The First Amendment Is Not a Quaker Testimony

by Ron Hogan
Flushing Meeting

I’ve run into a few Friends in recent years who declare that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution gives them the right to speak in a Quaker meeting. Sometimes I think they imagine themselves as the central figure in Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech,” rising from their bench to speak truth to power while their weighty neighbors gaze up approvingly. Their assertions show a basic misunderstanding of constitutional law, but I’m more disturbed by the failure to appreciate one of the most fundamental principles of our Quaker spirituality.

Let’s take a look at the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Congress—and, more broadly, any local or state government—has no authority to prohibit Quakers from exercising their faith. They cannot stop the Religious Society of Friends from gathering for worship; they cannot stop us from expressing ourselves in or out of worship. (The government can regulate speech under certain limited conditions, none of which apply here. The odds of a Quaker inciting a riot, for example, seem reasonably slim.)

That has no absolutely no legal bearing on how Friends choose to regulate each other’s speech within their own meetinghouses. We may like to give everyone an opportunity to speak, but we have no constitutional obligation to do so. If you want to suggest we have a spiritual obligation to hear everybody out, we could have that conversation. I can see good reasons why someone would take that position, such as cultivating a spirit of congeniality and sociability. I can also see good reasons why someone would disagree—starting with the proposition that Quaker worship was not established to provide a forum for everyone to say “what’s on their mind.”

What did the elders at Balby advise us, back in 1656? “That as any are moved of the Lord to speak the word of the Lord at such meetings, that it be done in faithfulness, without adding or diminishing.”

Moved of the Lord. To speak the word of the Lord.

Now, as I say, meetings can and do give people substantial leeway to determine for themselves whether they are “moved of the Lord” to speak in worship, and many also give over a portion of the hour for “thoughts that did not rise to the level of a message.” But we also have traditions and processes for handling people who are seen to abuse that generosity, with or without meaning to, by speaking “only for myself” and not at the true leading of Spirit. We may not want to prevent someone from speaking in worship (or meeting for business), but we will if we discern the need to do so to preserve the spiritual integrity of the community. And the First Amendment has no power to stop us from doing so.

I suppose I find this zealous invocation of the First Amendment disturbing because it flirts with Christian nationalism—and it almost always yokes the history of the Religious Society of Friends to some form of American exceptionalism. But Quakers do not rely on the permission of the state to speak the word of the Lord, and they never have—not in Puritan and Restoration England, not in New Amsterdam, not in colonial Plymouth, and not today. We speak as Spirit moves us; we accept messages from others as we see Spirit moving them. When we invoke any other justification to speak, we run the risk of cutting ourselves off from the Light that gives our messages true weight.