Drafted May 1, May 6-8, and May 25, 2026.
Revised May 28, 2026. 

Part 1 of How I Became a Quaker can be read here.
Part 2 of How I Became a Quaker can be read here.

Making the decision to join a religious community as a leftist is admittedly a pretty unusual thing to do. Committing to anything indefinitely is not easy in late stage capitalism, particularly committing to a religious identity. Since I am pretty public about being a Quaker (people who I have only just met often bring it up before I do, because I mention it on my website), this means I am now “the person you can talk to about religion” in many of the circles I move in. 

Over the last couple of weeks, I talked about how and why I became a Quaker. Today my life looks very different from when I applied for Quaker membership in 2023, so it’s worth talking about why I continue to stay a Quaker. Broadly speaking, it’s because being a Quaker provides me with a sense of stability, community solidarity, and spiritual practice. 

Stability 

I’ve previously mentioned that one of the most stable things in my life is being a Quaker. I think of this stability as something that is co-created, both by my choice to show up every Sunday at the meeting house when I’m in town, but also by the choices of other Friends to do the same thing. My calendar rarely looks the same week to week, so my Sunday morning is the most consistent and stable thing I can count on in my life right now, scheduling-wise. I am a total Capricorn freak when it comes to managing my calendar, so I cannot overstate how important it is to me to have recurring things on my calendar in order to feel anchored and secure within my very unpredictable life.

I am a person who finds a great deal of comfort in routine and predictability. Knowing that every Sunday I will see people who care deeply about me and are, for lack of a better way to put it, keeping tabs on me (aka up in my business) does a lot for my sense of well-being. If I don’t show up for a while, or if I share about a particularly difficult challenge I’m going through, I know that someone will likely reach out to check on me (and I know I am also encouraged to ask for help and support if I need it, and I will get it). 

There are a lot of jokes about how infamously long the Quaker decision making process can take. Meetings are full of apocryphal stories about how it took an entire decade to come to unity about how to replace the carpet. The level of sensitivity around Quaker business process and reaching unity (not to be confused with consensus!) can border on the absurd at times (“How many Quakers does it take to change a lightbulb? Let's form a committee and discuss this joke/Ten to sit around until someone gives ministry about the inner Light”), but the upside of this is that if you, like me, are a person who has dealt with a lot of traumatic situations in their life that involved abrupt changes or withholding of information, there is something comforting about knowing that the Quaker deliberative process is slow by design. 

Community

In the part 1 essay, I mentioned that in recent years our Quaker meeting has started to grow. We are not alone on this measure. I’ve had this discussion with many other people who are part of liberal denominations, and they also report that in recent years they’ve seen a modest but noticeable increase in involvement from younger people. Colloquially we sometimes call it the “Trump bump.” Many of the people who come to us are either those who grew up in high-control religions and are seeking a new accepting spiritual home or those who were raised in very secular/atheist homes and have been searching for their first spiritual home. In almost all of the cases, newcomers usually mention factors such as liberal Quakers being LGBTQ-affirming, desire for a spiritual home where science is also valued, Quakers’ reputation for social justice, etc.

At the beginning of this essay I said I’m the person in my social circles that religion-curious people talk to about their burgeoning religious interests. I know people who have expressed interest in joining a liberal religious community because they have a very specific type of yearning that religious affiliation often fulfills. I suspect those people will eventually find their spiritual home, because they have identified that they have a spiritual-shaped vacuum in their lives.  

But what is often a very hard and delicate conversation to broach is when people tell me they ache for a community, meaning, purpose, and structure and have been turning around in circles trying to find it. And I want to gently but firmly ask them “buddy, have you ever considered checking out some different religious communities? Because it sure sounds like what you’re seeking is religious community.” As I like to joke, even the atheists now have groups where they get together on a regular basis! 

At the time I became a Quaker, I didn’t really have a specific vision for what I was seeking, I just knew I needed the guidance of some kind of spiritually-grounded thoughtful people. But I kept going because it was feeding something deep inside of me that I didn’t realize was hungry. I realize now that it was being in community with others that was critical. 

At this point, I have invested so much in my Quaker community that I also view being a Quaker as part of my very real local safety net. At my lowest point in my divorce when I was feeling absolutely terrorized about my future between being forced to sell the house I had lived in for years and trying to find a suitable apartment, I knew in the back of my head that in a worst case housing scenario, the Quakers would not let me be homeless. 

Spiritual Discipline 

Discipline gets a bad rap these days as something that is either the domain of weird hustle bro culture or some kind of Puritanical hangover. While I sometimes use the terms interchangeably, I’ve long distinguished spirituality from religion in that spirituality is a plane of existence and active communion with the divine, but religious discipline is a form of (sometimes boring and mundane!) activities and practices to help you reach a spiritual existence (sort of like how you can get healthy in many ways, but going to a gym can more easily help you get to where you want to be). 

I have now been a Quaker long enough that virtually every thing I do through my life is filtered through the lens of being a Quaker, sometimes consciously, more often reflexively. Quakerism does not have rites or professions of belief in the manner of other denominations, but it places great emphasis on what we call the testimonies, which are a form of spiritual commitments that all Quakers are generally expected to embrace and to discern how they are realized on an individual and collective level. 

The Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice (a book of faith and practice is a volume that most yearly meetings maintain for the guidance of members, also known as a book of discipline!) describes testimonies in the following way:

Quaker spirituality is grounded in a direct relationship with the Divine. Quaker testimonies are visible manifestations of our corporate spiritual relationship, flowing naturally from a shared experience of God’s call. They are not rules we follow or things we do in order to get close to God but the fruits of faithfulness. As we follow the guidance of the Inward Light, our lives become simpler and our relationships characterized by integrity, equality, and peace. We are drawn into loving community with each other and with all of creation. We become patterns and examples, because testimonies are outward and public acts—shared expressions of the beliefs of the whole community. 

For the first 300 years of the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers expressed their inward spiritual relationship through various outward behaviors. These included ministry under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit; distinctive manners of dress and speech; and the rejection of professional clergy, outward rites and rituals; and refraining from what they termed “recreations and pastimes of the world.” Such corporate witness could be dangerous. In times of persecution, publicly identifying with the Society of Friends exposed some to scorn and harassment, fines, and imprisonment, even death. 

[...] In Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting, the Quaker testimonies are generally understood to be simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and harmony with creation. These are broad categories, not an exhaustive list of the ways in which we witness as a religious society. [...] While living our testimonies can be a source of joy, the Spirit has often directed Friends to challenge the customs and standards of the wider society. Faithfulness may require us to act contrary to comfortable and familiar ways. It can lead us into action we would rather avoid, but if we are true to our calling as Friends, we can do no less.

This might sound pretty vague, and indeed it took my brain many years to wrap my head around the concept of testimonies and spiritual discipline. But something I read long ago stayed with me during my early days of being a Quaker, which is that “prayer follows practice.” Quakerism is very much a praxis-based religion in which the outward acts are seen to be an outward expression of the inner light/truth. For quite some time I would sit in silent waiting worship frequently checking my watch, not really “getting it,” until gradually I began to feel what everyone else had been talking about (the sense of spiritual presence, listening for the still small voice, feeling a sense of spiritual gathering with other Friends). Some Quakers immediately click with Quakerism, but I think the reality is that many more Quakers (including myself) take years to feel at ease with the admittedly very strange and very metaphysical experience of being a Quaker. But now it is also very hard to imagine a life in which this is not my reality.

In a rather dramatic sense, I knew I had become a Quaker when I heard someone share the apocryphal phrase that has been attributed to many other pacifists that “There is nothing a Quaker would kill for, but things they would be willing to die for” and realized how deeply I resonated with it. But beyond the extremes of life and death, there are the small every day things that inform living a Quaker life. 

For me, the most foundational Quaker testimony and the beating heart of my own spiritual discipline is the testimony of integrity. Integrity is why I am honest about the impacts of climate change, it is why I am frank with people when they hurt my feelings, it is why I give away as much of my work as I feel like I can afford to, charge what I feel is fair for my business services and not what I think I can get away with, and it is why I do not engage in lying, cheating, or stealing. I truly believe that integrity is the load-bearing foundation of every other Quaker testimony. Living a life of integrity often means a refusal or a repudiation of many of the things about our violent, misogynist, racist, nationalist, late stage capitalist world, and that refusal has a cost (one of my all-time favorite essays on this is a Quaker computer scientist who has refused DoD funding). But as anyone who goes to the gym can tell you, discipline is what makes us stronger day by day. 

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