Quaker Theology #6 -Spring 2002

                                                                                REVIEW ESSAY

A Great Deep: The Peace Testimony and Historical Realism

II

Meredith Weddle complains, at the end of her book, about "An uncharacteristic silence in Quaker records," which she says "has veiled the complexities of Quaker pacifism." This may be true of the period she studied; but it was not a problem for Thomas Kennedy in British Quakerism 1860-1920.

His subtitle, The Transformation of a Religious Community, lays out his agenda. And for it there is, two centuries after Rhode Island’s war, a plethora of material: minutes, speeches, articles, books, letters, journals and even court documents. These he was able to supplement, in his early years of work, by interviews with some of the principal characters of his later chapters, adding the perspective of their old age to the passion of youthful documents produced in medias res. Yet he handles this flood of material judiciously and with a sure hand, sustaining a narrative that evokes many strong characters and recounts dramatic events.

There is in these pages much more than the peace testimony; his dates alone make that clear. The book begins with the remarkable burst of renewal in British Quakerism, which became what he and others call the "Quaker Renaissance," the culmination of a conscious effort to stop and reverse a long decline of both numbers and spirit. Any such venture would be almost certain to bring on some degree of internal conflict, and London Yearly Meeting was no exception to this rule. There were struggles over theology, church structure, and an array of social issues.

Each of these would be worth a substantial essay; but running through the whole period like the proverbial bright red thread is the issue of war and the peace testimony. As London’s "transformation" unfolded, this issue came inexorably into center stage, and moved from an abstract debate to a question of life and death practice. As Kennedy puts it,

The most important product of the Quaker Renaissance was the revitalization of the Society’s peace testimony. The young men and women who so ardently resisted the Great War and the imposition of conscription did not suddenly and conveniently discover Quaker pacifism once the war began . . . Quaker resistance to the Great War not only caused the public perception of Quakerism to be inexorably linked to pacifism . . . it also raised the stature of the Society of Friends in the post-war world to a higher plane than it had ever previously occupied. . . . One prominent . . . politician called Quakers the ‘religious body which came through the war least tainted’. (9)

As the period opened, a writer in The Friend of London, calling him (or her)self "Pacificus," could say in truth that, for the middle and upper-middle class Victorian Society of Friends:

We live in a well-ordered State, where persons and property are . . . secure from the hand of violence, and in a country where the presence of a foreign enemy has not been felt for centuries. It is no trial of faith for us to abstain from the use of arms. . . and to refuse to engage in military service. . . . It therefore becomes us, at the present day, while steadfastly supporting the Christian doctrines which we believe to be right, to speak with deference, as never having really had our principle put to the test. (245)

This comment should resonate for many of us; and like us, the Victorian Friends’ long period of security was like the Titanic, steaming inexorably toward fatal icebergs of war.

The first major worldly clash which jolted British Friends was the Boer War of 1900-1903, in which British forces fought rebellious Dutch-descended Afrikaner settlers who wanted independence. When the war began, London Yearly Meeting had just been through a period of intense internal theological and generational controversy, as a younger, more liberal generation struggled to unseat an older Evangelical establishment. The insurgents were headed for ultimate success, but as the new century began, the contest was far from over.

It was predominantly the younger militants who were led to protest the British role in the war, which produced such doleful innovations of twentieth century combat as the concentration camp. But in addition to intense and occasionally violent public opposition to their peace statements and meetings, the peace activists were also shocked to find that a significant number of mainly older Friends, including some very weighty figures, supported the war, and the imperial venture of which it was a part.

Among these was the now-revered convinced Friend, and author of the classic Quaker Strongholds, Caroline Stephen. Stephen even appeared at a peace meeting to announce her position, causing consternation and dismay in many of her hearers. But she was unmoved in her belief that

the Quaker testimony against all war did not take the form of any ethical theory of universal application . . . as to the ‘unlawfulness’ of war . . . I personally cannot but recognize that . . . certain wars appear to be not only inevitable but justifiable . . . I cannot, therefore, regard all war as wholly and unmitigatedly blameable. (257)

(For that matter, Stephen was also against women’s suffrage; but that’s another story.)

One outcome of the division over the Boer war was that many of the coming generation that had been shocked by it set out to renew (reinvent?) a strongly antiwar peace witness among British Quakers. And after a decade of work, as the First World War approached, many felt they were ready to take on the war machine. They also thought of themselves as part of a larger antimilitarist movement which could potentially disrupt the ability of national governments to wage wars.

Their idealistic folly in the face of onrushing calamity is plain enough in hindsight. Yet their illusions hardly compare with those of the statesmen who piled up corpses by the millions, and I found the saga of these young men–and many women too, who were often as vigorously outspoken–an inspir-ing one just the same. War came; and if they didn’t stop it, they never gave up trying, and many steadfastly refused to join it.

Soon, the war machine raised the stakes, coming for male Friends in the form of conscription, posing the direct threat from which they had for so long been exempt.

Reactions to the draft, Kennedy reports, seemed to fall into three more or less equal categories: one group enlisted in the army, and took its share of casualties; a second group resisted conscription; and a third opposed the war, but managed to avoid either risk.

Among the resisters, more than a hundred ended up in prison, among them many of the Society’s "best and brightest." One of these was Wilfred Littleboy, a future Clerk of London Yearly Meeting, who spent two years in a prison with the Dickensian name of Wormwood Scrubs. Beside them were many radical women Friends, some of whom risked arrest by challenging wartime censorship. Their sufferings had the continuing support of the Yearly Meeting, the officers of which were firmly in the pacifist camp throughout.

But as in Rhode Island, Quaker unity was only apparent. In 1918, when three Quaker militants were tried for defying censorship, John Henry Barlow, the Yearly Meeting Clerk, interrupted the annual sessions to go with an official delegation to the trial as a solemn show of support.(As he did so, he yielded the clerk’s chair to the first female Friend to sit in that position; but that, too, is another story.)

A noble gesture; yet when the convictions of the three were on appeal, a new solicitor appeared at the hearing. He announced that he had come on behalf of "a large number" of "real" or "patriotic" Friends, who wanted nothing to do with such disloyalty, and who believed that supporting the war and the Empire were the true way to uphold Quaker peace principles.

Kennedy comments:

Quaker pacifists were prone to suggest that many war-Friends became actively involved in the Society’s affairs only ‘when the outbreak of the present war disclosed their wide divergence from the position of Friends as held throughout long years of trial.’ But such an assertion was difficult to sustain given the number, and sometimes the stature, of those who claimed to be moved by a conviction of the Inward Light which embraced the national cause. There were, in fact, significant defections from the peace camp in nearly all of the eighty British monthly meetings, often from among ancient and distinguished Quaker families. (389)

Nevertheless, while there was division, the Yearly Meeting overall finished out the war in a remarkable state of inner resolve: seasoned by the suffering witness of some of its most stalwart younger members, and somehow undaunted by the diversity it encompassed. Kennedy closes his story in 1920 on a note of unabashed admiration, which I was drawn irresistibly to share:

So, guided by the renewed authority of the Light of Christ Within, armed with a rejuvenated peace testimony more powerful than the commands of the State and moved by a quickened sense of social and economic justice for all women as well as all men, the British Society of Friends faced the world of the twentieth century resolved to create the Kingdom of God on earth. That they have so far failed to do so comes as no surprise; nor should anyone be amazed that they have never ceased to try. (420)

What can be learned from these two books?

For me the first lesson is that there was no "Golden Age" of pristine Quaker unity and faithful witness, by comparison to which we Friends today are a pale, compromised imitation. This notion of "Early-Friends-Good/Modern-Friends-Bad comes up in many guises these days, from almost every corner where special pleading and hidden agendas dwell. But such "Handbasket theology" is rubbish. As Weddle shows, in spades, we have much to learn from early Friends such as her Rhode Islanders. But we need not, should not hang our heads as we contemplate them.

Second, both Rhode Island in 1675 and London in 1915 show that bearing a Quaker peace testimony is perennially an ordeal of faith. This truth applies on at least three levels: to each of us inwardly, in our hearts and souls; within the body of Friends challenged by a given war; and then between the Society and the warmakers, be they the State, or non-state forces which would make us enemies and targets. The Apostle Paul’s warning that we work out our salvation "with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12) applies here as much as anywhere.

Yet third, in these texts we can also see that the "great deep" of our peace witness, while hiding reefs and conflicting currents, is also a deep spring of spiritual energy. It has repeatedly renewed itself, and the Society, even in the midst of seeming confusion. So we need not hide from this diversity, or take it as evidence of defeat or even unfaithfulness. The struggle of faith may often be painful; but the fact of it is no cause for shame, or despair.

And not least, these two superb books show we have nothing to fear from seeing our history whole, strengths, weaknesses, incoherence and all. Indeed we are better off for seeing clearly: authentic renewal will be better built on truth, however mixed, than comforting but ultimately self-deluding myths.