III. Facing a few uncomfortable Facts
In 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.
Copyright © 2002