Elon University, Elon North Carolina
April 24, 2002
An Essay in Five Parts
I. 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.