The Rise of Liberal Quakerism, Part 7

The Great War

Britain Yearly Meeting was not truly unified against the war. Almost 1000 Quaker men served in World War I, one third of the men of military age. One hundred died. (Kennedy, p. 313) An indeterminate number of Friends drifted in the middle, unsure of what to do. But those who chose to resist ended up defining the yearly meeting’s official stance and even the character of Quakerism itself.

And the peace testimony was “generalized”, by which I mean that war itself was declared the problem, not this particular war, or any particular war for which there might be good reasons to oppose in the specific case. The peace testimony became absolutist, at least in its definition, if not always in its actual employment. A “just” war was now deemed an oxymoron.

The absolutist stand even prevailed officially over an alternativist stance, according to which many Friends felt that alternative service was the appropriate action. Many Friends took that route, but the yearly meeting chose absolute refusal as its testimony, even though this represented only five percent of eligible Quaker men. Their moral influence “far outweighed the paucity of their numbers.” (Kennedy, p. 351)

This was the first direct Quaker confrontation with the state in more than 200 years. The absolutists went to jail. For a while, Wormwood Scrubbs prison was the largest Friends meeting in London. The experience also turned Friends against solitary confinement, which they had originally pioneered.

This stand did more than cement the peace testimony. It also helped cement the new liberal theology, especially the “divine spark” interpretation of “that of God in everyone” that Rufus Jones had introduced a decade earlier. As William Littleboy put it in his Friends and Peace, the peace testimony was a “direct inevitable outgrowth from . . . distinctive message of early Quakerism . . . the universality of the Divine indwelling.” (Kennedy, p. 315)

And of course it cemented an action-oriented engagement with the social order. It also cemented the new infrastructure for organizing witness work—the committee. LYM created the young men’s Service Committee in 1915 to “strengthen the Peace testimony among Friends of military age.” (Kennedy, p. 318) The Friends Ambulance Unit was formed, and the Friends War Victims Relief Committee. Quaker Henry Hodgkin helped form the Fellowship of Reconciliation. For the first time since the dismantling of the traditional faith and practice of recorded ministry, Friends had an established structure for organizing around a concern.

The war also activated resistance on two new fronts, and helped define two new evils: female emancipation against female subjugation, and democratic socialism versus capitalism.

More about these in subsequent posts.