Morningside Meeting's Daniel Seeger on the challenges to our fundamental values and how Quakerism may equip us to face them.
At the end of his recent New York Quarterly Meeting Trustees report, Morningside Meeting's Daniel Seeger wrote about the current challenges to fundamental values and how Quakerism may equip us to face them.
In a CNN interview, White House advisor Stephen Miller said the following, and I quote: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
With these few chilling words Stephen Miller not only expresses a view totally at odds with a Quaker perspective, but he seems ready to dismiss the very basis of civilization itself, which has been a long struggle to overcome mere bullying with systems of fairness and justice.
The great historian Arnold Toynbee saw humankind’s spiritual quest as the driving force behind the march of civilizations and eras. Certainly, in a time like our own, a time when habits, customs and institutions hallowed by years of acceptance seem nevertheless to be being crushed, we are thrown inevitably into a stark encounter with the question of fundamental values. When things are going smoothly it may be possible to imagine that religion is a compartment of life among many other compartments. When the center no longer holds every issue is but another manifestation of, or another doorway to, the religious quest.
When George Fox saw a great people to be gathered he did not see a miscellaneous collection of individuals with merely personal concerns, but he saw a community gathered around a historic mission in the progress of civilization. It is one of the geniuses of the Quaker tradition, a unique contribution we have to make to the struggle for peace and justice, that we can utter words of militancy which are not lost to the sight of love, and we can offer words of reconciliation which nevertheless challenge the hearers to respect the fundamental truth of things.
So let us be confident that in our Quaker ways we have found something that is very, very good, and that through our searching together there is something more of inexhaustible measure that we will yet be blessed to achieve.
Daniel A. Seeger
January 18, 2026
Friends who want to talk about how Quakers may be led to act in this moment are invited to attend an upcoming Quaker Witness Threshing Session. The first one is on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 6:00 pm, at Brooklyn Meeting and on Zoom.
