I was raised in the Bear Creek Friends Quaker community in rural Iowa. Bear Creek meeting belongs to the Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) organization of Quaker meetings in the Midwest. I attended Scattergood Friends School, the boarding high school of our yearly meeting.
I was led to the concept of the New Conscientious Objector (NewCO) because of that spiritual upbringing. We believe the Spirit continues to be active today, as it was in the past to inform people of faith. We spend our periods of worship by sitting quietly together for about an hour. We wait expectantly for a spiritual message. This idea is referred to as continuing revelation. My first experience related to this was when I labored deeply to try to figure out what I should do regarding the requirement to register with the Selective Service System (draft). It finally became clear that resisting the draft was what the Spirit was leading me to do.
The term conscientious objector is one of the Selective Service System classifications that allow someone to perform two years of alternative service in the community instead of military service. I was led, by the Spirit, to believe that doing alternative service was legitimizing an evil system, and I could not do that.
The concept of a New Conscientious Objector (NewCO) is the broader interpretation of the term to object to the systems of injustice we are embedded in, which is defined as Christian colonial capitalist violence by those who were or continue to be its victims.
Another significant spiritual impact in my life was being led to live without a car because of the harm to Mother Earth.
In the intervening years, I learned a lot about community organizing by participating in:
- Quaker social change ministry, North Meadow Circle of Friends
- Kheprw Institute black youth mentoring community
- Keystone, Dakota Access, Wet’suwet’en, and carbon pipeline resistance
- Abolition of police and prisons
- Des Moines Mutual Aid
- Decolonial Repair Network
- Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous led organization
- Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples
- Palestinian solidarity
- Apartheid-Free Communities
What has emerged from all of this is idea of New Conscientious Objector (NewCO)
My frustration has been trying to figure out how to live justly while living in unjust systems. I came to see capitalism as the evil that creates poverty and a police state that protects wealth and property. Our systems of governance have broken before our eyes. There is great spiritual poverty and pervasive mental health crises.
I learned of the past atrocities of the Indian boarding schools policy of the Grant administration which Quakers were active participants in. I remembered that our massive systems of mass incarceration are based on the early Quaker attempts to improve conditions of the jails Friends were held in the mid 1600s.
These misguided attempts to help ended up creating current systems of injustice.
The NewCO idea came to me as I read tom kunesh’s article, “Decolonizing Quaker Moves to Innocence: What Would it Take to Decolonize the ‘Quaker Peace Testimony’?” The article was published in Quaker Religious Thought, Volume 139, Article 5, in 2022. Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/qrt/vol139/iss1/5
tom is an Indigenous Quaker who has been involved in Decolonizing Quakers, which is where we met (via Zoom). tom doesn’t capitalize his name, which is related to the colonial erasure of Indigenous cultures in this land.
tom’s analysis of the Quaker Peace Testimony clearly framed the “fracture” of that testimony. That Quakers have a long history of opposition to wars among nations, but have a moral blind spot to the injustices of the Christian, colonial, capitalist violence that we are embedded in. Quakers aren’t addressing this country’s internal, domestic violence which is required to maintain control of our colonial systems of domestic war.
When I was struggling with what to do about registering for the draft (in 1969), I learned a lot about conscientious objection. I was profoundly affected by the Epistle to Friends Concerning Militarism and War, which was signed by my cousin, Roy Knight, and my Quaker mentor, Don Laughlin.
It matters little what men say they believe when their actions are inconsistent with their words. Thus we Friends may say that all war is wrong, but as long as Friends continue to collaborate in a system that forces men into war, our Peace Testimony will fail to speak to mankind.
Several years ago I wrote a similar epistle on the subject of community, Mutual Aid and LANDBACK. (An Epistle to Friends Regarding Community Mutual Aid and LANDBACK.)
It matters little what people say they believe when their actions are inconsistent with their words. Thus, we Friends may say there should not be hunger and poverty, but as long as Friends continue to collaborate in a system that leaves many without basic necessities and violently enforces white supremacy, our example will fail to speak to mankind.
Let our lives speak for our convictions. Let our lives show that we oppose the capitalist system and white supremacy, and the damages that result. We can engage in efforts, such as Mutual Aid and LANDBACK, to build Beloved community. To reach out to our neighbors to join us.
We must begin by changing our own lives if we hope to make a real testimony for peace and justice.An Epistle to Friends Regarding Community Mutual Aid and LANDBACK
