We Are Treated as Impostors and Yet Are True

Look, now is the acceptable time; look, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: in great endurance, afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; in purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors and yet are true, as unknown and yet are well known, as dying and look—we are alive, as punished and yet not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing and yet possessing everything.
(2 Corinthians 6:2-10, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Empire, having seized power, works tirelessly to preserve its grasp.

Authoritarian regimes must keep their subjects in states of resignation and fear. They need us to believe that none dare oppose them because none can oppose them. And when credible threats to their dominion do emerge, they go into overdrive to discredit those threats in the eyes of the people.

Herod had John the Baptist imprisoned and executed. The Romans crucified Jesus, then spent centuries killing the advocates of the good news he brought to all living under imperial subjugation. Jump forward just over one millennium, and the English Parliament engaged in a lengthy campaign of persecution against the Religious Society of Friends, who openly challenged the righteousness of their political and ecclesiastical control over the nation.

The Quakers accused the churches of having strayed from the principles of authentic, “primitive” Christianity, preventing people from experiencing an unmediated communion with the Spirit of Christ. “We, many of us, sought truly and only after God from our childhood,” one early Friend, Isaac Penington, wrote:

“Now it pleased the Lord at length to pity us, and to inform our minds towards himself; to show us where life lay, and where death lay; and how to turn from the one and to the other, and he gave us his helping hand to turn us: and by being turned to him, we have tasted of the truth, of the true wisdom, of the true power, of the true life, of the true righteousness, of the true redemption; and by receiving of this from God, and tasting and handling of it, we come to know that that which the world hath set up in the stead of it, is not the thing itself.”

England’s ruling powers could not tolerate this defiance—not merely of their authority, but of their very claim to authority.

They threw Quakers in prison, charging them with blasphemy and heresy. Later, after the restoration of the monarchy, Parliament gave the accusations against Friends a more overtly political spin, charging Friends with “[assembling] themselves in great numbers in several parts of this Realm to the great endangering of the Publick Peace and Safety and to the terror of the People,” of “separating and dividing themselves from the rest of his Majesties good and loyall Subjects and from the Pubilick Congregations and usual Places of Divine Worshipp.” 

So they made it illegal for five or more Friends to meet “at any one time in any place under pretence of joyning in a Religious Worship not authorized by the Lawes of this Realm.” Knowing that Quakers refused to take oaths, they also made it illegal to refuse to swear loyalty to the king when prompted by a magistrate. Violating these edicts would bring financial penalties, followed by imprisonment and, for the determinedly unrepentant, the threat of deportation to the colonies.

As I read the text of 1662’s “Act for preventing the Mischeifs and Dangers that may arise by certaine Persons called Quakers,” I had to pause. When it occurred to me to draw this historical parallel, I’d expected I might make some broad comparison to the Trump administration’s attempts to villainize the people their officers had assaulted, seized, and killed in the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I hadn’t anticipated that the language invoked to persecute the Quakers then would so closely echo the rhetoric our current regime has used to smear all antifascists as a “domestic terror organization.”

Trump’s Christian nationalist allies are also doing their bit to discredit resistance grounded in faith.

Empire cannot tolerate the flourishing of prophetic imagination among the people; when enough of us can imagine a better world, it doesn’t take too long for us to begin working together to build up that better world. The Christian nationalists, having willingly embraced the yoke of authoritarianism, now fight to defend the status and influence they’ve attained by attacking the foundations of Jesus’s gospel.

Perhaps we can see this most clearly in their repudiation of empathy, as they’ve joined billionaire Elon Musk in regarding it as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” They run down the very idea of caring for other people; Southern Theological Seminary’s president, Albert Mohler, described it as an “artificial virtue” and “a therapeutic category rather than a moral category.” Even those who pay lip service to empathy suggest it can too easily get out of hand; the conservative theologian Joe Rigney, for example, calls “untethered” empathy “the means by which various aggrieved groups have been able to steer communities into catering to greater and greater folly and injustice.”

The first Quakers didn’t use the word “empathy,” as it doesn’t appear in English until the early 20th century. But embracing empathy as a virtue doesn’t make Friends today “impostors,” either as Quakers or as Christians, however we may see ourselves. Instead, it reflects the highest of Quakerly aspirations—to accept the summons of the Inward Light to pattern our minds after that of Jesus, “to do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, looking not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” (Philippians 2:3-4) When enough of us choose to live like that, rejecting the call to pursue wealth and power for their own sake and refusing to go along with those who do, Empire will crumble—it may not go quietly, but it will go.