Spirit in Action

Chuck Fager/Quaker House

Chuck Fager has been the director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, NC, for 4 years now, advocating for peace and providing information and advocacy to those attempting to avoid or get out of the military, in one of the most concentrated military environments of the USA. Chuck is the author of more than 14 books and many more stories, articles and publications. He was a member of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's staff and a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

Duration:: 58m
Broadcast on:: 01 Jan 2006
Audio Format:: mp3

I have no hands but yours to tempt my sheep No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep I have no arms but yours with which to hold The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old I have no hands but yours with which to see To let my children know that I am out and out is everything I have no way to feed the hungry souls No clothes to give and make, give, the ragged and the morn It can be my heart, my hand, my tongue Through you I will be done The enders have I none to help I'm down The tangled nuts and twisted chains The strangle fearful minds Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands Being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind Today's Spirit in Action program will be a telephone interview with Chuck Fager, the director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina For four years now, he has been advocating for peace and providing information and advocacy to those attempting to avoid or get out of the military in one of the most concentrated military environments of the USA Chuck is the author of more than 14 books and many more stories, articles and publications He was a member of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff and a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War Born into a Catholic family, raised on military basis through much of his childhood, attending a military academy in high school and enrolled in ROTC It hardly seemed likely that Chuck would end up as an activist, peace advocate and Quaker, but that is the direction God led him From his involvement in civil rights, including participation in the Selma Voting Rights Crusade, to his eventual declaration as a CO during Vietnam War And to his current role as director of Quaker House, Chuck is dedicated to deep thought and resolute action His books and writings have covered the gamut, including Bible study, fiction, political commentary, memoir and even ghost and humor stories Well good morning Chuck, thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action, how are you doing today? I'm doing fine, it's good to be here Here being North Carolina in your case Can you tell folks about where you're at specifically? I'm in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is the home of Fort Bragg, one of the largest and most crucial military posts in the country It's the headquarters of the Special Forces with the Delta Force and lots of other secret stuffs It's also the seat of the 82nd Airborne Division What I do here, I'm the director of Quaker House, which is a Quaker Peace Project that's been here since 1969 How long have you been there Chuck? I arrived in Fayetteville on New Year's Eve of 2001, so it'll be four years I guess four years a day, this is broadcast What is Quaker House about? Why is it there with this big military base? I'd like to say that if you were to try to think strategically in long term about Quaker Peace Work in North Carolina I'm an advocate of thinking strategically in long term If you're trying to think that way about Quaker Peace Work in North Carolina Setting up a Quaker Peace Project in Fayetteville near Fort Bragg would make total sense However, that's not the way life works There's a Quaker saying Mark you're probably familiar with When you don't like something, say that's an idea which would not have occurred to me And the truth is, a Quaker House is an idea which did not occur to Quakers in North Carolina It only got started because a soldier at Fort Bragg in 1969, who was not a Quaker Nonetheless came to the conclusion that he didn't believe in war anymore and wanted to be a conscientious objector And he couldn't find anybody to help him But somebody who had been raised Quaker heard about this and kind of whispered in his ears "Hey, if you can get to Chapel Hill, which is about two hours away" "If you get to Chapel Hill there's a Quaker meeting there and they'll help you" So this soldier, his name was Dean Holland, he actually hitchhiked from Fayetteville to Chapel Hill on a Sunday morning Showed up in meeting and Dean Holland got up after meeting and announced my time and said "I'm Dean Holland, I'm a soldier at Fort Bragg, I want to be a conscientious objector" "Well, you help me" As Quakers do when they're faced with any kind of urgent emergency like that They scrambled around for a while and formed a committee And they did help him and he did get to be a conscientious objector And in the course of doing the work with him, some Chapel Hill friends discovered that there were lots of GIs at Fort Bragg in 1969 Who were very unhappy with the Army, they were very unhappy with the Vietnam War Not all of them wanted to become conscientious objectors But they did want to speak their outrage and anger about it and protest There got to be a very active and vocal GI anti-war movement around Fort Bragg during those Vietnam years And Quaker House came into being following on the case of Dean Holland to be a service to these folks Even after the Vietnam War faded away, Quaker House continued because Fort Bragg was still here And you had the volunteer army and you had the whole succession of military adventures Since then and so one thing has led to another and Quaker House is still here What is Quaker House? Well, there's different ways to answer the question Quaker House is a manifestation of what Quakers call the peace testimony The peace testimony, we could talk about that for a long time It's a kind of particular emphasis that Quakers have had pretty much since their beginning in the 17th century It's kind of a particular preoccupation for many Quakers And so Quakers have been active trying to end war, trying to relieve the suffering of war, trying to prevent war In sort of a focused way for 350 some years This testimony, this witness has taken many forms and Quaker House is just one form that it took here in North Carolina Quaker House is a project that does three principal kinds of things which keep us pretty darn busy these days First of all, we have a G.I. Rights Hotline There are still people like Dean Holland calling us up who want help And we're not just a local project anymore In 1994, Quaker House joined with several other similar groups to form something called the G.I. Rights Hotline And the G.I. Rights Hotline is a collaborative project where we maintain a toll-free number It's 1-800-394-9544 that you can call from anywhere in the country And when people call that number, calls are routed according to what part of the country is They're made from, and for Quaker House, our piece covers 12 states, mostly the southeast We get calls from G.I.s and family members from 12 states Plus, we also get calls people find the number or find our landline And they call from Iraq, I've had phone conversations with G.I.s in Iraq Call from Kuwait, call from Germany, various other places Looking for help, mostly help in figuring out how to get out of the military Because they don't like it, or they've felt misled by recruiters So we do this G.I. counseling. Last year, 2004, we had about 6,000 calls To our piece of that G.I. Rights Hotline number And this year, we are on track to have about 6,500 calls Which will be a record when I came four years ago They had less than 3,000 calls in a year So the call load has gone dramatically up And we actually have two counselors who do that pretty much full-time answering those calls And giving people informational counseling We also help council family members and people who are thinking about joining the military And give them information that recruiters tend to leave out, they do that a lot So G.I. counseling is sort of the bread and butter day-to-day work that we do Then secondly, we do peace work We help organize peace rallies and peace vigils and take part in other similar kinds of activities Mostly here around Badville and Fort Bragg, but also in some other places And then thirdly, we try to be a resource, a resource on peace issues and peace work to other groups It's mostly been Quaker groups, although we're open to talking to anybody who's interested I lead a lot of workshops and make presentations It's not just about Quaker House, but about peace work in a time of war And between those three things, plus the day-to-day work of keeping the place going, keeps me pretty well busy Is Badville a kind of hostile environment for you to be in? Are you considered parayas? Or do you have adversarial relationships with military folks? Mostly not, we do get hate mail from time to time And I run into people who say, "Oh, I saw you on TV" or "I heard you on the radio" But nobody has threatened me or anything Now, that hasn't always been the case in May of 1970 Jane Fonda came and they had a big peace rally in a park that's right behind Quaker House Where we have had big peace rallies over the past few years Three nights after that, peace rally, the first Quaker House was firebomb in the middle of the night It was clearly arson, but there was never any serious investigation and nobody knows exactly what happened So that's on our minds as we go about our work, but we don't live in fear At the same time, we also learned just about two weeks ago that we made the Pentagon's watch list So we were inspired on, when I say "spied on" I have to add the word "spied on" again because one of my predecessors as director files some freedom of information, ACT requests Got information that showed that we had been spied on by military intelligence quite extensively during the Vietnam years As a matter of fact, we have some of those documents posted on our website Which is QuakerHouse.org in a special exhibit called "Make Your Own History" if somebody wants to look at that So we have kind of assumed, as we go about our work here, that people are listening And now we don't have to assume anymore Do you mean that they actually place bugs in your house, or how do they spy on you? In the Vietnam years, what we know about was infiltration, sending people into meetings, for instance and sitting outside in unmarked cars Those are the kinds of things that we have documents to establish that they went on Of course, it's 30 years later and the technology of surveillance is so much more sophisticated That they don't have to do that anymore They can be listening to this phone call and they probably are They could be monitoring my email and they probably are They could be reading our snail mail, I don't know And they could do all this without our being able to tell In no mark, even before this stuff was revealed a couple of weeks ago, I say the people Friends, privacy is like the Beatles It was great, and you can still hear the music sometimes But it's gone, they're gone and it's not coming back Even without being particularly paranoid regarding our situation, we're in a surveillance society now We just are I don't necessarily like that, but that's just the truth of the matter And you don't have to be a peace activist, to be under surveillance You just don't [music] Twin soldiers and Nixon's coming We're finally on our own This summer, I hear the drumming For dead in Ohio Gotta get down to it Soldiers, I've caught in the sky Should've been done long ago [music] What did you do, and I'm gonna get on the ground How can you run when we know [music] [music] [music] [music] Gotta get down to it Soldiers, I've caught in the sky Should've been gone long ago [music] What did you do, and I'm gonna get on the ground How can you run when we know [music] Twin soldiers and Nixon's coming We're finally on our own ♪ This summer, I hear the drumming ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ ♪ Or that in Ohio ♪ I read about a project you have with a kind of alternative recruiter. He turns out that when I say comic book artist, he draws, but he doesn't draw much on paper. He uses computers and his comic stuff is mostly online. He came here and talking about potential projects, we have been feeling that one of the important things to do was to bring more truth into the recruiting process if we could. We focused with John on the military enlistment agreement form. Some people call this an enlistment contract, but if you look at it closely, you'll see it's not a contract. The contract is an agreement between two equals, which binds them both. And one of the features of this military enlistment agreement that we wanted to highlight is the fact that it says that the army or the military can change any of the provisions of it any time at once. And this person who signs up to recruit has no recourse, and that's not a contract. That's whatever you want to call it, indenture, slavery, something. In thinking about this and looking at this agreement, it's like four pages. John came up with the idea of creating a cartoon character. What he came up with was a character called Sergeant Abe, Sergeant Abe, the honest recruiter. So he worked very hard, and we developed a version of the military enlistment agreement that has images of Sergeant Abe on it pointing out all these different parts and illuminating their meaning and some of the hidden meaning and the potential old traps. This form, the military enlistment agreement with Sergeant Abe pointing out all the hidden pitfalls and traps is available on our website, QuakerHouse.org. People can download it for free and you copy it and use it for free. In fact, people have been doing that. Military recruiters are everywhere practically all the time. They represent an ongoing activity that I think we need to be attentive to. The recruiting aspects of the military is its weakest point, and that's where smaller groups like Quaker is and other church folks and either secular peace groups can have a big impact, because you don't have to get on a bus or a plane and go to Washington for some big rally to work on counter recruiting, because recruiters are in your neighborhood. They're in your town. They're coming to you. You can save your gas money and concentrate on bringing truth into the process that they are trying to put over, particularly on young people, so there's an awful lot of untruth in what recruiters do. Are many of the people who come to you, who call up the J.R. rights hotline, are many of them thinking they're conscientious objectors, even though they're in the military? The number of people who have wanted to do that has been increasing in the last couple of years, but it's still a relatively small proportion. There are lots of people who call us who do not like the Iraq War, and many of them say things like, "If we really were threatened, I wouldn't mind defending my country and taking risks, but that's not what's happening, and I don't like it, and I don't want to do it." Is that a conscientious objector stance? According to the law, it's not. It's certainly a stance that we respect. If there's a real threat, people who have convictions that war can be justified to deal with real threats can act in a conscientious way. But when you have a war that was started on lies and where so many of the soldiers who go over to it have experiences that don't fit with the stories they've been told about it, they are people of conscience, and they don't like what's happening, and they want to find some option. So we work with them to find whatever option we can. The number of people who have actually gone beyond that and said, "I just don't buy war anymore. This is ridiculous. We've got to find better ways to solve problems." That number has been increasing, but it's still relatively small. How many Quakers are there in Seattle? Well, we have a Quaker meeting that meets here at Quaker House. Six to Seven is a good turnout on a first day. We call it first day, Quaker Talk. It's a small, small group, especially when you drive around the city. There's some huge churches here. We're in the south. This is a church-ified culture, and we're so small. But, you know, it's interesting. We're like that says in the Bible where two or three are gathered, our little meeting makes a difference here. Let's talk about your background, Chuck. I think you graduated high school in 1960. Sure did. Were you a Quaker at that point? No, I was raised Catholic and graduated from a Catholic high school, St. Mary's High School in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was raised in a military family. My father was an Air Force pilot, and so we were transferred here and there. In the course of time, my father got transferred there, and so he finished up his active duty service in Cheyenne, and I went to a Catholic high school there for my senior year and graduated. By that time, though, I had decided I wasn't a Catholic, but I was certainly raised Catholic. What do you mean you decided you weren't a Catholic? Well, in my junior year, I heard about a Catholic military school in Kansas, all St. Joseph's Military Academy, and persuaded my parents to send me there. So I spent a year at this Catholic military school out in the prairie in the middle of Kansas. While I was there, I started reading all sorts of unapproved stuff, stuff that the Catholic authorities didn't approve of, philosophers, David Hume, psychologist, Sigmund Freud, and I got particularly interested in the work of Carl Jung. Also, during this time away from my family, even though we were going to church twice every day and during the week and three times on Sunday, in the course of just reflecting on my circumstances and all the big issues of adolescent life that a young person can think about, I just found that one day I just sort of looked around the chapel and realized and owned up to the fact that I didn't believe it. Catholicism, for me, was like a shoe that didn't fit. I didn't necessarily think my way out of it. I sort of realized that I just didn't buy all this stuff. So I became the local equivalent of the village atheist there in a little school, made a mistake of telling some of my fellow students about this and having big arguments about the existence of God and whatnot, and got kicked out for my trouble. That was an interesting experience because that year I was getting the best grades that I've gotten and I was doing very well in military stuff. I was by no means a peacenock, but I'll give the priest at the school credit. They took all that stuff seriously and if I wasn't going to be with the program, they didn't want me around, especially if I was going to be potentially corrupting the face of other students, which I was doing my best to do, so they kicked me out. And as a matter of fact, during that year, I had ordered a ring, it was going to be a graduation ring, and it arrived in the mail after they had written a letter and said they weren't letting me come back to the school. And when I got that ring, I looked at it and thought, "Wow, this ring means something very different now than it did when I ordered it." But it's still very meaningful. As a matter of fact, I'm wearing it today. I've been wearing it for 45, 46 years. As a reminder, or a marker of my own spiritual pilgrimage, in that case, out of Catholicism and into a period of seeking, which went on for some years. You thought of yourself as an atheist, but still you were seeking? Oh, yeah. In fact, I would describe myself for religious typology. I would describe myself as a failed atheist. I think the atheists have all the best arguments, but I just can't stick with them. Where did you go from there? Well, I went off to college, Colorado State University. It was something of a campus activist in an unfocused way. I had no real clue about what was going on in the world, but was active on various things on campus, local campus politics. My senior year stumbled upon and began to become aware of the Civil Rights Movement. I remember this largely came in the context of the great 1963 march on Washington. I didn't go. I never thought about going, but I had people around me on the campus there in Colorado who read the newspapers about plans for this big rally, and they said, "It'll never happen." Those black people can't have a large gathering without mass violence. I mean, it was pretty racist sentiments, and I found myself thinking, "Gee, I don't believe that. I hope that it goes well." And I couldn't have necessarily given you a big explanation about why, but I knew that that was my sentiment. And so after that, I just became slowly more aware, and during that year, discovered that James Emeritus, the black person who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, having to have federal troops to protect him and facing riots and stuff, that he was coming to Colorado and we persuaded him to come to our campus and give a speech. And he was very impressive in a quiet, soft-spoken sort of way. ♪ ♪ Oxford Town, Oxford Town ♪ ♪ Everybody's got the heads back down ♪ ♪ Some don't shine above the ground ♪ ♪ They ain't going down to Oxford Town ♪ ♪ ♪ He went down Oxford Town ♪ ♪ Guns and clubs followed him down ♪ ♪ All because his face was brown ♪ ♪ Better get away from Oxford Town ♪ ♪ ♪ Oxford Town around the bend ♪ ♪ Come to the door he couldn't get in ♪ ♪ All because of the color of his skin ♪ ♪ What do you think about that, my friend? ♪ ♪ ♪ He's my girl, my gas son ♪ ♪ We got met with a tear gas bomb ♪ ♪ I don't even know why we're coming back ♪ ♪ Where we come from ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oxford Town in the afternoon ♪ ♪ Everybody singing a song for tune ♪ ♪ Two men died and eat the Mississippi moon ♪ ♪ Somebody better investigate soon ♪ ♪ I found myself just drawn to learn more about this whole thing, and I asked him, "What's the best black graduate school?" And he told me, "Well, Atlanta University." And I set out to go there. And as a matter of fact, I did go there for about a week in the fall of 1964. They were very welcoming, they gave me a scholarship and so on. I was going to be studying English and went down there and enrolled, this was pre-black power, pre-black consciousness, and so they were going to teach me all the standard stuff for a graduate degree in English. And they wanted me to read novels by Daniel DeFoe from the 17th century and all that. And there I was in Atlanta right after the summer of 1964, where you had the Great Mississippi Freedom Project, which I had been reading about daily, all that summer, when four civil rights workers had been murdered and all that. So it was a very powerful set of experiences, even though I was only involved in them as an observer. When I tried to read these 17th century novels, I just realized, you know, I was not drawn to the South to do this. I need to do something else. I need to figure out how to get involved in this civil rights movement somehow. I wasn't stopping to think that maybe they didn't need more white folks to run around their movement. Now, at that time, I began to think about that later. In any event, I sent out letters and things, and it's amazing to think that somebody actually read the letter, but Dr. King's organization responded favorably. I told them I was a writer, which was kind of true, that I could write stuff for them, do press work or whatever. Of course, I really had no skills at all in this area. It was amazing. The hoods by the whole thing. I'd worked on a campus paper. I didn't know anything about journalism, really. They hired me at the grand salary of $25 a week to help out with press stuff. Then they were getting ready to go to Selma for what turned out to be the monumental Selma Voting Rights campaign. Once I heard about that, I just said, "Look, you gotta let me go. I just gotta go." So they let me. I guess for $25 a week, they were ready to experiment. So I went down to Alabama and spent a year there working for the movement there. It was during that year a number of things happened. I mean, we had a very powerful non-violent campaign, which reshaped American law and had a big impact on the South. But then while I was there also during that same year, that was the year that the Vietnam War was decisively escalated. The coming of the Vietnam War was another thing that I personally was very oblivious to. Even though I was in ROTC in college, I wasn't paying any attention. I'm embarrassed to look back and see how narrow my range of awareness was at the time. But nonetheless, that's what happened. And by the late spring of 1965, you couldn't escape it, and I had to begin thinking about it. I was also subject to the draft. We had the military draft in those days. While I'd been in school, I was deferred, but now I was out of school. I was still deferred because I had gotten married in the summer before I went south, and married men were deferred, at least for a while. And so I had some room to think about it, some time to think about it. But in the course of being in the Civil Rights Movement, I was not one of Dr. King's close advisors by any means, but I did have the great good fortune to sort of sit at his seat and hear him preach and speak many times and was able to take in the whole perspective of nonviolence and war. And with the Vietnam War coming on more and more, the question of whether and how the work of Dr. King and Gandhi and other nonviolence practitioners could be applied in the international arena just became more and more a live issue. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought, I don't know that I have all the answers here, but there's got to be better ways to do this. Even though I'd been raised in the military family, I'd been in ROTC. I'd even almost gone to the Air Force Academy after high school. I just found myself thinking, nope, we've got to do this differently. So I've decided to look into being a conscientious objector. When you were ROTC, doesn't that mean that you had the application to accept military service? Well, I would have, except my senior year in college, I woke up to the fact that I didn't want to go into the Air Force. I just wasn't interested. And I can't say that I was a pacifist or a peacenik because that never occurred to me at the time. I just knew that the thought of spending four years sounded so boring. I mean, who knew that Vietnam was around the corner? I didn't. Keep in mind I had grown up on a military basis, but I had grown up in the Cold War, sort of between big wars. And really, a fighting machine that doesn't have a war to fight is, at least in my view, a pretty boring place. And I found myself thinking, the last thing I want to do is sit around for four years. So I went and told my ROTC instructor that they huffed and puffed and shuffled around. And they said, "Well, look, you have to either fish or cut bait here, so you either in or you're out." And I said, "Well, if I'm either in or I'm out, then I want out." So they let me out. So I just was out of it. And then I looked into, as I say, back in Selma, the summer of 1965. Mulling all this over, found I wanted to find out more about being a conscience objector and rode off to a place called the Central Committee for Conscience and Objectors, which is in Philadelphia. They had a little handbook called "Handbook for Conscience and Objectors." I still have copies of it. And just that same year in 1965, in fact, like a couple days after a big march in Selma was attacked by police in a very famous civil rights landmark event, just a couple days after that, the Supreme Court issued a decision that said that people who were not conventionally religious could still be conscientious objectors. Up until that time, if you wanted to be a conscientious objector, you had to say that this was a matter of your religious training and belief, and religion was interpreted rather narrowly to mean being a Quaker or part of some other such group that taught pacifism as part of its more or less doctrine. And obviously, I wasn't such a person then. I still considered myself pretty much an atheist. The Supreme Court in March of 1965 made it possible for me to legally be a conscience objector. And this was part of what I learned from reading this little booklet from the Central Committee on Conscience and Objectors. They rushed to update their handbook when the Supreme Court passed that decision out, known as the Seager case. And the guy who was a defendant in that case, Dan Seager, as a Quaker, I applied as a non-religious CEO from Selma. It was an interesting thing, at least for me. In those days, you had to have letters of reference to back up your application. And I often imagine what my draft board went through, sitting around the table in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as they looked at my application, because here I was, they would have known. I mean, I didn't try to hide the fact that I'd been in ROTC. But among the references that I had for my application was Dr. King. I suppose his secretary wrote a letter, but that's okay, with his name on it. And I can just imagine my draft board sitting around saying to each other, "Do we really want to have a trial in the federal court over here where this guy, King, could show up and be a character witness for this clown, Baker? Do we need that kind of publicity?" Probably not. I think that because my draft board accepted my CEO claim without a peep. And I was surprised by that. I was expecting they'd say, "Hey, look, even in ROTC, you're from a military family. You're kidding us, right? We're not going to let you do this." And then I'd end up, you know, in jail or something. There I was, a certified conscientious objector. And you had to have a civilian job that the government would accept as alternative service for two years. And also, in those days, if you didn't find an alternative service job, when your time came, when your number came up, the government would find a job for you. So because they would find a job for me, I was not looking very hard at the time. But then, I think it was December of 1965, in the house we were staying at in Selma, Alabama, Quakerism came knocking at our door. It's remarkable to say that it would never work in a novel because it would be way too pat, but that's the truth of the matter. And it's remarkable, too, because Alabama is probably the least Quaker state in the country, except maybe for Mississippi. But nonetheless, a group of Quaker students from a new experimental Baker College showed up in Selma and wanted to do something useful for the civil rights staff that was there. So they sent them out to knock on some doors to see if there were some people who still needed to register the vote. And they came and knocked on our doors, one of them. We hit it off with these folks. One thing soon led to another, and I told them I was a conscientious objector, and they knew about conscientious objectors. They had a couple on their staff. They said they were looking for some more staff, and so I applied, and they hired me. So, in February of '66, my first wife and I got on the train in Alabama and rode all the way up to New York City and went to work at Friends World College. I've said earlier that being raised Catholic, I felt like it was a shoe that didn't fit, and as I learned about Quakerism, that felt like a shoe that did fit. So I've been involved with Friends ever since, so that's just about 40 years now. It fit for you as an atheist? Yep. For one thing, there are Quaker atheists. In fact, the fellow who started Friends World College, the late Morris Mitchell, who was quite a remarkable fellow, and a very devoted Quaker, and a very devoted pacifist, and who became sort of my initial Quaker mentor, explained to me once, after a while, that I don't know if he really used the word atheist, but he was an atheist himself. And Quakerism for him was a practice which fit into the nature of a universe which didn't include a god. I mean, he was very dedicated to a violent meeting. We would do that every day when we had faculty meetings and things, and he was very serious about testimonies, like the peace testimony, working for racial equality. He was a southerner from South Carolina, and yet he was a pioneer in working on civil rights matters. So this was a very powerful, personal kind of witness. It wasn't just preaching. He had a track record, but he was an atheist. For me, though, while that was comforting in the sense that nobody was getting on my case to sign up with some creedal formulation, there were still matters of sorting out what life was all about. And it's not an easy thing to describe, but over time, I just came to feel that there was more going on than atheism could explain for me. The arguments, for instance, about the existence of God regarding the problem of evil, what about the suffering of innocence? I don't have answers to those any more than anybody else does. When I describe myself, I call myself a failed atheist. Failed in the sense that I haven't worked at all out in a way that makes satisfactory rational sense. I couldn't write a book of systematic theology explaining all this. And yet, it's quite clear to me that, for my own personal experience, that God language makes more sense of my life and my experience than atheist language. One book that was important to me in some ways was a book called "The Secular City" by Harvey Cox. It pointed out that, in the Bible, the name of God, the tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew word, which is sometimes vocalized as Yahweh or Jehovah, it has no fixed meaning, and that this appears to be intentional. And this goes along with the commandment, one of the Ten Commandments, against having grave images about not having idols. Cox's book pointed out that this prohibition applies as much to ideas and theologies as it does to statues. That was a big point for me, because the idea of God being mysterious, God being unable to be captured in words or even ideas, is one that makes sense to me. That there is some kind of strange order. It doesn't satisfy all our questions about why innocent suffer and things like that. And yet, it's there. Particularly over time, as I've done Bible study and I've studied the Bible a lot and written about it, not that I claim to be a great Bible scholar. In the Bible, some of the books that speak most to me are books which actually include this kind of questioning and ambiguous and ambivalent attitudes about God. Particularly like the book of Job or the book of Ecclesiastes, where questions like the injustice of everyday experience are faced head-on, and they are not resolved. I found myself coming to respect the Bible for that, that certainly lots of people use the Bible as if it were a font of easy answers. I think that's stupid, because it's not. In fact, if I were to reduce the whole Bible all 1,500 pages of it to one sentence, it would be this, "Thus says the Lord, beware the easy answers." By that, I mean, even in the Bible itself, what appear to be settled answers in one book can be an often our challenge, sometimes quite vehemently, in another. And that's the case with, for instance, the book of Ecclesiastes in the book of Job. You have other books like the book of Proverbs and a lot of the historical books where you have lots of statements about God intended this to happen and did that and all that, you know, and gave these commandments. And if you're good, everything will be nice for you, and if you're bad, everything will be bad for you. But then you get to, like, the book of Ecclesiastes, and it says, "Wait a minute. I'm looking around, and life doesn't work that way. I see lots of bad people who are prosperous, and I see lots of good people that are taken into the neck. What's going on here?" I'd give them credit, too, because I searched and I searched and I couldn't find any answer. Nothing under the sun. And I thought, "Hey, there's integrity here." And also, there is challenge. There is dialogue. There is even argument more than dialogue. So the Bible is not a place where you have some simple answers being propounded and pounded home again and again and again. Rather, you have ideas being presented in one place and then challenged in another both on the basis of experience and on the basis of reflection. And this is no more true than in the book of Job, which is obviously a story, but it's a story with very important levels of meaning. Job is portrayed as a good man who is not a sinner, and yet terrible, terrible things happen to him. And moreover, in the book, they happen at God's command by God's permission, and they happen because God's made a bet with Satan. I mean, give me a break, folks. God comes off looking very bad in this book, in the book of Job. There is no morality in toying with the states of innocent and virtuous people, just for fun, just for a game. But that's what God is portrayed as doing. That's a pretty audacious thing to suggest. And to include in your holy scriptures. Absolutely. And it completely challenges, I think, in a very fundamental way, the very comforting parts of the Bible say, you know, just do what your toe, follow the law, and everything will be fine. He'll be taken care of. Then the Bible is full of that sort of stuff. And yet here in the Bible is a book that says, "Ah, good people take it in the ear. Bad things happen to good people." And what's the deal? And Job himself, who is a good man, he's not a sinner. He demands what's the deal, God? I want to know. Well, finally God speaks to him. God doesn't give him an answer. He does not resolve. And I'm saying God is he here for shorthand purposes. I'm aware of the importance of inclusive language. But I've got to say that God of Job has got to be a he. We're talking to somebody who's like in the celestial bar, you know, sitting around the table with Satan. And say, "Hey, let's fool around with Job. All right, man. If I mess with Job of it, he'll say, "The hell with God." And God will say, "Oh, I bet he won't." That's exactly how it unrolled. So it's got to be a he. So God finally speaks to Job out of the whirlwind and does not give him an answer in the sense of resolving this issue. It just says, "Hey, I'm God. I run the universe." And that's the way it is. The experience of God, it doesn't answer questions, but it puts them in a different context. Okay, if this is the way it's got to be, then all right, it's different. It's different for Job suffering through all of this in the universe where there is God who ultimately respond, at least to him, than if there isn't. And I have to say that that's sort of my conclusion. I don't know if this makes a whole lot of sense, but the leaving in God doesn't save me from anything. I'm mindful, for instance, of my friend Tom Fox, a Quaker from Virginia, who went to Iraq and was taken captive, kidnapped by who knows who, by a group that nobody seems to be able to identify. At the end of November of this year, and it's still a captive as we speak today, and they've threatened him with death twice, and we don't know, as we speak, what his fate is going to be. And that's awful. I mean, here he was a guy doing good stuff and very much religiously motivated, but his religion, his belief in God does not save him from the risk of violent death. It absolutely doesn't. The world is set up where bad things can happen to good people, having God in it doesn't change that. I want to step back here. Chuck, you mentioned about Tom Fox. I think he was part of the Christian peacemakers team over there. Did you know him personally? I do. I don't use past tense with him yet. I do. Tom and I were in the same Quaker meeting for many years up in Virginia when I lived there. His two kids and my two younger children grew up together in the same Quaker meeting. My son and his son were members of a Quaker hip-hop group together that made quite a noise in it a little way. There were some times of personal trial for me when Tom was very kind to me in ways that I remember very gratefully. And I saw Tom last summer at our annual conference, a Quaker's called yearly meeting, up in Virginia. He was between trips to Iraq and we sat down. We talked about kids and stuff like that. And we also talked about Iraq. It was quite clear that to the extent that it's possible without going through it, he was very well aware of the dangers. I mean, he had been in Iraq. He hadn't been kidnapped or anything. So, yeah, Tom is a friend of mine. This is personal. It's not just principal. What kind of work was he doing there and what's happening now in his case and in the case of the abduction of the four of them? Christian Peacemaker team folks in Iraq, as I understand it, were documenting cases of abuse. They were among the first to be talking to reporters about abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. They hadn't been to Abu Ghraib, but they talked to people who had been there and had been tortured. And they were raising this and nobody was paying attention to them for a long time, but of course they turned out to be quite right about what was going on there. They've also been working in Iraq. And I think most recently they were spending a lot of time talking to Iraqi officials put in by our occupation about abuse of other Iraqis by new police forces, of which I gather there's more and more. There's been speculation that this might have had something to do with their being kidnapped, that there could very well be groups that want to shut them up from talking about bad things that are being done in Iraqi, on Iraqi, not just through the occupation. And they were also opposing the U.S. occupation. This is no way to promote peace and democracy here, get these troops home, take these U.S. troops out of here. So they were doing all those kinds of work. It was obviously very risky and they accepted those risks. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I think you've been doing some follow-up trying to help get the word out about them. Yes, we have. There's another friend of Tom, this fellow John Stevens, who was our intern here and created the Sergeant Abe, honest recruiter character, was also a friend of Tom. Once this happened, he and I were on the phone to each other about it and in trying to just sort of cope with the situation for ourselves as well as for Tom. In talking also or consulting with some experts in the peace studies and negotiations field, we were advised that if we could help make Tom's work, particularly his work on behalf of Iraqis, more visible to the world and to his captors and make their work more visible in the Muslim world in Iraq, we could at least potentially reduce their value to their kidnappers as prisoners. In thinking about how to do that, John and I were on the phone one night and said, "Well, hey, you know, we could put up a website and the technology of the web is such that within the hour, we had a website up. It's called freethecaptisnow.org and it's devoted specifically to really keeping vigil for Tom and the others so that they're not forgotten. We update it every day. Initially, we were part of the effort, which was much larger than what we did, to try to make Tom's work visible and the character of the work more queer, particularly in Iraq and the Arab world. And as this developed, it got to be quite remarkable that there were lots of Muslim groups, including some that are devoted to violence, who made public statements aimed at their kidnappers saying to them, "Look, these folks were friends of the Iraqi people. They were opposed to the U.S. occupation. They were opposed to torture. The Christian peacemaker teams and even Tom have also worked in Palestine where they have worked against the Israeli occupation and illegal settlements. These are friends of Muslims and friends of Iraqis. Don't kill them. It's unislamic to do that and it's also stupid." I mean, I'm obviously paraphrasing what these people have said, but many quite prominent and otherwise not known for being nonviolent people made these kinds of statements. They got to be quite a remarkable chorus in making it clear to the captors that if they kill Tom and the other three, they are not going to be winning glory for Islam or for their group. Even in Iraq. The Christian peacemaker team is not a missionary group. They don't go there to try to make converts. They're just trying to live out their conviction rather than sell them. I think that the campaign that our website was part of has been very successful in its own terms. All we don't know yet is whether it's going to succeed in helping get Tom and the other four released safely. So, people can get the latest information by going to freethecaptorsnow.org. That's right. So, Chuck, now you've been at Quaker House for four years. What got you there? Well, that's kind of a telling question, I think. And I have to answer it with a bit of a story, so bear with me. For a couple of years, I did adjunct teaching at Penn State University, but in the spring of 2001, I got laid off. So, I joined the ranks of the unemployed, and I was looking around, I couldn't find anything in Central Pennsylvania near Penn State. When I went to our annual conference, Quaker, really meeting that summer, there was a woman there who sat me down one night, and in Quaker, phraseology, she labored with me for a long time. She told me that there was this project in Fayetteville called Quaker House, and they needed a director, and nobody wanted to go to Fayetteville, and so they couldn't find anybody that I should apply for. When I told her I didn't want to do that, I had lived in Virginia for a long time, I didn't much like to sell. I like to say the living in Virginia put me deeply in touch with my inner Yankee, but she wouldn't give up. She kept saying that she thought I had some skills that would be useful, and that this was a project that was important and shouldn't be allowed to die because nobody would go there. And I said, "Well, really, I don't want to do it. I'm pretty well settled in Central Pennsylvania." But I finally agreed to send him a resume after all I didn't have a job, and so I did at the end of August, and also about that time my son had graduated from high school in previous year, and he was getting ready to go into AmeriCorps. And so we decided to go on a trip for the father/son life transition kind of thing. And we did, went up into Canada, and wound up in Maine at a friend's house on the morning of September 11th, got back home the next day, safely. And it was either that day or the day after that that I got an email from the chair of the board of Quaker House saying they wanted to talk to me. And on September 13th, that message and the whole idea of Quaker House looked entirely different to me than it had before then. I began to feel like an old army reservist being called back up to active duty. I tell you a story because I think this is the way what Quakers call "leading's" work, that is just as likely to be the result of trauma as it is to be some kind of heavenly nudge while you're sitting quietly in meeting. And you may just as well be dragged kicking and screaming into a leading or doing what God wants you to do as to be walking into it in some state of inner serenity and tranquility. In lots of ways, it's tough being down here, being so close, being surrounded by the spirit of war in a very concentrated way. And it's not an attractive part of our culture, that's putting it mildly. But still, this is where my assignment is, and I hope to be able to stick it out until I'm released. Chuck, I want to thank you for taking time on the program. It sounds like you've gotten more than enough to keep you busy down there in Fayetteville. Some of the areas that we didn't talk about include the books that you've written. You've had a fairly prodigious career in that way, in addition to all your activism. If people wanted to find out about your writings and the other things you've produced, where could they go? The first place to go would be to the Quaker House website, QuakerHouse.org. And if they scroll down to the bottom, they'll see it says Chuck Fager, Director, and that's a link, and they can click on that, and there's a fairly detailed biographical sketch. And at the bottom of that, there is a list of most of the things that I've published. You're right, I've written a lot of books. I mean, you've written stuff on civil rights, you've written Bible study information, you've written murder mysteries, you've written just a whole diversity of things. Yeah, that's right. My basic career has been out of a writer. If they saw books that were of interest to them there, there's another website that's my personal website called chemopress.com. That's K-I-M-O-P-R-E-S-S.com. I have my own little publishing enterprise called chemopress. And they can find listings of some books. You can actually buy a few of them if you want. I'll include the links for your sites on my website, which people know is northernspiritradio.org, where they can also hear this program again. Thanks, Chuck, for taking the time to be with me. Get back to work there and convert Fayetteville, okay? You've got to convert Wisconsin. We need Wisconsin too. You bet. Thanks again, Chuck. You've been listening to a telephone interview with Chuck Faker of Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina. You can hear this program again via my website, northernspiritradio.org, where you will also find useful links and further information about this program. The music featured in this program was chosen by Chuck for its relevance, including Oxford Town by Bob Dylan, Ohio, by Crosby Stills, Nash and Young, and Bring the Boys Home by Frida Payne. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands but Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow subtly toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this to love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. [Music]