WHAT Is Offered
The NewCO (New Conscientious Objector) framework provides a comprehensive strategic blueprint for the immediate cessation of systemic sin within the Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) tradition. The NewCO is about a faithful response composed of three integrated pillars: LANDBACK, Mutual Aid, and Abolition.
The NewCO offers the institutional structure for Communal Risk Absorption through a working group on Decolonial Repair, which is modeled after the historical Meetings for Sufferings. Furthermore, the NewCO suggests developing LANDBACK research protocols to investigate property title histories and identify original Indigenous stewardship. Truth-telling workshops and new Queries for discernment are suggested to acknowledge historical complicity.
WHY It Is Important
This framework is essential because it addresses the fused architecture of Christian Colonial Capitalist Violence (CCV), which reinforces a self-perpetuating loop of ideological license, land theft, and economic extraction. It solves the crisis of the “economic draft,” a system that conscripts labor, money, and daily life into structures of environmental and racial destruction. By adopting the NewCO model, we ensure that modern efforts do not repeat the cultural genocide of Quaker-run Indian Boarding Schools. Implementing these actions actively disrupts “Settler Futurity” by refusing the assumption that the colonial state and its extraction-based economy are permanent or inevitable.
HOW It Is Measured
Success is quantified through specific material benchmarks rather than symbolic statements or performative acknowledgments. Measured results include the dollar amount of wealth transferred directly to Indigenous control via Voluntary Land Taxes and the Honor Native Land Fund. Progress is tracked by the number of community members whose daily survival needs are met through autonomous Mutual Aid pods outside of capitalist market logic. Effectiveness in Abolition is measured by the reduction in police reliance for conflict resolution and the number of individuals freed from cages through community bail funds. Institutional integrity is confirmed by the completion of LANDBACK research on acreage, such as the land occupied by Scattergood Friends School, and the subsequent transfer of title or jurisdiction to Indigenous nations. Finally, success is seen in the adoption of a new Query on Complicity and Repair into the official Advices and Queries.
Quaker Insights
- Embrace Immediatism: Delaying justice through committees is an act of spiritual disobedience; once a sin like the occupation of stolen land is identified, it must be stopped immediately.
- Utilize the Surgeon Analogy: Just as a surgeon must immediately cut out a lethal infection to save a life, the Meeting must decisively rupture its ties with CCV to preserve its spiritual health.
- Establish a Faithful Remnant: If the larger corporate body chooses the path of Gradualism, individuals must follow the 1877 Bear Creek precedent by acting as a “faithful remnant” to preserve the integrity of the witness.
- Prioritize Institutional Self-Abnegation: True integrity requires ceding institutional resources and power directly to Indigenous-led efforts, acknowledging that the needs of the harmed community are more important than the institution’s own functions.
- Adopt the Symmetrical Antidote: Because systemic violence is fused, the response must be equally integrated; one cannot faithfully pursue peace without also pursuing LANDBACK and Mutual Aid.
- Withdraw from the Economic Draft: Consistency of faith requires a total refusal of the socio-economic systems of violence, recognizing that daily participation in extractive capitalism is a form of spiritual collaboration with war.
