Can Atheists be Quakers too?

 

I recently watched this video on YouTube “Can Atheists be Quakers too?”

I have been a dyed-in-the-wool Christian Quaker, a nontheist Quaker, and a pagan Quaker, oscillating between them over the years. Eventually, I realized I don't care for labels. They place me in a box with walls far too confining.

Instead, I find truth in two quotes that point to a deeper reality:

"There is a principle which is pure placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds from God..." — John Woolman

"There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end..." — James Nayler

My experience has taught me that regardless of what I believe or which traditions I draw from, this pure principle—this spirit, whether divine or rooted in the human psyche—exists and can be directly known, whether we conceptualize it as God or a Deeper Wisdom.

George Fox, one of the founders of Quakerism, often advised Friends not to let raw reason or overwhelming emotion overtake us, but to sink down into "That Which Is Pure," which tests and proves all things. Interestingly, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) teaches something very similar: while we can easily over-rationalize or react purely out of emotion, real healing comes from drawing upon our "Wise Mind"—that deeper wisdom within—when coping or seeking a path forward.

I believe there are spiritual energies and presences into which we can tap and, for lack of a better word, communicate. I do not believe in a cosmic chess master manipulating human beings. But I do believe in a presence that accompanies us through this human experiment.

I believe this because after my partner died, unexplainable things began happening to my family—a family that is largely secular. My father was woken up by an apparition of my partner shaking him as he dozed, at the exact time my partner was 535 miles away on life support. That same night, a Quaker in Michigan was woken by my partner’s voice at his door. Later, after he passed, my cousin looked in her rearview mirror and saw him sitting in the back seat.

The most vivid moment happened to me directly. I was dreaming about him; we were at an after-hours club in Baltimore we used to frequent. In the dream, I was elated to see him, but then I heard his voice clearly: "Kevin, wake up! My parents are in town!"

There was a stark urgency to it. I tried to stay asleep—being in the dream felt like having him back—but as I drifted into that hazy state between sleeping and waking, his voice came again, louder: "Kevin, wake up! My parents are in town!"

Then, right as I reached consciousness, I heard his voice shout from the left side of the bed where he used to sleep: "Kevin, wake up! My parents are in town!"

I bolted upright. Of course, the room was empty. It was 7:30 a.m.—time to get ready to teach. But I was so shaken I couldn't teach that day, and my principal sent me home.

When I checked my email at home, I found two messages sent at 7:30 a.m. from Center Stage, the theater where he had worked. His parents had driven in from Knoxville and were standing outside the building, waiting for it to open so they could see where their son worked.

Why the urgency in his warning? A few months later, I was served with legal papers from a local Christian law firm. His family was suing me. They wanted his body exhumed from the Quaker cemetery where he rested. They wanted the house. They wanted his estate. They wanted to erase my presence from his life entirely.

Combined with charismatic spiritual experiences I had when I was younger, these events proved to me that there is more to this mortal coil than physical matter. As Robert Barclay wrote in his Apology, true spiritual reality comes from the direct experience of the Divine, not from dogma or teachings about it. (A nontheist Friend might frame it similarly: true happiness comes from the direct experience of love, not doctrines about love.)

Do I believe in a god who selectively intervenes—saving a politician while letting a bystander die? No, I do not.

This is why nontheists, theists, polytheists, and those of us who fit no category at all are all welcome in liberal Quakerism. We gather to sink deeply into the silence and ask what Love requires of us. Regardless of our individual mythologies or theological frameworks, the shared experience of entering that silence leads us toward the same fundamental truth: how to live, how to love, and how to hold one another in community.