Some Quaker Reflections
On the Latest War
Presented as part of the Conference: Non-Violence in the Contemporary World
Elon University, Elon North Carolina
April 24, 2002
By Chuck Fager
Director of Quaker House
Copyright © 2002
An Essay in Five PartsI. A Letter from Lincoln
What does it mean to be a religious pacifist in America in 2002?
As I have struggled with this question as a Quaker, one who wants to be a religious pacifist, a recent joke came to mind:
Question: What did one paradigm say to the other paradigm?
Answer: Shift happens.
It seems to me that finding a role today, or a range of roles, for Quakers and other religious pacifists, involves working our way through several such shifts. There are at least five that I have noticed and want to mention here.
The first and most obvious appeared on the U.S. political horizon, involving a near-unanimous coming together or policymakers from across the political spectrum after September 11. Despite conflicts over domestic issues, this solidarity still seems solid as this is written in the spring of 2002. However long it lasts, it is unprecedented in my lifetime, or at least since I was an infant in World War II.
The shocks of September 2001 which catalyzed this united front has also affected religious pacifists, or at least those in the Religious Society of Friends, more than many of us may care to admit. And the second shifting paradigm highlighted by these trauma — the most troubling to many Quakers — is not in fact a new one; it was identified as long ago as 1864, by no less a personage than Abraham Lincoln.
After three years of Civil War, Lincoln (who had Quaker ancestors, by the way) wrote to Friend Eliza Gurney, who had visited and prayed for peace with him at the White House two years earlier.
“We hoped,” Lincoln wrote, “for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this, but God knows best and has ruled otherwise. . . .”Your people, the Friends,” Lincoln continued, “have had and are having a very great trial. On principle and faith opposed to both war and oppression, they can only practically oppose oppression by war. In this dilemma, some have chosen one horn of the dilemma, and some the other.”
Today we can substitute “terrorism” for “oppression” without diminishing the force of Lincoln’s statement. There is, of course, a rationalizing subtext in Lincoln’s note. First the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Army shifts responsibility for the war from humans to God. Then he deftly begs the pacifist’s unspoken question of whether there was not some way to escape his version of the dilemma, and to “practically” oppose oppression without war.
At the same time, the letter shows Lincoln’s shrewd political insight: It is a fact of Quaker history that while our corporate opposition to war “in general” has never really wavered, it has often been a different story when it came to wars in particular. Many individual Quakers have often had trouble opposing specific wars, especially those waged in pursuit of what these Friends felt was a worthy goal, or against a monstrous evil. The same has been true of many other religious pacifists.
Some Quaker statements on the latest war have reflected this ambiguity. Perhaps the most well-known was that of Scott Simon, the prominent correspondent for National Public Radio, who has identified himself as a Friend. He made a speech in late September, renouncing Quaker pacifism and declaring that “the United States has no sane alternative but to wage war; and wage it with unflinching resolution.”
By contrast, most “official” statements from Quaker groups have urged a halt to hostilities, but some have done so in a curiously muted way. This should not be surprising. For many, the latest war, and its horrifying beginning, resurrected the same dilemma Lincoln defined: Oppression (or terror) vs. war–one horn or the other.
If a poll were taken among those U.S. Friends who vocally opposed, say, the Gulf War of 1990-91, I believe it would show them (or rather us) to be distinctly divided this time, with a significant number leaning like Scott Simon definitely, if quietly and with misgivings, toward the view that the war, however unfortunate and ugly, may be the lesser of available evils.
As Lincoln’s letter suggests, such division of opinion would not really be a new phenomenon. It has even cropped up among Friends who stuck by the traditional refusal to take part individually.
Listen, again, to two of Lincoln’s Quaker contemporaries, who struggled with this dilemma: First the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, probably the best known Friend of his time, writing to a local newspaper:
“No one who knows me can doubt my deep sympathy with the united North, and with those who, with a different idea of duty from my own, are making generous sacrifices of person and property; but as a settled believer in the principles of the Society of Friends, I can do nothing at a time like this beyond mitigating to the extent of my power, the calamities and suffering attendant upon war, and accepting cheerfully my allotted share of the privation and trial growing out of it.”
(Actually, Whittier rather understated his willingness to act on his Union sympathies; his weaponry may have been confined to verse, but he was an active and very effective propagandist for the Northern war effort.)
Or Lucretia Mott, writing after a cousin was killed in battle: “If, by this means, these cruelties [of slavery] can be arrested and an end drawn…to man’s claim of property in his fellow man, we need not be troubled — ‘knowing that these things must needs be’. . . . My faith however in the superior force of the mighty weapons ‘that are not carnal’ is unshaken.”
In World War Two, a majority of draft age Quakers went into the military. But over a thousand took their stand as conscientious objectors to military service. But for the most part they did so in a very subdued way: their personal refusal to bear arms was combined with a foreswearing of public protest. This indicates a resigned acceptance of the war’s unavoidability, if not its legitimacy in the face of Nazi and Japanese tyranny.
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II. War & Peace — Cops Vs. GeneralsBut there is an additional level of complexity for Quakers regarding the new war which needs to be teased out, a third paradigm that may be shifting out from under us, making our footing uncertain. Again this can be illuminated by a glance into Quaker history:While early Friends regularly denounced war as an instrument of state policy, they also generally upheld the place and role of what they called “the magistrate,” in enforcing what we would now think of as “law and order” within a society.
This distinction can perhaps be usefully summed up as “the Cops versus the Generals.” Early Friends were anxious to dispense with generals and armies; but they weren’t in such a hurry to get rid of the cops. Fox among others more than once quoted scripture (cf. Romans 13: 3-4; 1 Peter 2:14) to the effect that “magistrates,” local authorities were divinely sanctioned as “a terror to evil-doers,” who did not “bear the sword in vain.” (As many leading figures in the Quaker community gained acceptance and wealth, their concern for “law and order” increased, as does that of most people with something to lose. As the saying goes, Quakers came to Philadelphia to do good, and some did very well indeed.)
Of course, in practice there have often been gray areas and overlaps between the two realms of the cops and the generals. The necessity to draw lines between them has made for recurrent headaches for the weighty Friends called upon both to uphold a peace testimony — and to survive as a community in a tough world.
To take one obscure but apposite historical example: in 1705, the Quaker Mother Church was a body called London Yearly meeting; and its executive committee was called the Meeting for Sufferings. In 1705 this group was asked to adjudicate a dispute among Friends on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Island officials, fearing a French invasion, were building various fortifications, posting sentinels and training a militia. They had offered Friends there the option of helping with some of the construction work, as well as keeping watch, in lieu of serving directly in the armed militia.
Older Friends were ready to accept this arrangement as a reasonable accommodation of their pacifist scruples. But then a group of young radicals loudly dissented, insisting that such projects were in fact “all one,” of a piece with the military effort, and thus all were contrary to stated Quaker convictions, which called for Friends to steer clear both of war itself and the preparations for war. The two groups could not resolve this difference, so both factions appealed to London for support.
Meeting for Sufferings took awhile to respond; were its members squirming? I wonder.
But in the end, being the Establishment, they sided with the older Friends, ruling that keeping watch and helping build walls were not inherently warlike, but were simply prudent precautions that good neighbors owed each other under the Golden Rule.
Who was right? Or, suppose you (or I) were on meeting for Sufferings — who would we have sided with?
Today many believe our planet is increasingly resembling that island of Antigua, more and more of an inescapably close-knit community, rather than a collection of heterogeneous sovereignties, each a law unto itself. In this globalized context, the new war can be portrayed as more an attempt at international law enforcement than as a specimen of traditional warfare.
Such a line of argument seeks to escape Lincoln’s dilemma by redefining it out of existence: in these cases, we Quakers don’t really have to choose between war and oppression, because, if it is fought against grave “oppression” like terrorism, such a campaign isn’t really a “war.”
To be sure, it is easy to find Friends who, like the young Antigua dissenters, would reject this whole “world cop” notion as an abandonment, even a sellout, of 350 years of Quaker pacifism. To them the current war is “all one” with other wars, of a piece with Vietnam and Desert Storm, no more than another bloody example of American militarism and imperialist pretensions running amok.
For that matter, objections to the new calls for an imperial Pax Americana don’t come only from religious pacifists. Listen to retired Army Col. David Hackworth, a combat veteran and military columnist who is very far from being a pacifist, from his column of December 26, 2001, entitled: “A Christmas Wish –– Let’s End Our Role as Globocop”:
“Since I was a kid, the sound of American boots marching off to war has come to seem as inevitable to the young men of this nation –– and now, unfortunately, to the young women as well –– as spring rain.
First there was World War II, a just war against totalitarian monsters in which –– as with today’s terrorist crazies –– we had to either whip ‘em or wind up suffering the terrible consequences.
But once the Axis was put down in 1945, America became the self-appointed guardian of Western civilization, and Johnny didn’t come marching home. Like the Romans and Brits before us, we began setting up outposts around the world without any mind of the burden or the cost.
This long occupation has been intermittently interrupted by the occasional hot war, as with Korea –– another just conflict that certainly was in our national interests –– or Vietnam –– where we had no reason for going except the greed of the war profiteers. . . .
We maintain about 100,000 military personnel in both Europe and Asia –– where many of the locals want us gone yesterday –– at a cost of billions of dollars per year. The locals rightly say that we’ve overstayed our mission, which ended when another empire, the Soviet Union, bellied up and followed the path of the Romans and the Brits into history’s dustbin. So it doesn’t make a lick of military sense. Not only are these people more than capable of defending themselves against now mainly nonexistent threats, the average Hans and Kim are chanting, “Yankee go home.”
. . . Sure we need a strong military ready to defend America, but we need one that –– as opposed to the Roman, Brit and Soviet models –– follows the wise guidance of our Founding Fathers when they said that we shouldn’t do a Pax Americana and stick our nose in other folks’ dealings.”
Yet there are in fact thoughtful Friends who have adopted the world cop view, at least in principle. One is Daniel Seeger, the retired Executive Director of Pendle Hill, formerly a career executive for the American Friends Service Committee, and a very weighty, influential Friend. Writing in 1995 (in a book of essays, A Continuing Journey) on the character of Quaker peace witness in a “post-Cold War world,” he concludes:
“It is my conviction that if progress is to be made in…the prevention of ethnic violence; and the ending of the arms trade and arms profiteering — such progress will require development of a body of international law governing these matters and a capacity of the international community to enforce these laws on behalf of the common good. It seems to me that this will involve some sort of international police force…to intervene when, in the power vacuum created by the collapse of empires, ethnic strife breaks out.”
Seeger hastens to admit that there are risks associated with this concept, and urges Friends to begin thinking these questions through in a deliberate and searching way, especially the task of designing safeguards against the abuse of such power.
Indeed. One can hear the skeptics already: designing such “safeguards” will be no small task. If police forces are so benign, it will be asked, why is there such a continuing plague of cases of notorious and atrocious police abuse? What about New York City, where police pumped 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo, and brutalized Abner Louima? Or the Los Angele’s Police department’s notorious Mark Fuhrman, whose chilling and acknowledged habit of faking evidence against persons of color helped acquit O.J. Simpson. These are only a few recent examples?
The record of violent police misconduct is long and daunting. It could easily be argued that police forces are just as dangerous as armies, except for the fact that they’re smaller and not as heavily armed.
Did the U.S. bombing Kosovo campaign in 1999 embody what Seeger had in mind? Will the current “war on terror” end up resembling it, with a U.S.-backed protectorate in Afghanistan? What can Friends make of such a scenario?
For myself, while the “world cop” idea has a certain plausibility, it still seems very risky. Here are some of the hazards its current incarnation seems to carry:
Do we know what kind of “law and order” the U.S. is out to enforce? I don’t. The simplistic rhetoric from the White House is neither concrete nor entirely convincing. what would “victory” in this latest struggle look like to our current officials?
Columnist Molly Ivins offered a typically apt and pungent summary of this situation in her column of April 10, 2002:
“From the beginning,” she wrote, “the trouble with ‘war against terrorism’ has been the definition of terrorism and the immutable fact that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. After he got us involved in this war on a noun, Bush then upped the ante and announced it was a war between good and evil, and we would continue until we had eradicated evil. Oh man, this is going to be a long sucker.”
For that matter, the old pacifist’s question, of whether such a “victory” will be worth the longer-term cost seems very apropos just now. While the number of US casualties from the one day of attacks in September was in the thousands, there seems little doubt that the cost of the U.S. war in Afghan lives, is probably already higher, and likely to increase substantially. Besides actual combat deaths, how many unnecessary deaths have there been among the hundreds of thousands of war refugees, of which we now hear so little?
Beyond Afghanistan itself, this war seems based on maintaining indefinitely a shaky coalition that itself has put the U.S. in league with a pack of governments whose own records are hardly less bloody and ominous than those of the perpetrators we are so loudly determined to track down. Will the U.S. end up trading an enforced stability in one small province for a much more dangerous instability on a much larger stage?
Or, to pursue the “what if” one step further, what if the present arrangement falls apart? What might that mean? We can get some clues, I think, from the case of Kosovo. The fact is, it was the Pentagon, not mobs of protesting peaceniks, who raised the fiercest objections to plans for US military intervention in the Balkans with ground forces. They did this quietly, “through channels,” but it was no secret. This is an important point, I think.
The basis of the generals’ unease was that the region presents many difficulties and traps for a military mission; I believe the word “quagmire” has been mentioned. This assessment was repeated for all the world to read on June 3, 1999 in the New York Times’ account of President Clinton’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Among Pentagon strategists,” read the dispatch, “there are strong reservations about an invasion that could quickly become mired in the Balkans with no clear exit in sight.”
A few paragraphs later, the point is repeated: “From the start, the chiefs have expressed reservations about NATO’s strategy and ever deeper misgivings about the prospects of an invasion, which would require thousands of troops and would risk significant casualties. On the 71st day of the air campaign, those views have not changed, the officials said.”
For the short-term, the new war is different, in one major respect: the enemy attacked the Pentagon, the citadel and symbol of U.S. military might. A fighting machine of its size and ethos can hardly be expected to absorb such a blow without a thirst for retaliation in kind. Whether wise or effective, payback of the sort we have seen in the autumn of 2001 was a certainty.
But for the longer term, how long can a recurrence of the generals’ misgivings of 1999 be staved off? A long war/occupation in Afghanistan will be a major logistical challenge. A wider war, against Iraq, in the Philippines and who knows where else, will be even more daunting. And amid this confusion, debate and doubt among politicians and public about the wisdom of the entire campaign may begin to grow, as they already are in Europe.
In short, the situation, difficult as it already has been, could easily become disastrous.
This is a worst-case scenario, of course. On the other side, maybe al Queda and its forces have been decisively defeated and scattered, and Afghanistan will somehow be reconstructed to be harmless to those within and beyond its borders. The world “cops” may win this round with the “bad guys” after all.
What might all this mean for Friends and other religious pacifists? Is there a useful roles for our Quaker peace witness in light of such “world cop” efforts?
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III. Facing a few uncomfortable FactsIn the political arena, I believe the honest answer to the question of what potential there is for Friends to play a useful role is: not much.Like citizens of other countries, we are mainly spectators at this particular contest. To be sure, many Friends have drafted minutes, writen letters to Congress and the editor, and sent checks to various relief groups. A few of us have even been to the affected areas, and a few more will probably go.
All this is as it should be; but let’s not flatter ourselves: “Democracy” is at one of its weakest points when it comes to such ventures. Look back for a moment at the U.S. bombing campaign against Serbia after its occupation of Kosovo: As Joe Volk. the chief Quaker lobbyist in Washington put it in a speech to a protest rally in early June, 1999:
“President Clinton is in violation of important laws in Kosovo, as he is in Iraq: the U.S. Constitutional provision on the declaration of war, the U.S. War Powers Act, the UN Charter that requires UN Security Council authorization for the use of military force, and the Geneva Conventions and Protocols which prohibit the targeting of civilian infrastructure.”
I would add that Clinton not only violated or ignored all these laws, he also got away with it. If at this point in the new war George W. Bush has the approval of Congress and domestic public opinion as well, those items only marginally mitigate the shaky legal basis of the war.
Stopping or changing a leadership bent on making war through public dissent is a long and difficult process, and despite the large march in Washington on the weekend of April 20, 2002 we are as yet far from the point at which such public outcry is likely to gain a hearing.
These days I hear some activists, usually safely ensconced on college campuses, scoffing at the reports of solid support for the war among the public at large. They insist it is much less than reported, and shifting rapidly toward opposition. We will soon, they contend, see a replication o the mass protests of the late Vietnam era.
How I wish this were true! But it is not.
I don’t live on campus, and every day I see a multitude of corroborating evidence that Americans are behind this war. Yes, this could change, but it will take time, possibly a long time. Furthermore, even if all Friends were of one mind about the war — which we definitely are not — our organized impact on the structures of power is so minuscule as to be negligible.
Our potential leverage has been further diluted by the fact that post-Vietnam presidents have become quite adept at techniques for neutralizing public unease about military ventures. This was shown in the Gulf War and Kosovo. Moreover, given the level of official censorship of reporting on the war (greatly abetted by the self-censorship of the corporate media), the U.S. citizenry, in our allegedly media-saturated society, will likely be the last to know the truth if the war goes badly.
All this puts Friends and other religious pacifists directly in the way of one more shifting paradigm, the fourth on my list. This one involves the whole understanding of what Quakers call our peace testimony, especially the forms it has taken in the past ninety years, namely of politically-oriented “activism.” This form of witness presumes that the world is moved from Washington, and it is our job above all to move those who move Washington.
This tradition fits our broader culture. North American Friends, and perhaps most British Quakers as well, are modern persons, the heirs of activist political traditions, part of larger societies which pride themselves on being able to Get Things Done. As William Penn put it so long ago, “True religion does not draw men [and women] out of the world but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.”
When AIDS appears, we demand a cure. John Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon, and it happened; and so forth. When it comes to war, this description especially fits the Vietnam generation, which saw a vigorous antiwar movement form and make a difference: it would seem that some wars and some presidents can be stopped or at least impeded, eventually.
Many of the high points of Quaker history are of the same order: We were against slavery, and slavery is gone (except in places like the Sudan and a few other countries). We wanted women to be able to vote, and now they can. More recently, in the U.S. we wanted the military draft to end, and it did. (One might in fairness, add: Quakers also demanded Prohibition, we got it, and it blew up in our faces.)
Nor is this attitude confined to liberals or radicals; it is just as common among modern “conservatives.” Are pornography and abortion considered abominations? They can be eradicated! They demanded the return of the death penalty, and it came back; etc.
Unfortunately, this model of peace witness does not fare very well in relation to many American wars — not just the new war, but others, like Kosovo, the Gulf War, and World War Two. I am more and more inclined to think that the Vietnam war, which was not popular even among most of its supporters, was the exception. Popular wars, in which protest is either ignored or suppressed, are the rule. And this war remains very popular.
A similar conclusion was reached a few years ago by a distinguished Quaker historian, J. William Frost, Director of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. Writing in the same volume as Dan Seeger, Frost came at the activist view of peace witness obliquely, through several years of study aimed at finding an answer to the question, “has religion ever prevented or stopped a war?”
Or as he put it more pointedly, “is there historical evidence that religious leaders have stopped wars from beginning or shortened their duration?”
His sobering answer, in sum, is: No. There is very little such evidence.
The record of western history, as Frost reviewed it, shows that a church “cannot prevent war, because it has neither theology, mission, nor the leverage in society to do so.” Even the largest, most “established” denominations have lacked real leverage, he found. Much more often, even typically, churches blessed wars, and dutifully assured their various rulers that the deity was on their respective sides.
Frost looked mainly at the record of weighty church powers, like the Vatican. But Friends have their own list of such war-preventing sorties as well:
In 1675, John Easton, the Quaker Lieutenant Governor of Rhode island, visited the Wampanoag chieftain Philip, in a bid to head off an Indian uprising. Philip agreed with Easton that “fighting was the worst way” to resolve the natives’ grievances. Nevertheless, what is called King Philip’s War soon broke out, and became the bloodiest conflict in New England’s history.
More than 150 years later, two wealthy British Friends visited the Czar, trying to prevent armed conflict between Russia and Britain. They too failed, and the Crimean War went on its bloody, pointless way. There are more examples, with very few different outcomes.
Frost adds that in our time, “there is little evidence that those in power…have paid much attention to what Quakers had to say about foreign and military policies. Longtime lobbyists for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, asked to point to the hard results of their decades of labor around Congress, can point only to a barely visible thumbprint here and there on federal policy.”
(To be sure, Quakers are a tiny denomination. But if it’s any comfort to us, at the other end of the scale of denominations, the Pope was vocally opposed to the Gulf War of 1990-91, as was the head of the first George Bush’s own Episcopal church; you may recall how much difference they made.)
Based on this record, Frost calls for a revamping of the Quaker understanding of pacifism and the peace testimony. In particular, he writes, “I propose that Friends rethink and jettison the twentieth century linkage between service and peace.”
Under “service” Frost lumps most of the kinds of social-political activism so many Friends today are accustomed to. Note that he is not suggesting that we jettison all efforts at service to which we might be called. Not at all; they have their own value on their own terms. It is the link between them and something called “peacemaking” that he is dubious about. In fact, the very notion that an organized religious peace witness can prevent or stop wars is, he insists, a conceit of rather recent vintage, with little in the way of concrete achievement to support it. This is particularly true when this “service” is cast, as it so often has been, as another form of politics, aimed at short-term visible impact on legislation and government military policy.
As an alternative to this politically-centered activism, Frost much prefers the Quaker pacifism of the Quietist era. “Then,” in his view, “pacifism was an integral but neither the defining nor most important ingredient in Quaker religious life.” This humbler conception was, he feels, also more realistic, more suited to the actual potential of Friends’ place in the world.
In theological terms, Frost is arguing for groups like Friends to serve as a sign, rather than a lobby or a pressure group. This stance was more like what theorists call nonresistance: “I cannot fight, and I cannot aid you who fight,” is Frost’s summary of the Quietist Friend’s responses when the draft notice came or the war tax bill arrived. Otherwise, they went on about their (often quite prosperous) business. The peace testimony, he says, was “not a strategy or technique for success”; its basis was simply obedience to what Friends thought was God’s will for them, for us.
This nonresistant stance is most typical today of groups like the Amish. Focused on their farming and their inward-looking communal life, they are about as far from being “peace activists” as you could get. But they shun war just as they shun many other features of the modern world.
Returning to Lincoln’s dilemma of oppression or terror versus war, Friends of this persuasion would deal with it not by redefining it as Dan Seeger might, but rather by simply ignoring it: wars, regrettably, will come and go. From a worldly, political perspective, some may seem more justified or necessary than others. That’s as may be, and debates on such points will be endless. But Quietist Friends, to the maximum extent possible among imperfect humans, are called to have no part in any of them, except perhaps to help clean up the destruction they leave behind.
This conviction was more than an individual matter. “For the minority consecrated to peace,” Frost says, “the church can provide a sanctuary, and it can defend those who for Christ’s or conscience’ sake refuse to fight, and stand as a rebuke to those who seek to sacralize war.”
What shall we make of this argument? For my part, I think Frost is a little more than half right when it comes to gauging the effect of organized religion on conventional politics and diplomacy. But I believe he underestimates the social impact such “signs” can have.
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IV. Exceptions — Past and FutureFor 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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V. Conclusion
For instance, as far back as 1693, William Penn published “An Essay Towards the Peace of Europe,” proposing the creation of a European parliament as a way of avoiding wars between the various continental powers. In the short run, no statesmen paid much attention; but in the long run, this essay became one of the intellectual ancestors of the current European Union, which has helped end wars among states which used to fight each other regularly.
More than two centuries later, it was a British Friend, Lewis Fry Richardson, working alone and without encouragement for many years after world War One, who essentially invented the discipline of peace research. A generation later, two more Quakers, Elise and Kenneth Boulding took Richardson’s work and moved it forward by orders of magnitude.
In the 1970s, another Quaker couple, Miriam and Sam Levering, labored quietly but very effectively to promote the successful negotiation of the Law of the Sea treaty.
Other examples could be cited. (Many can be found, in thumbnail form, in the pioneering summary-overview of Quaker peace work in the twentieth century prepared by a young scholar, Maya Wilson, for the volume, Sustaining Peace Witness in the Twenty-First Century.) These were efforts which did not aim directly at countering political power; but they were ambitious, and conceived on a large conceptual scale: they aimed to alter the overall context in which politicians do their work. To paraphrase a more recent politician, they “triangulated”; they aimed at preventing war “in general.”
If we reformulate Jerry Frost’s question about the churches, to ask whether they–and in particular, Friends — have had any effect in ending or preventing wars in general, I think the answer of history is much less bleak than that given his more particular inquiry. However, the successes of any such “high concept” projects are paradoxical, in that they are likely to be quiet incremental, and as undramatic as the Law of the Sea treaty, a document including several hundred articles and reams of mind-numbing technical text.
This very undramatic character, along with the fact that their impact is measurable primarily in terms of what does not happen, is essentially the very antithesis of “news,” and thus makes such witness all but invisible to the sensation-dependent media. Yet this is precisely why the Leverings worked for the success of the Law of the Sea treaty: because it would and does provide ways of resolving maritime disputes without combat. The Alternatives to Violence Project is another example of such quietly successful Quaker work, though it does not yet operate on a comparable scale.
Each of these projects by itself may not seem like much. But taken together, and over time, they add up to more than the sum of the parts. A third contributor to A Continuing Journey addressed this prospect very aptly. David Jackman, from the Quaker UN Office, suggested that efforts like those just mentioned, along with many others, are beginning to pay a kind of compound interest, in the form of another new paradigm, the fifth and last on my list, that of an “Emerging Peace Structure” for the world.
This “peace structure,” which is part formal and part informal, consists, Jackman says, of “a cycle of overlapping and interrelated programs that begin with conflict preventive actions, move on to more crisis oriented steps…then respond during post-violence (”post-conflict”) stages with peacekeeping, humanitarian and eventually long-term development programs.
“The overall aim,” Jackman continues, “is not to suppress conflicts — they will be inevitable and, indeed, necessary — but to ‘inoculate’ societies against using violence as a means of conflict management.”
This “structure” is not centrally organized, and Jackman is careful to emphasize that “emerging” in his description means we are still a long way from nirvana. Further, with a bow to the cops-vs.-generals divide, he concedes that in the near term, when violence gets out of control, “there may well be a need to stabilize the situation by the imposition of a peacekeeping force. These operations are likely to be military in nature for some time into the future. They require some capabilities and skills that at present only the military is organized to provide at the necessary scale and speed.” This caveat seems to me only realistic.
Nevertheless, Jackman sees the quiet efforts of many groups, on many fronts, contributing to something new and important on the world scene. Friends have played many important roles in this structure’s development, along with other religious peace workers. If this structure finally does “emerge,” it could prove to be the next major exception to Jerry Frost’s depressing catalog of failure.
Jackman believes there are many ways, globally and locally, we can plug into this work. There is much to learn, but no grand coalition to join, no single party platform to endorse. I was going to add that there are no dues to pay, but of course there are, in the sense that the blues singers use that term: If any Friend wants to work seriously and constructively in a field of international conflict, she or he will have plenty of dues to pay. There is another advantage as well:
Work against war “in general” is much less subject to the recurring differences of conviction over oppression vs. war. It points toward a day, distant perhaps but not inconceivable, when this cruel choice could be resolved simply by becoming largely obsolete.
In the meantime, if future wars resemble the past, conflicts which are relatively easy for most Friends to oppose, like Vietnam, will also be relatively rare. The new war is likely to be more typical (like the U.S. Civil War, and World Wars I and II). If so, we can expect to see Lincoln’s dilemma surface again, along with the predictable differences over the horns of terrorism vs. war. In such cases, Friends will do the best we can, and most will probably feel, with some justice, that we have not done enough.
Nevertheless, Jackman offers an informed, hopeful vision in the midst of the gloom generated since September 11. I share his sense that Quaker and religious pacifist peace witness that is indigenous, inner-directed, cooperative, and deploys our resources with strategic vision can, over time, have a significant, and usually surprising impact on the larger society and the problem of war “in general.” It will be an impact most visible to the informed eyes of people of faith, who can see beyond the diversionary spectacles offered by the mass media; but the media do not define reality.
In particular, Jackman wisely notes that this vision can help us “combat the inevitable fear that we have to fix everything. We can choose what is appropriate or crucial for us to do, and know that others will do likewise. Too often nothing gets done when we treat peace work as a huge amorphous cloud of needy symptoms. We need to explore situations, identify what our best contribution can be and then stick at them.” This advice applies, I might add, even to those who are called to work on policy issues in Washington, DC.
When it comes to the new war, what can this mean? Once the war is over, – if it ever is – there will be lots of room for work involving the three Rs of peacework: relief, reconstruction and reconciliation. These are all part of the long-term work of peacebuilding. In the meantime, we can’t forget about the Fourth “R”, that of ongoing efforts to resist and counter militarist ideology and propaganda, even if these efforts often feel like the cries of voices in the wilderness. This need for Resistance could become much more important if, as I very much fear, the ever-expanding demands of America’s new imperial project ultimately requires a return tothe military draft.
Even Jerry Frost affirmed that “the church can provide a sanctuary, and it can defend those who for Christ’s or conscience’ sake refuse to fight, and stand as a rebuke to those who seek to sacralize war.” I suspect we will also have opportunities to defend our civil liberties, shrunken as they are under recent “anti-terror” legislation. Paradigms shift and shift again, but that still leaves, to borrow another biblical metaphor, many fields ripe for the harvest.
In short, what does the new war mean from a Quaker religious pacifist perspective? Well, for this Quaker, it provides a useful reminder of our limitations, and gives us a full plate of intellectual and spiritual sorting out to do. At the same time, for those who still feel called to pursue the path of pacifist witness despite its uncertainties, we still have plenty to do.
On this path, discouragement, suffering and confusion may be our frequent companions; but despair is not a option.
Shifting Paradigms list:
1. Political solidarity in US policy circles.
2. Lincoln’s Dilemma: War or terrorism, which is worse?
3. Cops vs. generals?
4. American Activism vs Christian non-resistance/leaven-in-the-loaf
5. Focus on an emerging peace structure vs. protest against the endless wars.
Copyright (c) 1999, 2002 by Chuck Fager. All rights reserved.
Bibliographic notes:
The essays cited here by J.William Frost, David Jackman, and Dan Seeger are all published in: A Continuing Journey: Papers from the Quaker Peace Roundtable, Pendle Hill 1995, edited by Chuck Fager. Pendle Hill, 1996. Sustaining Peace Witness in the Twenty-First Century, also edited by Chuck Fager, was published by Pendle Hill in 1997.
“Fayetteville’s story,” says Catherine Lutz, “is America’s story.”Lutz should know. She’s an anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina, and author of Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Beacon Press), published last fall. She spent six years interviewing people on and off the post, ransacked heaps of mostly forgotten historical records, and her book shows great empathy for the city, its people and its experience. (A mini-review: I strongly recommend HomefrontI to all who want to better understand the reality and impact of American militarism on our society. It’s also well-written.)Even so, Lutz and her book are controversial here in Fayetteville. She’s been repeatedly denounced in the local paper here as a left-wing ivory tower intellectual who hates the military, Ft. Bragg, and Fayetteville.
A Wednesday afternoon at Quaker House: I was digging into the pile of papers on my desk, the doorbell rang, and a young man was on the porch. His name was Thomas Mayfield.