Can a Government Be Pacifist?

Christian pacifists such as Stanley Hauerwas are too quickly brushed aside in conversations about what a good state ought to look like. This is a missed opportunity for Christians of all stripes who are seeking to live as faithful citizens amid many political temptations and confusions.

For starters, Hauerwas has not called for a retreat from politics, but is rightly concerned that the dominant mode of political engagement will swallow Christian ethical commitments whole. As he likes to quip, much as retreat might be nice, “We’re surrounded, so there’s no place to retreat to. So Christians have to engage the world in which we find ourselves.” The question is not whether Christians should get involved in politics, but how – to which Hauerwas would invariably joke: “the same way porcupines make love: very carefully.”

Hauerwas admits that Christian success in politics might look like worldly loss. If a Christian somehow ends up president, he warns, “if they do the right thing, they won’t be re-elected.” Christians must live in the awareness that faithfulness often leads to martyrdom, not political success. After all, in Revelation the saints are identified as those who conquer by means of the apparent defeat of their Lord (“the blood of the Lamb”), as well as their own apparent defeat (“the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death”).

It is one such apparent defeat, Hauerwas once told me, that he considers the “only successful Christian experiment in government”: Quaker Pennsylvania. Even Christians who, like me, lack firm pacifist convictions can learn much from the efforts of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn.

Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, oil on canvas, 1771.

Penn had a hand in founding three of the early American colonies, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, while Roger Williams (not a pacifist, but a fellow nonconformist) founded Rhode Island. Anyone attempting to revive the concept of a Christian commonwealth should attend to the example of these Christians who belonged to neither Canterbury nor Rome nor any other national church. As historian Frederick B. Tolles observes, the Quakers “had created in the American wilderness a commonwealth in which civil and religious liberty, social and political equality, domestic and external peace had reigned to a degree and for a length of time unexampled in the history of the western world.”

Is the answer to today’s ascendant Christian nationalism, one that is overly susceptible to capture by dangerous racial and ethnonationalist causes, a saner and more salutary version: what we might cheekily call “Quaker nationalism”?

A Community of Quaker Character

The major features of this Quaker government were as follows: affirmation of the equal dignity of all human beings, a commitment to religious liberty, and the practice of noncoercive nonviolence in public and social life, all of which contributed to Quaker Pennsylvania’s “success” (per Hauerwas).

While Williams’s Rhode Island had already established a strong Christian precedent for the proper treatment of the Indigenous and their rights within the territories controlled by European settlers, Penn’s approach was equally commendable. In a handwritten letter to the Lenni Lenape tribe, Penn speaks of the mutual obligations demanded by natural law: “This great God has written his law in our hearts, by which we are taught and commanded to love and help and do good to one another, and not to do harm and mischief one unto another.” Rather than accept as binding the charter to these lands that he had received from King Charles II, Penn insisted that he also desired to receive the Native Americans’ consent, “that we may always live together as neighbors and friends.” This was no empty rhetoric: Penn compensated them generously for the land he already legally possessed (potentially a major factor in the bankruptcy that overtook him later in life).

It was also Pennsylvania from which the first statement against slavery in the colonies emerged. In 1688, six years after the colony’s founding, a group of Quakers in Germantown wrote a petition condemning the “traffick of men-body.” This was almost a century before the Declaration of Independence, which Martin Luther King Jr. would later call merely a “promissory note” on the full dignity and equality of all human beings. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania would not begin the gradual process of abolishing slavery until 1780, and that process would not culminate with the full eradication of slavery in Pennsylvania until 1850, just a decade before the Civil War.

The roots of American religious freedom also extend back to Pennsylvania. The principle of religious freedom now enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution did not come out of nowhere. Like Williams’s Rhode Island, Pennsylvania was a haven for free churches and full religious liberty at a time when religious establishment – one government-aligned church – was the norm, as it was throughout Congregationalist New England and the Anglican colonies in the South.

Religious liberty was not merely the product of a deal cut between James Madison and Virginia Baptists at the drafting of the Bill of Rights; at the time it was already a principled and practiced reality with more than a century of precedent in places like Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, even predating John Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689). Pennsylvania’s imprint on the Constitution was felt even before the ratification of the First Amendment: everywhere throughout the American charter where the need for oath-giving can be replaced with a simple “affirmation,” one can see the fingerprints of a long Quaker history of scrupulous observance of the New Testament’s prohibition on oaths.

Again, centuries before the military draft was ended in 1973 (an effort led in part by US Senator Richard Schweiker, himself of Pennsylvania free-church stock), Pennsylvania was already molding a society that allowed for conscientious objection to military service. Such conscientious objection was not so much an exemption in early Pennsylvania as the social norm. Pennsylvania, which Penn called a “peaceable kingdom” (an allusion to Isaiah 11:1–9), had little need for taking up arms because of its long record of peaceful relations with the Native Americans, enabled by Penn’s right dealing with them early on. Even so, the Quakers were noncoercive in their pacifism, meaning that others were free to take up arms in self-defense and police work as they saw fit.

Why “Quaker Nationalism” Failed

In 1763, Pennsylvania’s peaceful relations with the Native Americans were put to a decisive and violent end. At the hands of the Paxton Boys (a group of Presbyterians living on the Pennsylvania frontier), the last remaining Conestoga Indians were massacred.

This failure of Pennsylvania’s Christian liberalism was the product of its success. Religious liberty meant that Pennsylvania was open to all comers, including Ulster Presbyterians like the Paxton Boys who did not share the Quakers’ commitments to nonviolence. Religious liberty also meant that Penn’s descendants were free to abandon Quakerism themselves. After Penn’s death in 1718, many did just that, including Thomas Penn, who succeeded his brother in leading Pennsylvania. His conversion to Anglicanism is said to have cast off “the Quaker faith that sustained his father’s humane benevolence,” leading to exploitative deals that deteriorated Pennsylvania’s relationships with Native Americans. It was Thomas who was Chief Proprietor of Pennsylvania at the time of the 1763 massacre, and who, some believe, failed to take decisive action to protect the Conestoga.

While the Quaker Party in the Pennsylvania Assembly continued to dominate even as the Penns abandoned Quakerism, fresh outbreaks of conflict proved challenging for these pacifist politicians, beginning with the French and Indian War. Whether it should be read as political improvisation amid religious pluralism or a failure of pacifist nerve, the Quaker-controlled Assembly found indirect ways to support various war efforts: £4,000 for the “King’s use” during the War of Jenkins’ Ear against the Spanish, and funds earmarked for the provisions and clothing of the army during King George’s War against the French. While Pennsylvania’s pacifists personally avoided violent action, they nevertheless made financial arrangements for others to go to war. Was this cleverness or compromise?

In 1756, the desires of the remaining pacifists were overruled and Pennsylvania hurtled directly into war for the first time in its history. As Kevin Kenny writes in Peaceable Kingdom Lost, “memories of the French and Indian War died hard among frontier settlers, who blamed the Quakers for failing to provide adequate defense and harbored deep suspicions about local Indians, including the Conestogas.” According to this account, the massacre of the Conestogas less than a decade later was a result of Quaker failure to take up the necessary political responsibility to defend Pennsylvanians on the frontier. Yet as Benjamin Franklin argued in the aftermath of the massacre, the problem was not Quaker pacifism but Ulster violence – the Paxton Boys who viewed Indigenous peoples as “Canaanites” to be purged from the land.

So was this the complete failure of a pacifist experiment in government? An impartial historian, I think, would say not.  Quaker policies held strong for more than seventy years, a political tenure only outstripped in the modern era by the Chinese Communist Party. The peaceable transition of power is a hallmark of democracy, not its failure, after all. Moreover, many Quaker principles have endured to this day, as we have already explored above.

Pacifism does not entail passivity or civic irresponsibility; Pennsylvania’s pacifists were remarkably active in the face of violence. As Horst Weigelt notes in Migration and Faith, while they refused to take up arms, Quakers and other Pennsylvania Christians committed to pacifism “gathered substantial monetary donations to compensate the Indians for wrongs they had endured” in an attempt to buy the peace. They found ways to support their ideologically diverse community without violating their own consciences. As one political ally of the Quakers remarked: “We all have willingly helped bear the burden and expenses in the townships, whatever happened to someone.”

It is not correct, then, to frame debates about pacifism as if they came down to those who would commit to take up civic responsibility and those who refuse. Instead, the proper question becomes: What does Christian responsibility require? Whatever its allure, violence cannot ultimately guarantee that the world will be safe. And yet history shows that a conscientious decision to avoid violence may also have tragic knock-on effects. A Quaker commonwealth is not exempt from this reality. Still, Christians in Pennsylvania found unusual ways to live out their faith publicly, with an integrity that continues to underwrite the best of America’s tradition of political liberalism.