As for Me, I Walk in My Integrity

O Lord, I love the house in which you dwell
    and the place where your glory abides.
Do not sweep me away with sinners
    nor my life with the bloodthirsty,
those in whose hands are evil devices
    and whose right hands are full of bribes.
But as for me, I walk in my integrity;
    redeem me and be gracious to me.
My foot stands on level ground;
    in the great congregation I will bless the Lord.
(Psalm 26:8-12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

The French philosopher René Girard had a lot to say about what he called mimetic desire—whatever we want, we want not for itself but because we saw somebody else with it and we want to imitate or, better yet, to be them. Such desires, he added, deeply shape our concepts of sin. “If we ceased to desire the goods of our neighbor,” he wrote in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, “we would never commit murder or adultery or theft or false witness.” But when we want what we have not got, we often find ourselves willing to do whatever it takes to get hold of it.

Morality sets boundaries on acceptable behavior, reminding us we shouldn’t commit violence—physical or emotional, individual or institutional—against each other to take what we want. We do it anyway, though, committing one “scandal,” as Girard put it, after another. As the scandals accumulate, and society becomes increasingly disordered, we start to realize that things have gone terribly wrong. 

Rather than acknowledge our complicity in this state of affairs, however, we pick some marginalized individual or group, someone who can’t defend themselves very well, and identify them as the source of society’s ills. Then we purge them from society—by imprisonment, perhaps, or deportation, or execution—and tell ourselves we’ve eliminated the problem.

Society inevitably selects an innocent as its victim, who can never return to challenge that characterization. Except, of course, Jesus, who famously did come back and confronted the world with the lie that underpins the entire scapegoating process—but also offered us a way out of the trap of mimetic desire. Instead of obsessing over everyone else’s wealth and success, Girard wrote, “what Jesus invites us to imitate is… the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible.”

That brings us to the story of James Nayler, one of the earliest Quakers.

Nayler fought in the English Civil Wars for much of the 1640s, on the side of the Parliament. He had already experienced some religious stirring while in the army, and soon after he was mustered out, God told him to leave his home and resume preaching. It took Nayler a while to work up the nerve to heed this call, but he did, and in 1651 he crossed paths with George Fox.

Conventional Quaker history has it that Fox “convinced” Nayler to become a Friend, but other observers suggest that Fox and Nayler’s intense spiritual visions may have dovetailed neatly. In any event, early Quakers quickly recognized Nayler as a highly effective minister, to the point where some grew concerned he might undermine Fox’s position as the spiritual leader of the young movement. The relationship between the two grew strained.

The issue came to a head in October 1656, when Nayler traveled to Bristol, riding a horse down the muddy street leading into the city, with several Friends walking ahead, singing praises—a provocative re-enactment of Jesus’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. Seized by the local authorities, Nayler was sent to London, where he would stand trial for “horrid blasphemy” before Parliament.

Nayler was found guilty, and though many in Parliament wished to see him executed, they had to settle for hundreds of lashes from a whip, the letter B branded upon his forehead, and the piercing of his tongue with a thin piece of heated iron—all before he was put into custody for two years.

Parliament needed Nayler as a scapegoat to serve as a warning to other religious dissenters, especially the Quakers. For their part, Fox and other members of the Quaker establishment deliberately distanced themselves from Nayler, assuring Puritan authorities they would never step as far out of line as he had.

Their denial may well have ensured the Religious Society of Friends’ survival.

The charge of blasphemy, however, depended on a notion that Nayler went to Bristol believing himself the resurrected Christ—an assertion Nayler firmly denied. “I do abhor that any honour due to God should be given to me, as I am a creature,” he told his accusers. “But it pleased the Lord to set me up as a sign of the coming of the Righteous One.” In his view, Nayler had been “commanded by the Lord” to deliver a message to Bristol and the world. Whether or not he anticipated his re-enactment of Palm Sunday might result in such excessively violent punishment, he felt he had no choice but to follow God’s lead.

Some Friends, we should acknowledge, continued to support Nayler through his imprisonment and after his death in 1660. They had their work cut out for them, though. Until his own death in 1691, Fox did his best to keep Nayler’s writings out of print, while other Friends routinely left his name out of their historical accounts. (To this day, many Friends choose to characterize Nayler as a loose cannon, perhaps even mentally or emotionally unstable.) But you can’t suppress a story this powerful completely—not as a human story and especially not if we are willing to sit with the possibility that Spirit may indeed have inspired Nayler’s assumption of the scapegoat’s role.

(If you want to learn more, I highly recommend Leo Damrosch’s The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, which has strongly shaped my understanding of Nayler’s ordeal.)