Torn over Pacifism from the Start
~
The genesis of Quaker perspectives on peacemaking was . . . in the apocalyptic caldron of the English Civil War, [(1642-1651) and] Friends generally embraced the cause [of war against monarchy]. It was through Holy War that the Peaceable Kingdom would come. . .
[George Fox viewed] pacifism as vocation, [which is how he] could both decline to participate in the Civil War and yet support not only Cromwell, but Quakers who served in his army. [He originally believed that] a war could be . . . divinely sanctioned [even though some Friends] were called by that same divine power to refuse all war. . .
Quaker pacifism was rare before 1660 . . . [However, with the failure of the English Civil War to bring about the Peaceable Kingdom], the nascent Society of Friends emerged from the crisis with a sense of their calling to . . . lay down “outward weapons” [and take up] spiritual weapons alone. In the Declaration to Charles II of 1660, Friends stated that none of their members would participate in war any more . . .
Though the organizational commitment to pacifism was established, questions of what exactly Friends were to do when wars came emerged. . . Friends began to engage in many experiments to discern how they were to proceed to engage with the government and their larger society with only “spiritual weapons.” Central to this shift was the stress on the inward changes required of anyone to be led by the Spirit and to then manifest peaceableness in their actions. . . [This] notion of seeking and preaching inward transformation was not limited to being evangelical witnesses for the Spirit. Friends sought to discern how the Spirit called them to reform society. . .
In the [American] colonies, Quakers had the opportunity to attempt to reform government towards their peaceable testimony . . . However, . . . they found it difficult to reject war . . . and still have responsibility to govern . . . This was a radical experiment, . . . government established for the good growth of the human spirit, but the seeds of its own destruction were there because of the recognition of the primacy of conscience in democratic governance. . . Quakers argued for freedom of conscience in either advocating for war or advocating for peaceful resistance to the war-making of the government. . .
[By the mid-1800s], pacifism was no longer a distinctly Quaker or radical Reformation notion, since pacifist ideas had spread to other denominations. Further, like other denominations, the Society became divided about pacifism . . . This may have been first evident in the U.S. Civil War. Many young Quaker men, torn between pacifism and opposition to slavery, opted to join the Union Army . . . Similar divisions . . were evident in Britain and the United States during the two world wars. In England and the United States, from thirty to fifty percent of eligible Quakers accepted service in the First World War, and that percentage grew in the U.S. during the Second World War to some seventy-five percent. . . [The] disaster of the First World War revealed the loss of the unified peace testimony within the religious Society of Friends and revealed the horrors of modern warfare. . .
[Across the decades], the Religious Society of Friends developed a vast number of experiments in how to refuse involvement in warfare and incarnate peacemaking. It challenged and changed powerful governments and transformed widespread societal views about the place of conscientious objection, non-violent action, and a host of social attitudes and structures. . . Along with such influences and struggles, Friends now find themselves less distinct from their neighbors and so have merged with larger cultural currents. . .
[As] Quakers experience conflict around the world and within their own Society, it may be a season for the rebirth of Quaker commitment to its own peace testimony and to creative experiments in international and interfaith peacemaking.
– Lonnie Valentine in the Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (2013)