Quaker Peacemaking in Washington

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1. The Lancaster advocacy team spent nine years building a quiet relationship with Congressman Lloyd Smucker before asking him to help Murad’s family in Gaza. What does it practically and spiritually take to keep showing up for someone whose political votes break your heart?
2. Incremental change takes years of relationship-building, yet as Trayce Peterson points out, the people hurting the most are constantly “invited to continue to wait”. How do we balance the patience required for long-term political advocacy with the moral urgency of people suffering right now? 
3. Trayce compares democracy and civil service to a bird’s nest—sturdy enough to hold new life against the wind and rain, yet fragile enough to fall apart if no one cares for it. Now that the polls have closed, what is one “twig” you can bring to help tend the nest in your own community? 

Zack Jackson
In the fall of 2025, a Palestinian peace activist named Murad Matar was trapped in Gaza City. Humanitarian aid had been cut off. The borders were sealed. And his young daughter, who has Down syndrome, urgently needed heart surgery.

Murad’s friends had managed to secure his family passage to South Africa for the surgery—if only someone with enough political influence could help them cross the border.

Which is how a small group of Quakers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania ended up sitting across the table from a Republican Congressman named Lloyd Smucker.

On paper, Smucker was the last person you’d expect peace activists to turn to. He votes nearly one hundred percent of the time with Donald Trump, and on January 6th, he voted against certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral votes.

Except Lloyd Smucker was born Amish. And for nine years, a local Quaker advocacy team hadn’t written him off. They just kept showing up to his office, building a quiet relationship around a shared belief in humanitarian aid.

So that day, the team brought along two Quakers from their meeting, Ann and Joe, who knew Murad personally, along with a retired doctor carrying photos of families surviving on USAID in Malawi. They laid these stories on the table in front of their MAGA congressman. Here’s Tom Latus, one of the Quaker advocates. 

Tom Latus 

So, telling the story of Murad and telling the story of aid in Malawi, you could see Mr. Smucker move from like, well, “Look, we, you know, why should we do this? I mean, there there are many, many millions of people suffering. Why these people?” And when he heard about them as people, he softened. And Smucker said, “Well, maybe we can do something about this”.

Zack Jackson 

Smucker was moved by the personal story and tasked his aide with pressing the State Department. A month later, the phone rang.

Tom Latus 

Joe got a call. Marad and his family were in South Africa. The Israelis had come in, rounded up the family, took them across the border into Israel, and then took them to South Africa. Now we don’t know, and we’ll never know whether or not that movement on Smucker’s part made this happen. But at the very least, it showed his willingness to do it. 

Zack Jackson 

It turns out when you spend nine years looking for that of God in your political opponent, eventually they start looking back.

Zack Jackson
Welcome to Thee Quaker Podcast. I’m Zack Jackson.

It’s Election Day in the US.

Depending on when you’re listening to this, you might be standing in line at a polling place. You might be refreshing a results map on your phone. Or you might have turned off the news entirely, convinced that the whole system is too broken, too cruel, and too rigged for any normal person to make a difference.

If you’re feeling cynical today, I don’t blame you, but today is also the first of three special episodes this season sponsored by FCNL—the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

And so, we wanted to step back from the political noise and ask a much bigger question about faith and power. Why do Quakers get involved in politics at all? How do you lobby inside a deeply flawed, worldly system without losing your spiritual center? And what unique gifts do Friends have to offer a country that has forgotten how to listen to itself?

In order to understand why Quakers lobby Congress at all today, we have to look back to a time long before Congress existed, long before anyone even had the right to cast a ballot. From the very beginning of the movement in the 1650s, Quakers were marching directly into courts and throne rooms to confront the powers of the state. As Quaker author Marcel Martin told me last season…

Marcelle Martin 

She felt like, as early Quakers did, they got to speak to the King of Kings. Why not speak to the human king?

Zack Jackson 

Here’s Alicia McBride. She’s the senior director for Quaker leadership at FCNL. She spends her days translating Quakerism to political advocates and translating political advocacy to Quakers.

Alicia McBride 

Quakers have been working to influence the government since the beginning, but you know that a lot of that early advocacy was really in self-interest because Quakers were being persecuted for their beliefs and put in prison, and they were trying to, you know, petition the government to release them or to, you know, provide for religious freedom, and you know FCNL really came out of a concern in World War II, especially around conscription and the ways that the government was imposing on Friends and other conscientious objectors, like keeping them from being able to exercise their faith.

Zack Jackson 

Quakers have been inserting themselves into the halls of power since the beginning. Still, it can feel like entering a foreign country, a country designed to make regular citizens feel small.

Alicia McBride 

But I think it’s also important to recognize that choosing to interact with Congress and the federal government, you know that is one of the least diverse, least progressive institutions. Like, you know, it was basically like the whole system of government in our Constitution was set up to keep laws from moving too quickly and to keep the government insulated from the will of the people, to some degree, and you know all of the ways that discrimination and prejudice are like worked into our system of government, and so part of what you have to do is like get over that in order to interact with that system. So I think you know I think by choosing to act in that space, there are compromises. I think you have to accept that there’s not this purity of, like, I am not going to interact with people who think differently than I am, or like you know, you can’t think that you’re going to be like tainted by hearing and experiencing the views of other people.

Zack Jackson 

That refusal to treat a political opponent as untouchable goes right to the heart of Quaker theology. If there is that of God in every person, then there is that of God in the politician whose votes are breaking your heart. Trayce Peterson is the co-clerk of FCNL’s Quaker Governance and Engagement Committee, living down near the border in Tucson, Arizona. For Trayce, walking into a legislator’s office requires a spiritual reframe before anyone even opens their mouth.

Trayce Peterson 

In this complicated season for us as a nation. The reminder is about our humanity and seeing that of God in each of us, and so if that is an adversarial relationship, how can that be reframed? And the reframe is, oh, that person is actually a human being, just like me. And while we may be on very different sides of an issue, how am I going to remember to humanize that individual enough so that I’m actually listening and not rehearsing what I want to say to that person, so that the possibility for creating some common ground can emerge? And that often isn’t our doing, but our doing is to create the conditions for that possibility, and then the Universe or Spirit or God has the opportunity to meet us and to help us.

Zack Jackson 

Creating the conditions for Spirit to move in a sterile congressional office sounds lofty. On the ground, though, it starts with something remarkably simple.

Olivia Delaplaine helps organize FCNL’s lobby conferences in Washington, guiding volunteers from across the country into congressional offices.

Olivia Delaplaine 

What I have noticed is that we train our volunteers in the FCNL network to always lead with some kind of appreciation or affirmation or thank you, particularly to the staff when we’re meeting with staff, and I’ve seen the staff be really surprised by that and really grateful for that because it’s not what they hear most of the time. I think a lot of time they are hearing a lot of really strong, sometimes hostile, sometimes frustrated or disappointed kind of feelings come from meetings with constituents, and so it’s rare that they hear appreciation and affirmation and thanks. That’s something that our advocacy teams really embody. That even if we disagree with a vote that the member of Congress has taken, we can still appreciate the work of the staff. We can still recognize the humanity in the staff.

Zack Jackson 

Of course, depending on who represents you, finding something, anything to thank them for can take a little digging. Here’s Tom again from the Lancaster team.

Tom Latus 

So we were going to lobby Senator Toomey, our former Republican senator, and on the way we said, “Well, what are we going to thank him for? Because we didn’t, we couldn’t think of anything to thank him for.” So someone started scrolling their phone, and they found out that he was a member of the Sikh caucus because there had been some really outrageous xenophobia directed towards Sikhs in Pennsylvania, and he stood up for them. And so we started with his aide talking about that, and he just loved it, you know. And he just went from his usual defensive stance to being very open. But over and over again, I think both the act of looking for the affirmation, because there always is one if you really look, is a good spiritual exercise.

Zack Jackson 

That posture of warmth and listening gets Quakers through the door. Once they’re inside the room, however, things get much murkier, because politics is the art of the possible, and sometimes the only way to move the needle in Washington is to attach your peace-loving goals to legislation that goes against everything you believe in. Here’s Alicia again.

Alicia McBride 

You know, FCNL is very much about how do we work within the system enough to have legibility and to have credibility and trust in that system, while also speaking our truth and trying to change things, often incrementally, but also not implying that we agree with some or many of the positions. You know, a good example of this is one of the main pieces of legislation that consistently gets passed every year is the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes spending on military action and the Pentagon and a whole host of things. But often there are amendments to that because that’s like the only thing moving that we know is going to get through. There are often amendments to that that we will work on with members of Congress to try to pass related to foreign policy, related to are we going to support military spending that supports military action by other countries. But in the end, we’re not going to support the passage of the bill because we don’t support trillions of dollars to military spending.

Zack Jackson: Just sit with that for a second. A Quaker organization, dedicated to peace, advocating for small changes inside a massive defense bill—a bill you know is going to pass, and a bill you know will fund weapons that kill people.

To be honest, sitting with that feels a little gross. Where is the line between pragmatic compromise and losing your soul to the machine? And how do Quakers live inside that tension?

We’ll explore how they thread that needle, right after the break. Stay tuned.

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Zack Jackson
This episode is sponsored by the Friends Committee on National Legislation. If you are feeling a call to work for peace and justice, you don’t have to work alone. Join an Advocacy Team with FCNL to team up with a committed group of advocates who are building relationships with Congress to advocate for policies that advance peace, justice, and an Earth restored.

The group we heard about today in Lancaster is one of 136 advocacy groups in all 50 states, and new ones are being formed all the time. 

To take the first step, join a monthly “Intro to Advocacy” call where you can learn practical skills, hear from FCNL’s grassroots network, and get your questions answered about what it means to join an Advocacy Team. You can learn more and sign up at FCNL.org/IntroToAdvocacy—again that’s FCNL.org/IntroToAdvocacy. We’ll leave a link in the show notes.

And now. Back to the episode. 

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Zack Jackson: Welcome back. Before the break, we were looking at the moral discomfort of what it actually takes to pass policy on Capitol Hill—like working to attach peace-building amendments to a trillion-dollar Pentagon spending bill.

When I confessed to Alicia that working inside a defense bill felt kind of gross to me, she didn’t flinch. She knows that tension intimately.

Alicia McBride 

If someone asked us, we would say no. We don’t support the bill. It’s more just like we’re not going to send an action alert out saying tell your representative to vote no on the bill. It’s threading a lot of needles, and I think that something I appreciate about FCNL is we talk about this model that originated with Bill Moyers, and then I think George Lakey has evolved it, of the different roles of a social movement. So the idea that you have people who are advocates within the system, you have people who are agitating outside the system for change, and sitting in congressional offices and protesting and taking nonviolent direct action, and then you have people who are sort of helpers within the system working with the people who are harmed.

Zack Jackson
Recognizing that you are only one piece of the puzzle takes some of the burden off. You don’t have to solve everything at once.

In fact, trying to fight everything at once is a guaranteed way to get tuned out in Washington. Olivia Delaplaine saw this firsthand in early 2025, when FCNL was preparing volunteers to lobby against a massive budget reconciliation bill packed with devastating cuts.

Olivia Delaplaine 

And we knew that a whole bunch of cuts to a lot of really important things were going to be on the table that would impact millions of people, and we had to help figure out how to message kind of to our network and to the public what specifically we wanted to ask people to ask their members of Congress not to cut, and so we kind of internally and as FCNL staff went through our own decision-making process there. And for this smaller event that we were planning, we ended up focusing specifically on trying to protect funding for renewable energy programs that had been originally passed under the Biden administration, and when we were trying to figure out how to message to our network, we were just thinking about what programs do people in our network currently benefit the most from, or would stand to benefit the most from. And so when we were marketing the event, that was how we marketed it. And then when we were at the event itself, we were really training people to articulate how they, their families, and their communities either have benefited from these programs or would benefit from these programs in their messaging to Congress, and so it was. It was tough because there were so many pieces in that spending bill, that budget cut bill, that were terrible that we wanted to advocate against. But we made the decision to really focus in on what people could kind of articulate a personal story and a personal impact on.

Zack Jackson
Personal stories move lawmakers in a way that abstract arguments never will.

Yet playing the long game—choosing incremental change and waiting years for relationships to bear fruit—comes with its own moral weight. Because while Washington moves at a glacial pace, real people are hurting right now. Here’s Trayce Peterson again. 

Trayce Peterson 

The people who are most directly impacted are most often the people who are invited to continue to wait, and there is something morally incorrect about that. So often, in the political landscape, you know, people talk about taxes or meeting the needs of the working class or the poor, and yet really, so much of the time they’re not speaking to those people and they’re not listening to those people. They’re listening to a different group of people. And so, people who are feeling the weight are often not the people who are consulted, frankly. And then, what’s worse is they’re invited to continue to wait. And so I think what FCNL is really trying to do is listen in a variety of ways to those very important concerns.

Zack Jackson 

While Congress so often tunes out the voices of those who are hurting the most, FCNL is built on a practice of deep, intentional listening. That spiritual grounding does two things: it keeps the needs of the marginalized front and center during the slow work of everyday advocacy, and it acts as an anchor when the world turns upside down. 

On September 11, 2001, Alicia McBride was a 23-year-old program assistant at FCNL. She lived in Arlington, right near the Pentagon, and was downtown when the planes hit. She remembers the way that the world seemed to forget itself by the next morning,

Alicia McBride 

You know. Even a lot of peace organizations in the immediate aftermath of September 11th were like, “Yeah, maybe we should retaliate. Maybe we should do something.” You know, Scott Simon, the NPR reporter host, was like a Quaker, and he came out with sort of a just war-like statement, and you know so there were people who had been sort of more pacifist-leaning going to Quaker meeting who suddenly were like, “Oh no, now I feel impacted and so I think we should do something else.” And FCNL came out with a statement that to me still is like the clearest statement of just cutting through all of that fear and all of that angst, and it was just so clear that like, “Here’s what we’re going to say, here’s what we can say, and we don’t know all the answers, but you know we have this building that’s right across the street from the Senate so we can put a sign up that says ‘War is not the answer.'” So all the Senate staff going to work can see there are people who don’t agree with this.

Zack Jackson 

Two days after the attacks, Congress voted to give the president sweeping authority to wage war across the globe. Out of 535 members of Congress, only one, Representative Barbara Lee of California voted no. Working inside the system didn’t stop FCNL from standing beside Barbara Lee and hanging that banner across from the Senate. It’s the difference between being in Washington and being of Washington.

Alicia McBride 

Speaking of bubbles, like DC is a bubble, the non-governmental organization community as a bubble, and there’s sort of assumptions about how it works and what people do, and you know what you have to do to change policy and all these things, and you know there’s a lot of pressure to just sort of like conform to that, to be another progressive group, you know, using the Quaker name, but like, is it really Quaker and all this stuff? And I feel like part of what I think FCNL does, and that I think is really important, and part of what I get to do in my role of Quaker leadership is like keep insisting that coming back to that center, listening to Spirit, listening to how we are called to be in the system is an incredibly important part of this work, and we’re not just like paying attention to what other peers think is the right thing, but we’re testing that against who we are as a people, as an organization, as a community, and. It’s not easy, and as I said before, everyone thinks we’re doing it wrong, probably. But to me, that’s that’s like the the essence of what makes FCNL a Quaker organization is that it is coming back to: is this how we’re called to do this work?

Zack Jackson 

Which brings us back to today, Election Day. Earlier in my conversation with Trayce Peterson, she told me that she was getting ready to work the polls today, just like her family had done for generations, and she shared an image of democracy that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Trayce Peterson 

It’s good work to be doing in a season when the stakes for the Republic and our right to use the very fragile and incomplete process of voting is very tender, and it’s you know like all processes have to be cared for, and so I think FCNL is doing its piece to tend to that. And you know, I was just talking to a friend of mine this morning about nest making and how, in some ways, nests are very sturdy, and yet they’re also very fragile, right? And so, if you think of the work that civil servants do, our elected officials, it is like a nest, right? That there’s always the tending and caring for that must happen, and I think FCNL is doing its piece to add to that nest and to add to that work. 

Zack Jackson
A bird’s nest is strong enough to hold new life against the wind and the rain, and yet fragile enough that it can be torn apart if no one tends to it. It is built twig by twig, piece by piece, season after season.

However you are feeling about the state of the world—whether tomorrow morning finds you relieved, grieving, or exhausted—remember that voting was never meant to be the whole story.

The real work happens after the polls close. It happens when we sit in silence to ground ourselves in our purpose. It happens when we look across the desk at someone we disagree with and choose to see a human being. And it happens when we gather in community to tend the nest together.

Zack Jackson
Thank you for listening and thank you to our guests, Tom Latus, Alicia McBride, Trayce Peterson, and Olivia Delaplaine. And thank you to FCNL for sponsoring this episode. To learn more about FCNL’s work or to find an advocacy team near you, check out the link in our show notes where you will also find a transcript, discussion questions, and other resources.

This episode was hosted and produced by me, Zack Jackson. Our executive producer is Jon Watts. With editorial support from our creative team, Maeve Sutherland and Adam Ginsberg—and a member of Thee Quaker board. All the music in this episode was composed and recorded by Jon Watts.

Thee Quaker Podcast is a part of Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform for the 21st Century.  If this podcast has been meaningful to you, please consider becoming a monthly supporter by going to quakerpodcast.com/support. Every little bit helps us to tell these stories and shine our light even brighter.

We’ll be back in your feed on the first and third Tuesday of every month this season, so make sure you’re subscribed. 

And now. Our daily Quaker message as read by Grace Gonglewski. 

Grace Gonglewski 

“To the extent that the blessing of peace is achieved by humankind, it will not be achieved because people have outraced each other in the building of armaments, nor because we have out debated each other with words, nor because we have outmaneuvered each other in political action, but because more and more people, in a silent place in their hearts, are turned to those eternal truths upon. On which all right living is based. It is on the inner drama of this search that the unfoldment of the outer drama of history ultimately depends”. Dan Seeger, 1983.

Zack Jackson 

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, go to dailyquaker.com. That’s dailyquaker.com.

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Executive produced by Jon Watts

Editorial Support by Maeve Sutherland, Adam Ginsberg, and a member of Thee Quaker Board

Original music by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Joey Hartmann-Dow.

Season 4 is sponsored by The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)