The Friends Peace Testimony Reconsidered
-- page 3 --
V
The 1660 Letter portrayed Friends as a meek and apolitical people: “ . . .as for
the kingdoms of this world,” it said, “we cannot covet them, much less can we
fight for them . . . .” But this sentiment evidently did not survive the passage
across the Atlantic: in Rhode Island, Friends not only coveted worldly power,
but achieved it. Although not founded by Friends, the colony’s annual election
in 1672 produced a Quaker Governor, Deputy-Governor, and a Quaker majority in
the colonial assembly. And Friends held most or much of the local political
power in the colony for many years afterward.
This novel development (almost a decade before William Penn
began the “Holy Experiment” in Pennsylvania) soon had the recognition and
endorsement of no less a Quaker authority than the first signatory to the 1660
Letter, George Fox himself. He visited Rhode Island in 1672, attended New
England Yearly Meeting there, and stayed on for several weeks afterward, the
honored guest of the Quaker governor, Nicholas Easton.
In a sermon there, Fox expressed great satisfaction with the new regime:
“What an honor is it that Christ should be both Priest, Prophet, Minister,
Shepherd & Bishop, Councellor (sic) Leader, & Captain & Prince in your Colony,”
he declared. He also – as was his habit– gave them lots of concrete advice,
about outlawing drunkenness, swearing, etc., and upholding their ancient
liberties. (Quotes from Weddle, see below.)
But with the power of the magistrate or governing authority for upholding righteousness, there also came the issue of bearing the sword against evil-doers. This role was, remember, explicitly affirmed in the 1660 Letter. Now this sword was in Quaker hands. What were they to do with it?
For Rhode Island’s new leaders, this was not an abstract
question: on the one side, from the sea, there were threats of invasion by
French and Dutch naval forces. On the other side, they were surrounded by
forests inhabited by increasingly restive native tribes.
No mention of war by Fox in Rhode Island has been found. But in other
contemporary epistles, he made clear his support for the Romans 13 stance. For
instance, in a 1676 letter to Friends on the Caribbean island of Nevis, Fox
wrote,
“For if any should come to burn your house, or rob you, or come to ravish your
wives or daughters, or a company should come to fire a city or town, or come to
kill people; do not you watch against all such actions? And will you not
watch against such evil things in the power of God in your own way? You cannot
but discover such things to the magistrates, who are to punish such things; and
therefore the watch is kept and set to discover such to the magistrate, that
they may be punished; and if he does it not, he bears his sword in vain.”
(Emphasis added.)
Fortunately for the Rhode island Quaker magistrates, the naval threats did not
materialize. But in the late summer of 1675, an alliance of native groups
launched a massive, region-wide terror war aimed at driving white settlers from
New England. This struggle, known to history as King Philip’s war (after the
Christian name given to its leading chieftain, whose Indian name was Metacomet.)
The horrifying impact of this war, and its impact on settlers in Rhode Island
and elsewhere, was powerfully evoked by the historian Meredith Baldwin Weddle,
in her pathbreaking recent book, Walking In the Way of Peace, (Oxford, 2001):
. . . [T]o appreciate the moral task facing each Quaker during King Philip’s
War, it is essential to imagine the immensity of the danger threatening the
people of New England; the fear of violence shredding all certainty and all
expectations, just as sword and hatchet shredded the bodies fallen in their way.
. . . . The imminence of death alone would have been enough to shake each
vulnerable settler or Indian; when death itself was dressed up in atrocity,
whether real or rumored, it would be the rare person who could be sure that
principle would not yield to terror or rage. For the Quaker, alone in his small
house, miles perhaps from a neighbor, fear and horror faced down the ordained
love for his enemies. . . . To the extent that the danger and fear can be
approximated from the security and predictability of modern America, to this
extent no hesitation can be seen as remarkable or shameful.
(From the security and predictability of modern America? This must have been
written in the good old days, of late 2000.)
What was a governing authority to do in the face of such unbridled terror? More pointedly, what was the duty of a Quaker “governing authority”?
We don’t know if those Friends in office engaged in much theorizing or soul-searching. We do know that they did two things:
First, they adopted and upheld the first conscientious objector
statute, exempting from militia duty those whose religious scruples forbade the
bearing of arms. (We can be reasonably confident that this law was largely the
product of their Quaker convictions, because as soon as non-Friends regained
political control, they repealed it.)
And second, they went to war.
VI
As Weddle summarizes their course:
“Rhode Island exiled Indians, supplied boats to the Plymouth
and Massachusetts armies, blockaded Philip on Mount Hope, rescued English
soldiers, provisioned and provided a safe haven for colonial troops, raised and
dispatched soldiers, stored ammunition, transported troops across Narragansett
Bay to battle, encouraged the mobilization and training of the local militias,
deployed gunboats, manned an official garrison, contributed troops to the final
search for Philip himself–and, at last, tried and executed prisoners of war.
This is scarcely the record of either a neutral government or an inactive one.”
(p. 170)
How did the Quaker officeholders reconcile this record with the pronouncements
of the 1660 Letter? As far as Weddle’s extensive research could determine, they
didn’t bother. But we can plausibly speculate that in their course they were
attempting to make room for both their pacifist brethren who still thought they
were living in Micah 4’s Peaceable Kingdom, while also observing Romans 13’s
stern mandate for magistrates to “execute God’s wrath upon wrongdoers”; after
all, both of these texts were in the 1660 Letter.
At this point, the Letter’s phrase “as to our own particulars,” which was edited
out of the sentence as quoted in modern Disciplines, comes back into focus. How
much different were the “particulars” of powerless, persecuted Friends in
England in 1660 from the “particulars” of Friends elected to office in Rhode
Island? And how much difference did such divergent “particulars” make?
Weddle did find one testimony by a group of Rhode Island Friends denouncing other unnamed Friends for abandoning their conviction of “dwelling with [Christ] in his peaceable kingdom” and returning to “that faith which stands in carnal weapons, or the arm of flesh . . . .” (p. 244) But she did not turn up any response from the authorities to this criticism.
Another authority who had no comment or complaint was George Fox, who sent an epistle to Rhode Island Friends in 1677, ten months after the war’s end. In it, among other things, he cautioned the Quaker colonists against hasty marriages, and chastised a member for killing a neighbor’s horses which had strayed onto his property. But amid these advices, he made no mention of the Rhode Island Quaker officials’ involvement in carnal warfare; not a word.
If we consider only the familiar excerpts from the 1660 Letter,
it is quite possible to look back at these official Friends in Rhode Island and
join the critics who challenged their faithfulness to the peace testimony. But
it is equally possible to fit them right into the Letter’s text if we consider
it as a whole, because it takes such a role for granted..
That is, this canonical document, far from dictating the unambiguous prohibition
of all Quaker involvement in any war suggested by the widely-known excerpts from
it, includes the very tensions and ambiguities, rooted in their turn in guiding
texts from the Bible, which very likely gave rise to these Friends’ course.
What can be learned from this fuller examination of both the 1660 Letter and this brief case study of its first application by Quakers in public power? One lesson would be to take a more critical attitude to the texts presented to us in our books of Discipline.
Another would be to disabuse ourselves of the notion, often heard today, that once upon a time there was a golden age of uncomplicated faithfulness to a clear standard of Quaker witness, which was followed by a steep decline into the moral morass of today. Early Friends may indeed have had moments and periods of exaltation, where they felt a strong sense of Christ’s presence and divine favor. But they also, from early on, had to wrestle with the application of their convictions in life situations which called such certainties starkly into question, and in which people of good will followed their light and testimony to very different places.
A third lesson, the last for this essay, is that the Friends Peace Testimony has been subject to reconsideration from early on in our history, and such reexaminations continue even now. We are not thereby abandoning our Quaker heritage, but very likely engaging it in one of the deepest and most faithful ways.
If this beginning reconsideration of the “canonical” 1660 Letter, or rather the familiar but bowdlerized excerpts from it, deprives some Friends of easy answers to hard questions, and a comfortingly secure belief in the uncomplicated Quaker Good Old Days, this Friend is not sorry. They – and we– are actually better off to be shucked of such illusions, and to begin the sometimes hard but critical work of rethinking and reclaiming a peace testimony for us, and for our time.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Next page: APPENDIX: The 1660 Letter–Full text
Next >>