We were now a few weeks into the class and learning more about the actual concept of secession. We were questioned in class if our proposal actually fit the concept of secession. That was shaking. We had never considered that our movement wasn’t. The professors wouldn’t have approved it if it wasn’t right? There was a crisis for a moment. Could we change our proposal? It was Lizzie who was firm that we could use this controversy to our advantage. What are the ways the Quakers follow and/or defy traditional definitions of secession? The concept of our website was slowly taking shape. What if we built a website arguing the case for Quaker secession? A synthesis of the two parts of this course—it felt like a risk but it gave our research a sort of legalistic structure.
It was also becoming immediately apparent that Lizzie and I are similar thinkers. We’re both largely abstract thinkers until it comes time to edit the final project. Then the meticulous nitpicking begins. Thus our research and development took a kind of nebulous shape—constantly shifting and adjusting as we refined what our argument was. We realized that it was hard to communicate to rest of the class exactly what we meant when we described our project. More often than not, we would sign off and turn to each other and say, “Well, I think we’re the only ones who know what we’re talking about.”
The idea of arguing for secession really changed how we came to think of the Quakers and how I (I can’t speak for Lizzie) viewed the class and its other assignments. I began reading the excerpts with an eye towards how the concepts expressed in this piece could apply to the facts of the Quakers’ experience. How could you find wiggle room in the definition of secession? Where were the loopholes? We began to develop the idea of intellectual or moral secession. This is something essentially different than political secession which is the more typical brand of separatism. Political secessionism is something I would define as being when a nation or government splinters like in the American Civil War. Intellectual or moral secessionism is the conscious choice to reject societal trends or standards like with the Utopian communities (like the Oneida Community or the Shakers). If we could construct a case around this definition, the Quakers would be more than a rival religious group, they would be religious rebels.