounds can be tended in community
7. Reclaim structures of accountability and support for public ministry, honoring both the slowness of institutions and the urgency of Spirit-led work
8. Resist the “tall poppy syndrome” that cuts down those who stand out, recognizing that the prophetic often appears as disruption
9. Learn from past failures, including historical complicity in injustice and contemporary patterns of silence, and allow those lessons to guide our renewal

To move from defiance and despair to loving lament is not to abandon the fire of the prophet. It is to recognize the pain beneath the urgency, that it is the deep longing for right relationship that fuels our anger, our disappointment, and our love. When public ministers speak with sadness and amazement, when they risk vulnerability and share their wounds, they offer a pathway into collective grief and through it to hope.

Defiance rooted in love, grounded in truth, and carried forward with humility can still shake the foundations, but it must be met with a community willing to listen, to be changed, and to participate in the holy work of repair. The ghosts of Lay, Nayler, Fell, Fry, Morrison, and Rustin are looking on, lovingly provoking us to love the entire and complete creation with our entire and complete selves. Will we accede to comfort and compliance, or will we repent and return to our roots, defiantly proclaiming the prophetic power of our Quaker witness? We know where we stand, faithful to the divine call to proclaim justice for the oppressed and to dissipate the fearful fog of comfort, standing on the shoulders of Quaker giants. What canst you say?