Recent discussions among British Friends have used – and agonised over the use of – a range of terms. People start with ‘welcome’ or ‘welcoming’, and then bring in ‘belonging’, sometimes in contrast with ‘fitting in’. Then there’s ‘accepting’, and ‘affirming’. In all but the last case, these are not at all specific to the particular reason for these recent discussions. They are words about how people fit together, how people are brought together, how a group of people becomes a community and how people become part of that community.
This post is not about those recent discussions. It is about this group of words and ideas more generally. What is ‘welcome’, and does it only apply to new people, to bringing those ‘outside’ a community ‘inside’? What does it mean to belong, or to be accepted? What connotations do these words have that might not be intended? What do I mean when I use them, and how might I be accidentally conveying something other than I intend? These are not easy questions, and it’s likely people will have different answers to them, which can make communication about these ideas difficult.
Let’s start with the easiest, or at least the one I think will have least divergence in views – belonging. What does it mean to say that one belongs in a community, or indeed in a place, an organisation, or any other thing that can contain people? I would personally define this as that state in which a person feels that they simply ‘fit’, that they are in the right place (or community, etc). There are other ways to put it, but I think they are largely equivalent to or aspects of that. For instance, when a person belongs somewhere, they do not feel as though they are an outsider in that place, they do not feel excluded, they feel they ‘fit in’ – without changing themselves. This is in contrast, of course, to making an effort to ‘fit in’, the sense in which people contrast ‘fitting in’ with ‘belonging’. If a person belongs, then leaving is not simply a matter of ceasing to be in a place or participate in a community, but rather there is a wrench, a difficulty beyond anything practical.
Of course belonging is not binary – it is not simply a matter of belonging or not belonging. A person can feel they belong to greater or lesser extents, and this then corresponds to the various aspects; a person who feels somewhat an outsider or othered, they may still also feel that they ‘fit in’ in some ways in spite of that. If someone feels a stronger sense of belonging, they are less likely to feel an outsider, and will have more of a wrench if they leave.
Being accepted is a more complex proposition. It is something I know that people have different perspectives on. To me, acceptance implies, in the context of a community, that there is a lack of resistance to one being or becoming part of that community. That resistance might be conscious or subconscious, intended or unintended. A person who feels they cannot openly be themselves in some way – for example, must keep a mental health condition a secret, or that they cannot be open about their sexuality (at least to the extent that some aspect of sexuality is typically open or visible in a community – often no more than ‘simple’ sexual orientation, though it may also include being on the asexual spectrum or being polyamorous) – will not feel accepted, and the rest of the community may not even realise that the person does not feel accepted. Not knowing these things about a person, they cannot accept or reject them, which is of course why people will keep them hidden, to avoid anticipated rejection. When they realise that they can be open about that part of themselves, they become more accepted – unless they are, in the event, rejected.
This sense of acceptance, as I see it, is a fundamentally negative proposition, speaking in terms of logic (it is, of course, still emotionally positive). It is defined by a lack, an absence – the absence of a need to keep part of oneself hidden, or the absence of rejection. I am aware, however, that to other people acceptance is a much more logically positive way. I’ll admit I haven’t gotten my head around this view enough to properly express it, but I gather it is more along the lines of how some people use the term welcoming or affirming. The awkwardness of trying to explain it that way is that there are different ways people use those words, too. In a very real, and practically awkward sense, we have more concepts than we have words, and people try to attribute the different meanings to the different words in different ways.
So, what then is this sense of acceptance, welcome or affirmation? Unlike belonging, it is not about a person so much as it is about certain characteristics. This fits in somewhat with the way I use acceptance, despite my explanation being about how a person – a whole person – feels, in the sense that it is those characteristics, those parts of a person, that are accepted, welcomed or affirmed. However, rather than an absence of rejection of those characteristics, it is a positive non-rejection of a characteristic. In that case, to be accepting/welcoming/affirming of, say, homosexual people is to have made a positive statement or commitment, making it clear that a gay or lesbian person is not going to be rejected. A person’s sexuality, within whatever limits might pertain, is welcomed if it is explicitly not rejected, and the fact that a person has been part of a community, and their sexuality known, for some time does not stop the term ‘welcome’ being used in relation to their sexuality.
Thinking about acceptance, it can be seen that these two meanings are perhaps complementary; one is from the perspective of the individual who might fear rejection, the other is from the perspective of the community, or of the individuals who might reject another individual. One is a feeling, a sense of one’s own state, while the other is an action on the part of a community and those within it. However, the community being accepting does not necessarily lead to a person feeling accepted unless that intentional, willed acceptance is adequately communicated. The easiest way such things are communicated is by having people who visibly, openly share the characteristic in question. If a person, to continue the example someone who is gay or lesbian, sees other people who are openly and visibly gay or lesbian, they will have more confidence that their sexuality will be accepted, and may even feel entirely accepted even if they never share that information about themselves. Because they are confident that they will be accepted, they do not need to keep it hidden to avoid rejection, but they may still choose not to reveal it for some other reason.
We can also think of welcome from both directions – a person feeling welcome, and a community welcoming them. However, the fact that the general use of the verb to welcome implies something done by someone ‘inside’ to someone ‘outside’ on their way ‘inside’ makes this more complicated. Some will hear people speak of making sure that a community welcomes people of colour, and read into it an implication that, in the mind of the speaker, all the people of colour are currently outside the community. This is understandable, as I’m quite sure that in many cases they are right. I certainly feel that, when Quakers speak (as they rarely do, though there’ve been some such conversations recently) about making people from diverse class (by which they often mean class-cultural) or financial/educational/professional (which they sometimes call ‘class’) backgrounds more welcome, it does have an ‘othering’ effect on me, even if a lot of people who know me don’t realise that my own class-cultural background is complicated (as discussed by way of example in my recent post on Quakers and practical action). When we talk about welcoming this sort of person or that sort of person, those people already in our community who are part of those classifications will react by thinking, or indeed saying, “hello, we’re already here”.
However, welcome is also used uncomplicatedly and without such an exclusionary assumption to refer to the more affirmative sense of acceptance described above. To be welcoming of people with a certain characteristic is, in this sense, to be positive about not rejecting them. It can even mean a stronger sense than that – that we would positively like to have more people with that characteristic. That attitude can be problematic, of course. Where applied to, for example, non-heterosexual people or (more controversially) non-monogamous people, there is some sense to it; we, as a Christian faith group (at least in origin), or a Christian-inclusive faith group, can be contrasted from some other such faith groups by the fact that we positively welcome people that they reject. Such language still runs the risk of creating an “us and them” impression, but if used in the right context is reasonably safe, well-understood and relatively unlikely to offend. In the case of non-heterosexuals for example, it is particularly safe because we are known, by any who know us at all, to include a lot of people who aren’t heterosexual.
However, where we are talking about a characteristic that is not rejected in comparator groups, or for whom comparator groups are not a sensible yardstick (as in the case of ethnic or class diversity), or for a characteristic that is not well-known to be common in our religious community (as in the case of gender diversity, youth, or class/educational/financial backgrounds), the use of the term welcome is more likely to lead to a sense of ‘us and them’, a risk of alienating people with those characteristics already within our community. This contributes, in my opinion, to an observable vicious cycle when it comes to youth – while children may be raised among friends, as they become young adults and naturally wish to be involved in a more adult way, they are aware that there are few people close in age to themselves, except those younger; they become party to conversations where we bemoan the scarcity of younger adults in our community; they feel less part of the community not only due to the scarcity of others like them, but due to the fact it is remarked upon.
This is one reason that some turn to the idea of affirmation. In the abstract, we affirm that different characteristics are welcome. On the individual scale, we affirm that a person is welcome given their characteristics. In this sense, affirmation has nothing to do with whether a person is right or wrong that they have a certain characteristic – a question that is sadly widespread in some religious communities when it comes to non-heterosexual orientations and asexuality, for example, and in many sorts of community in relation to people who are trans. Rather, it refers to recognising that characteristic, and saying – affirming – that it does not affect how people with that characteristic will be received, that they will not be rejected. Saying, yes, you are welcome here, and we will be glad that you openly bear that characteristic. That you can talk about your significant other without worrying about what gender they are, that your lack of interest in intimate relationships won’t be challenged or dismissed as a phase or an illness, that you won’t be mistreated because your gender identity does not conform with that expected based on your anatomy at birth – or that your gender expression does not conform to any particular expectations at all.
This conflicts, or perhaps conflates, with another sense of affirmation, however. The two senses overlap, but are not the same, and the distinction has become most clear recently in terms of people who are trans and non-binary. In that case, affirmation is often used to say “we accept, agree with and will treat you as we would anyone else with your gender identity, without regard to anatomy at birth”, to say “we will use the pronouns you prefer”, to say “we accept that people can have a gender identity that is not purely male or purely female, and accept your description of your own gender identity”. In this sense, a community affirms that a person is correct when they describe their gender or sexual identity. It is not only important in relation to gender identity; in other religious communities, whose traditions have historically rejected the very idea of homosexuality, it can be used to say “yes, we affirm that there are people who are homosexual, and that God made them that way”. For sexualities, or aspects of sexuality that have less broad acceptance in society at large, it can mean you affirm the validity of that identity or experience – that you are committed to avoiding biphobia or acephobia, that you are open to the idea that there are forms of non-monogamy that are not immoral or unethical, or inherently harmful.
All of these things feed into what is ultimately important about all of these questions – how we allow people to feel belonging, and how we help people to be confident that they might belong before they approach our community. That is what makes a welcoming spiritual community, in either sense of the word, and what lets people have confidence to come and try out the Quaker experience, especially if they are a religious or spiritual person who has had bad experiences because of some characteristic that was not accepted or affirmed in another religious community. A true community, religious or otherwise, is a group of people who belong together, and who know it.
We are never going to agree a consistent set of meanings for all these terms, even within a single Yearly Meeting of Friends, never mind in the wider English-speaking world. So how can we talk about this without causing confusion, even possibly offence? How can we communicate clearly, so that people hear what we mean to say, nothing more or less – at least to the extent that is possible? The answer is simple in concept, but difficult in practice – don’t rely on simple words to convey complex concepts. Don’t rely on complex words, either, even if they might be more precise; people won’t always understand them. Use more words. Be clear in what you say.
For example, for me, the sense I usually mean welcome is one that includes those already in our community; acceptance is, to me, a word indicating a very low bar – no outright rejection, but possibly still a lack of true welcoming. I will, I am sure, continue to use them in those ways out of sheer habit. That means that I need to be clear, when I talk about welcoming especially, that I mean it in that way – I need to use more words, not just use one and assume that everyone will know what I mean by it. It would be best, indeed, if we all thought about that all the time, whatever we talk about, thinking carefully about whether people will understand a word in the same way we do as we say it. On this specific topic, however, it is particularly important, for reasons I hope are clear from this discussion.
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