IV. Exceptions -- Past and Future
For that matter, Frost himself admits of one significant exception to his almost uniformly dreary record of religious support for, or irrelevance to, warmaking, and that exception is no less than William Penn’s Holy Experiment in Quaker Pennsylvania. Penn’s colony had no army and yet maintained peace with its native neighbors for 70 years, a record unmatched in American colonial history.
Even here, to be fair, the evidence is not unambiguous, and so-called "realist" historians have dismissed this record as either a fluke or an illusion. But Frost gives Penn and his cohorts some credit for their "American exceptionalism," while still maintaining that its rarity nonetheless proves the rule of religion’s ineffectuality as a remedy for warmaking.
This exception is more meaningful to me than it evidently is to Frost, because I have a more optimistic estimate of the concrete social potential of our authentic religious peace witness. Let me see if I can explain why.
Yes, for Quakers to confront a militarist government head-on, especially in our current situation, is a grossly unequal, even silly competition. It may sometimes be necessary as a religious witness; but it will rarely if ever be effective politics. However, this does not mean we can’t have any influence. We can still help "mend" the world, in Penn’s phrase. Consider a couple of examples:
During the Vietnam War scores, maybe hundreds of Friends meetings provided draft counseling to thousands and thousands of young men, the vast majority of them non-Friends and non-pacifists. (Such work survives in 2002, by the way, in the ministry of Quaker House.) This form of witness was entirely legal and non-political, consistent with Friends’ principles, and virtually unnoticed by the authorities or the media. Yet the record shows that the US military developed increasingly severe morale and recruitment problems as the Vietnam war went on, to the point where its combat capabilities were significantly and adversely affected.
Was there a connection between this and our years of draft counseling? It is hard to prove, but I believe there was.
Similarly, during the Central American wars of the Reagan years, it was a Friend, Jim Corbett, who essentially invented what came to be called the Sanctuary movement. He did this, not at a Washington conference, but in the borderland deserts of southern Arizona. Operating quietly at first, strictly within religious networks, this form of resistance soon spread far and wide.
The Sanctuary movement saved many refugees’ lives. It also eventually wore large holes in the Reagan administration’s efforts to return such refugees en masse to the repressive governments of their war-torn homelands, and to throw a cloak of silence over the many ways U.S. policies and officials were aiding and abetting the slaughter.
Other examples could be cited, but the point should be clear: yes, Friends carry little or no weight in the usual scales of secular power; we are neither wealthy nor shameless enough to buy politicians, and there are no congressional districts which turn on the "Quaker vote." But these are not the only ways the world is mended. The choices ro religious pacifists are not, I am persuaded, reduced to either Washington-centered politicking or Amish withdrawal.
Instead, the shift I’m suggesting here is from politically-centered "activism" to a strategy modeled on Jesus’ admonitions to be like salt, light and leaven (Matthew 5:13-15; 13:33). Working in our own way, quietly, cooperatively and diligently, Quakers have indeed made a difference in our society and the world. I suspect J. William Frost would be sympathetic to such a qualification of his thesis.
There is, further, another dimension of this tradition which I think Frost also overlooks, that part which is aimed, not at stopping this or that war in particular, but rather at working to end war "in general."
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