Three Twentieth-Century Revolutions:
Liberal Theology, Sexual Moralities, Peace Testimonies
By Jerry Frost
he Peace Testimony periodically emerges as a major focus for Friends, generally when there is a major war. From 1900-1999, more people - soldiers and non-combatants - were killed during wars than in any previous century. Future generations will look back on these last hundred years as we look upon the bubonic plague and wonder how medieval Europeans could have endured. Friends endured this century by working to prevent war by expanding the requirements for peace. The theme of this section is how liberal Quakers took a traditional Quaker belief on being personally opposed to war and transformed it into a vision for all politics. The emergence of a variety of peace testimonies as a salient feature of Quakerism and the continuing changes in the definition of peace and how to attain it constitute a third revolution. Peace was not terribly important to the first generation of FGC leaders who shared the general optimism that war had become obsolete. The future would be a World Court applying international law, arbitration of disputes between nations, and Hague Conferences to guarantee rights of civilians, outlaw pernicious weapons, and promote disarmament. (Swarthmore College's William I. Hull was the major American Quaker involved in such activities; his prominence was like that of Rufus Jones in liberal theology.) Friends supported various peace organizations, attended world congresses of peace groups, and reprinted William Penn's treatise advocating a European parliament. Building world peace was part of Christianity's social gospel, and Friends saw other Protestants catching up to a testimony first enunciated in 1660s.
World War I was a terrible shock and fundamentally transformed FriendsÆ thinking about war. First came dismay at the paroxysm of hate on the homefront accompanying the war and distress that a majority of young Friends in Britain and America would serve - phenomena repeated in World War II. One hundred leading Hicksite Friends in PYM issued a bellicose statement supporting the war. Pacifist Hicksite, Guerneyite, and Conservative Friends felt isolated from the wider American community and came to realize how much they had in common. And so in an attempt to preserve the peace testimony, they created new institutions, thereby gaining experience in the usefulness of bureaucracy.
In 1914 British Friends founded organizations to help German refugees and to provide alternative service for conscientious objectors - the Friends Ambulance Corps and the Friends War Victims Relief Committee. The British Friends had three years experience before the US entered the war and so the Americans could point to the British work as a concrete example of what could be done and would model the AFSC on British plans.
The AFSC would be the first occasion since 1827 that all American Friends would work together. It was created as a temporary service organization for COs who otherwise would join the army. Since the relief work was to be done in a war zone, the U.S. government allowed no religious proselytizing, a restriction Friends made into a virtue. Friends discovered that they were sufficiently good at relief that later the French would allow them to do post-war relief and reconstruction in Verdun and Americans would finance and the US government would provide food for feeding German children. Virtually all Friends during WW I embraced relief and reconstruction work as ways to fulfill the peace testimony. In addition, for some liberals, the AFSC became the living embodiment of the social gospel and working for peace an essence of religion.
Friends also learned that having a successful service organization brought access to power. From 1917 until the 1970s Quakers could make important people in Washington hear their perspective, relying first on Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, and then Quaker Herbert Hoover who served as Wilson's food czar, later Secretary of Commerce and then President. After 1932 Clarence PickettÆs close association with Eleanor Roosevelt brought access to the President and important businessmen. In the 1950s Paul Douglas who had signed an FGC recruiting statement in 1929 became an influential Senator. Unfortunately, I don't know of any examples of successful Quaker lobbying on the most famous 20th century Quaker, Richard Nixon, but then his meeting was not a part of FGC.
In 1943 in an effort to preserve the AFSCÆs tax-exempt status, Friends created the FCNL as a lobby which was to represent the concerns of all Quakers to Washington. My sense is that it is much more difficult now than earlier to establish contact with Senators and Congressmen and that much lobbying is done with legislative aides. Still, the FCNL eased consciences because liberals had long known that peace work was political as well as moral. The politicization and secularization of the peace testimony are major themes of the twentieth-century.
Between the Wars
The All Friends Conference in 1920 drew upon lessons learned in World War I by jettisoning the belief that wars were caused by evil leaders and focusing on what we now call structural conditions - economic injustice, colonialism, racism, and arms races. Insisting that personal abhorrence of wars was an insufficient conception of the peace testimony, the Friends dedicated themselves to doing whatever kind of work was necessary to prevent another major war. One step, taken in 1924, was to make the AFSC a permanent organization with separate divisions for foreign, interracial, peace, and home service, including a subcommittee on women's work.
The AFSC, in cooperation with peace and social order committees of yearly meetings, concentrated upon international affairs: the League of Nations, the World Court, and efforts to disarm and outlaw war. Because social relief now counted as peace work, Friends in 1922 began feeding the children of striking coal miners, later creating new towns for coal miners, building a school and orphanage in Mexico, and providing relief to both sides in the Spanish Civil War.
Because Friends had concluded that prejudice and ignorance caused wars, the peace testimony also involved campaigns to educate. In the 1930s Friends promoted peace through work camps for youth, peace caravans to college campuses, poster and essay contests in schools, and petition campaigns undertaken in cooperation with religious and secular peace organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom - both of which had many Quaker members.
For Friends seeking a politically relevant spiritually-based pacifism, Gandhi's technique of principled non-violence or Satyagraha campaigns seemed to offer an effective tool. Gandhi insisted that his campaigns for India's independence from Britain be moral in both means and ends, with the goal being not victory but the triumph of truth. The effort was to persuade, not to coerce, and both sides should be prepared to learn and change their positions during the struggle. Because Gandhi offered an alternative to arms races, power politics, and war, Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic embraced non-violence as a way to conquer evil.
Neither British liberals nor evangelical Friends approved of the AFSC's policy of silence about religion, a stance that remained a necessity because of the theological divisions among American Friends. By contrast, the English created Quaker international centers or houses in Berlin and other European capitals for people to learn about Quakerism and peace. London Yearly Meeting merged into one agency missionary endeavors and the Friends Service Council. So there was a kind of theological balance in British peace work that the Americans could not duplicate.
Evangelical Friends, who supported a large network of missionaries, saw peace work as a byproduct of a religious duty of converting sinners. Beginning in 1954 in Kansas and 1964 in California, evangelicalistic Friends ceased supporting the AFSC, an organization they identified with liberal Friends. Indiana Yearly Meeting's 1991 decision withdrawing institutional affiliation with AFSC but allowing individuals and meetings to continue support shows the continuing divide between fundamentalist and conservative evangelicals and liberals over how to promote peace. (Opposition to gay and lesbian rights also underlay this action.) So by default, the AFSC which began as an organization to unify all Friends became dominated by liberals, with most of its financial support coming from non-Friends.
World War II
The approach of World War II occasioned great soul-searching among Liberal Friends, who had kept close ties with British Quakers. Aware of the evil nature of the Nazi state and strenuously engaged in attempting to aid Jewish emigration from Germany and Austria, Friends also opposed British and American re-armament and, because they saw war as the greatest of moral evils, favored appeasement. The agony that the war caused perceptive Friends is illustrated by the response of two weighty Friends: Rufus Jones and Henry Cadbury. At the beginning of World War I Rufus Jones entered into deep depression; at the start of World War II Henry Cadbury underwent a similar trauma. Both soon rallied and devoted their energies to peace work.
As in World War I, Friends sought to protect the rights of COs, to provide relief for the victims of war, and to plan for what they hoped would be a long lasting postwar peace. The official statements of all American yearly meetings for pacifism must be balanced against the large numbers of young Friends who volunteered or served in the military when drafted. A majority of all Friends, young and old, supported the war. The war illustrated the division between two kinds of pacifists: religious sectarians who opposed all wars on principle and liberal internationalists who saw the peace testimony as primarily political, a way of reforming institutions. In a later time period the difference would be between those who support total disarmament instead of arms control. Except during war, the disagreement could be papered over by concentrating on immediate goals.
Working with the Brethren and Mennonites and with support from the Federal Council of Churches, Friends sought to do relief overseas but Congress insisted instead that pacifists work in Civilian Public Service camps located in rural areas in America. These camps run and paid for by Friends were under the authority of the War Department, an arrangement that neither pacifist men, Friends, nor the government found satisfactory. The men sought to do work of importance; the government was more interested in quarantining and not coddling pacifists; and the AFSC and Yearly Meetings were caught in the middle. Though the work the COs did in mental hospitals, in conservation, and as human guinea pigs seems in retrospect very impressive, many COs who sought directly to help people coping with war gave up in disgust, left the camps, and accepted imprisonment. Friend's estrangement from and distrust of the national government began in World War II. CPS camps, like the AFSC camps in World War I, would provide Quaker leaders for the postwar period.
The Cold War
The Cold War brought respectibility - the AFSC and British Service Council received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 - and controversy - with conservatives charging that Quakers were leftists who were soft on communism. In the 1930s Friends had seen the dangers of working closely with communist front organizations who were not really interested in peace; so they remained wary of being infiltrated. Yet the AFSC refused publicly to criticize the Soviet Union because building up cultural and personal contacts seemed the only way open to defuse hostilities.
At home, an initial reaction in 1945 against the atomic bomb and support for a World Federation ended after the 1948 election, the Chinese
revolution, the Berlin airlift, and the Korean War. Anti-communism became ingrained, supported by both political parties and Protestant and Catholic Churches. Friends were not alone, though sometimes it must have seemed so, in seeking to ease confrontations with the Soviet Union, but to conservatives all peace organizations seemed suspicious and it was easy to call critics of America's military posture "soft on communism."
During the Cold War Friends pursued their work for peace with a variety of foci. The AFSC began issuing a series of carefully-reasoned political tracts on Soviet relations, the bomb, Israel, and Vietnam. Designed to reach a wide audience of educated non-Friends, the tracts contained no discussion of religion or pacifism. Direct action came from demonstrations and sit-ins led by A. J. Muste against nuclear weapons and sailing of the yacht Golden Rule into areas of nuclear tests. Nothing had much effect until in the mid-1950s nuclear testing threatened to drench the world with radiation. So Friends helped create the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and anti-nuclear agitation became a major movement in the late 1950s and eventually resulted in a limited nuclear test ban treaty in 1962. Still, the anti-bomb agitation did not stop the increase in the number of nuclear weapons or improved systems of delivery by guided missiles.
The AFSC found it was also easier to raise money for projects which had an immediate humanitarian payoff such as aiding the victims of war or helping the poor to improve their standard of living than to enlist donors for peace education. Recognizing that relief was a necessary but short term fix, the AFSC initiated rural development projects which involved Americans' expertise and financial assistance in aiding villagers. Technical competence was more important to the success of such projects than being a Friend; so gradually the number of Friends employed by the AFSC in field projects diminished.
Yearly Meeting Peace and Social Order committees and the AFSC, whose members tended to be more activist than most Friends, began working for black civil rights and employing Afro-Americans in the 1930s, but most Quaker schools did not integrate until the 1950s. When Media Friends school admitted its first "Negro" in 1938, a boycott by white parents almost shut it down. When the young Friends movement surveyed its membership about Media Friends, one-third still favored segregation. Swarthmore College did not integrate until during World War II. Cape May was a segregated town during the entire time that FGC held its conferences there. Even when Quaker schools integrated, the number of minority students enrolled remained miniscule.
Martin Luther King addressed the FGC in 1958 and Friends officially supported his non-violent campaigns, with a few Quakers participating in the freedom rides through the South. When Prince Georges County in Virginia, closed its public school system rather than integrate and enrolled whites in private schools, the AFSC supported and staffed an alternative school system for blacks. The Quaker vision of social justice was integrationist, and, after King's assassination, Friends who had supported programs for social justice had difficulty in adjusting to the demands for black separation and reparations.
The War in Vietnam
The Vietnam War occasioned a rethinking of the peace testimony as Friends searched for an effective strategy. Unlike the World Wars, virtually all liberal Friends opposed the war and few young men volunteered for the army. The AFSC coordinated anti-war demonstrations of many organizations (insisting that leftists' vituperative language against each other cease), issued pamphlets against the war, and provided draft counseling. Older Friends worried that a Woodstock generationÆs bad language, smoking pot, and free love would jeopardize the political protest.
The length of the war and the seeming inability of demonstrations and teach-ins and other "civilized" protests to change government policies brought more radical critiques of American society and earlier Quaker peacemaking. Friends had long insisted that one could oppose the cause or the action, but should hate the evil while loving the evil-doer. This policy was now seen as dooming protest to ineffectuality; good manners were insufficient to protest a genocide in Vietnam. For radicals and even some moderates the issue became: what kind of direct actions would cause Americans to wake up? Should Friends engage in direct violation of the law? And if they did so, should they as a matter of conscience accept imprisonment?
In 1966 during the FGC gathering, America bombed Haiphong Harbor and a group of Quakers decided to go to Washington and have a worship service in the Senate gallery - an action which was against the law. The few who advocated direct action became A Quaker Action Group. In 1967 New York and Philadelphia Yearly Meetings approved of sending medical supplies to both South and North Vietnam. Because the AFSC feared jeopardizing its tax-exempt status if it openly broke the law, A Quaker Action Group sponsored sending the ship Phoenix to Haiphong. Cambridge, MA meeting among others became a temporary sanctuary for draft-resisters. Friends conducted vigils to protest the war outside the Pentagon, at courthouses, and at the White House. In order to demonstrate solidity with Buddhists in South Vietnam who were being persecuted, Norman Morrison, a Baltimore Quaker, in the Pentagon parking lot doused himself with gasoline and lit the fire. His sacrifice had little effect on American public opinion but had a traumatic impact on other Quaker peace activists and a lasting influence on Robert McNamara. His daughter visited Vietnam last year and found that her father there is a martyr-hero, a symbol of reconciliation.
The crux of Friends' debate over tactics was simple: either the American war in Vietnam was a single aberration needing reform or it was symptomatic of a fundamentally sick society which needed a revolution. Most Friends believed the first and sought appropriate tactics within the system. Radicals - some young and others old - complained that the AFSC had become a white male-dominated liberal bourgeois hierarchcal organization which was too conservative in mentality and tactics. And Quaker meetings seemed even more complacent. Somehow meetings had to be radicalized from within. Within the AFSC, a few staffers hoped for a North Vietnamese victory and worked for a revolution in America. Some insisted that past Quaker relief had been ineffective because it reflected an unconscious paternalism. Effective relief could come only with adequate representation of the groups needing help, Blacks, and Third World peoples. Even though recruiting such people might weaken the Quaker component of the organization, the AFSC agreed to recruit more minorities. The result was far reaching, a geographical broadening of the AFSC board members and a lessening of PYM's influence, and a gradual divorce between the AFSC staff and Friends so that by the 1980s fewer than twenty percent or more of its employees were members of the Society of Friends. Of course, under liberalism, membership was not crucial and the AFSC now believed that more important than membership was that board and staff supported in theory and practice vaguely defined Quaker principles.
Out of the turmoil of Vietnam came several modifications of the peace testimony. First was resistance to military taxes, a tactic that had been dormant since the American Revolution, but was now debated by Yearly Meetings and espoused by a small minority of Friends. Second, among peace activists there would also be a great variety of life styles from the counter-cultural communes to the middleclass women in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Third, there would also be a lessening of the number and influence of business classes among Friends, and fewer unprogrammed Friends would vote Republican. The membership of FGC Friends came increasingly from social workers, educators, and professionals - all of whom tended to vote Democratic. Fourth, Friends also pondered the effects of Americans' high consumption patterns in shaping America's business and foreign policy. The result was a rather consistent leftist slant in Quaker critiques of policies of American foreign policy. Fifth, the war in Vietnam, unlike the two World Wars and Korea, did not lead to a major influx of new members who became Friends because of the peace testimony. What seems to have happened instead is that radicals who worked with Friends to oppose the war moved on because they found Quakerism too confining. Sixth, a program termed the "New Call to Peacemaking" emerged from evangelical Friends and sought through a series of conferences to unite the peacemaking efforts of all Friends in conjunction with the work of the Mennonites and Brethren. The program's clear focus was on faith-based peace work. Unfortunately, the movement never really impacted individual congregations, perhaps because they were not interested in the merging of evangelicalism and peace work.
The 1980s
In retrospect, most striking about the 1980s is how quickly the ideological and tactical divisions between moderates and leftist Friends evaporated. FGC (and many FUM) Friends combined against a common enemy, the Reagan's administration heated anti-communist rhetoric which resulted in military confrontations in nuclear and conventional arms. The 1980s began with frustration as America, proclaiming an alleged military weakness, escalated its arms race with the Soviet Union. Friends had long approved cultural exchanges and detente with the Soviet Union and enthusiastically supported the two Salt treaties and the nuclear freeze, even though these measures channeled rather than ended the weapons build-up.
However, unlike the 1950s, in the 1980s Quakers found powerful allies within the main line Protestant denomination and the Roman Catholic Churches which issued carefully reasoned analyses of the dangers from nuclear weapons. In addition, Roman Catholics in Vatican II and in encylicals now added pacifism and conscientious objection as morally acceptable components of traditional just war theories. The papacy sought to create detente with the Soviet Union. The landslide electoral victory of Reagan in 1984 showed, however, the limits of the anti-nuclear campaign. Still, Quakers now recognized that the anti-nuclear movement was now a worldwide phenomenon drawing support from many religious traditions.
A second area of ecumenical peace work involving Quakers, other Protestants, and Roman Catholics was in opposing US policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The United States began sponsoring an armed revolt by Contras, some of whom had been supporters of the dictator Samoza's regime, against a leftist Sandanista government in Nicaragua. In El Salvador, the US provided financial and military support to an army linked to paramilitary groups who opposed Marxist revolution by terrorizing any potential opponent.
In both countries, Roman Catholic liberation theologians justified violence as a last resort against a social structure that denied basic human rights. Quakers ignored liberation theology's strongly sacramental emphasis and were far to liberal to sympathize with its starting point of the assumption of implicit Christianity (orthopraxis) of the peasants. Instead, Friends approved of liberation theology's emphasis upon structural violence, support for consciousness raising among peasants, complaints about the practices of American companies in Latin America, and critique of the U.S.'s visceral anti-communism and indirect military intervention.
Friends responded creatively to the crises in Central America. Central American meetings and towns sponsored refugees and provided legal assistance and sanctuary. A sister-village program linked a group of churches and meetings to towns in El Salvador. Groups of Friends journeyed to El Salvador and Nicaragua to establish contact with people and brought back information on conditions and the effects of U.S. policies. Humanitarian assistance might be buying a cow as a way of encouraging dairy farming or helping a village obtain an adequate supply of good water. A new organization named Peace Brigades International sent unarmed individuals, including Friends, who would live in villages or accompany activists whom it was feared the paramilitary groups might assassinate. At home, Friends and churches kept a relentless publicity campaign going which, when combined with opposition in Congress, restrained the policies of the Reagan administration and helped preclude direct American intervention. By 1990 the end of the Cold War facilitated a free election in Nicaragua and a compromise settlement in El Salvador.
1990s: New Challenges
Disappointment greeted those Friends who hoped that the end of the Cold War would allow a respite from an emphasis upon international peacemaking. War in western Europe appeared unthinkable as the European Union even created a common currency. Peace of a sort returned to Central America, South Africa and Eastern Europe. However, ethnic cleansing occurred in Bosnia and Kosovo, genocide in Rwanda, anarchy in Somalia and Liberia, and religious war in Sri Lanka and Afganistan. Possible compromise solutions over border disputes remained elusive between India-Pakistan, Israel and its neighbors, Ethiopia-Eritrea, and in the southern edge of the former Soviet Union. Congo remained on the edge of total break down. North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, Chechnya, Iran, and Macedonia remained flash points.
At the beginning and end of the decade military intervention under UN auspices in Kuwait and under NATO in Kosovo, seemed like old fashioned colonial wars in the disparities in military power and casualties between the sides, but victory provided no solution to long-running problems and peace still seemed far away.
Even promoting democracy seemed of little help. Elections in India, Croatia, the new Bosnian state, and Serbia increased ethnic animosity. One bright spot was the increasing use of international monitoring to guarantee a fair election, although its impact depended upon the local government's caring about international opinion.
Traditional support for the UN seemed questionable after the war over Kuwait, because the great powers proved able to manipulate the Security Council for their own ends. But there was no reason to believe that sanctions alone would have persuaded Saddam Hussein to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. The same was true for Milosevic in Kosovo.
UN peacekeeping without military force failed in Somalia; US intervention with troops eased the famine but, after casualites, the world left the Somali warlords to cause additional suffering. The US and UN refused to intervene in Rwanda until it was too late. When UN peacekeepers were lightly armed and interested in humanitarian relief, as in Bosnia, their presence may have actually facilitated fighting. Lightly armed peacekeepers proved a failure in Sierra Leone. A major UN effort to help Cambodia resulted in the continuation of an authoritarian government. By the end of the decade, even strong supporters of the UN wondered whether there was a future to traditional peacekeeping.
Sanctions had earlier appeared an alternative to fighting. In South Africa sanctions which had the support of the black majority appeared to have helped influence the white-dominated government to end apartheid. But in the 1990s the use of sanctions against Haiti, Iraq, and Cuba appeared to have increased civilian sufferings. Sanctions now were seen as a too blunt instrument which hurt innocent people without weakening repressive governments.
Friends also wavered in their response to globalization of markets, hoping that it would help to raise living standards but fearing that it would only increase the disparity between have and have-not nations. They searched without finding an effective way to insure that transnational companies paid decent wages and protected the environment. It is apparent that those who become the leaders of future peace activity will need a solid grounding in economics.
The major focus on Quaker peacemaking in the 1990s was non-violence conflict resolution. The Alternatives to Violence Program allowed Friends to do something useful at the local level. Non-violence could be both a technique and a philosophy for life. It could be studied in colleges and public schools and used as a method of child-rearing, in community disputes and in international negotiations. The techniques were applied in an enormous variety of situations: landlord/tenant, neighborhood disputes, racial conflicts, domestic abuse, and school violence. Trained facilitators could teach those imprisoned for violent crime that there were more productive ways to solve problem.
Non-violence seemed almost a panacea for liberal Friends seeking politically and socially relevant peace work. After all, it could be taught by churches as having a spiritual foundation but also be secular enough to survive a court challenge about religious instruction in schools. Non-violent conflict resolution was religiously attractive because Jesus could be seen as a non-violent revolutionary and politically correct because Martin Luther King and Gandhi had been advocates. Since the realism and idealism taught by political scientists seemed unable to deal with such a chaotic world, it is no wonder that Quakers acted as if non-violence summarized the peace testimony.
However, there were difficulties in method and content. non-violence could be construed as a means to a morally suspect end. It was used successfully to implement the ônot in my backyardö approach to social problems. And even if the means were moral, the end might be suspect: opposition to school integration or public housing or stopping women from entering a clinic for an abortion. Theorists distinguished between non-violence as conflict resolution which was not about compromise but a "win, win" result and as mediation of dispute. They disagreed upon the scope of the roles of the third party as teacher or facilitator. Some practitioners argued that conflict resolution was a method for managing conflicts rather than solving problems. Scholars debated whether practices should focus on issues involving "interests" or perceived "needs" of the parties.
There were also religious issues: did it simplify the gospel to see Jesus primarily as an advocate of non-violence rather than a prophet for social and religious justice or an exemplar of self-sacrificing love? If non-violence were more than a technique, what was its positive program for life? Should the peace testimony be simplified into non-violent conflict resolution? The kind of critique leveled at liberal pacifism in the 1930s could be applied in the 1990s to non-violence: did it deal adequately with issues of power, did it too easily dismiss the problem of evil, did it understand the difference between what was possible for an individual and for a state? Even many who found non-violent conflict resolution an extremely useful tool to use within a society wondered about the extent to which it would be useful in intractable international disputes.
Friends' love affair with non-violent conflict resolution was explainable as another manifestation of the religious liberalism of FGC Friends. Non-violence could be seen as congruent with traditional Quaker pacifism and the approved modern Quaker style of behavior. Its successes seemed to show the soundness of liberal Friends' vision of humanity as basically good. Conflict resolution was not judgmental and sought to persuade rather than coerce. Non-violence required some training but not great analytic rigor and it was most important for the practitioner to have a sensitive understanding of the participants. It could be defended as psychologically sound and, therefore, was intellectually respectable. And whatever its weaknesses, liberal Friends found no better alternative to non-violent conflict resolution as a way for them to work for peace. They concluded: better to use a flawed tool than to do nothing.
NEXT SECTION: Conclusions
[Part I: A Century of Liberalism] [Part II: A Moral Revolution] [Part III: Testimonies for Peace (this page)] [Conclusions]
