It’s Not Just About War

A British Quaker’s View on Pacifism Today

I have always found the response to telling someone that I am pacifist to be the same: “What would you have done in 1939?,” the start of World War II. The question misses two important points about pacifism: firstly, that it’s not just about war, and secondly, that one function of pacifism is to prevent the situation of 1939. Had more people paid heed to the witness of the All Friends’ Conference of 1920 in London, we might not have been fighting in 1939.

That pacifism is ineffective is a challenge that confronts pacifists. It is also part of the current criticism of the peace testimony from some Friends. Certainly, it is easy to look at a world at war and think that peace has little part to play in the crises that we see on the news every night. Even within those humanitarian disasters, however, the work of Quaker pacifists makes a difference. In 2024, I was privileged to meet a Quaker who was involved with the Quaker Tent School in Gaza; she supplied a report and photos for a Quaker magazine that I was editing. Rather than recoiling from the images of the suffering in Gaza, she was promoting learning, dignity, and keeping respectful in time of war. To me, this is pacifism in action, as it emphasizes our common humanity and belief in that of God in everyone.

I would like to invert the question about the ineffectiveness of pacifism by asking when  has war ever been effective. The UK magazine Private Eye got in trouble at the start of the current war in Gaza by printing a front cover stating that the Israeli assault on Gaza was unlikely to provide long-term stability and peace for the Middle East; this statement upset a lot of people. Whereas people always ask how pacifism is effective, no one asks if war is effective. 

When the UK government was proposing to intervene in the civil war in Syria in 2011, I wrote to the leading politicians involved. I reminded them that when faced with violence in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus chose healing over retaliation. I also asked if they would be prepared to talk with me in a year’s time to explain how increased violence in Syria had stopped the violence. None of them agreed.

My point is that pacifism does not have to be something passive; it can be very active. Too much of the wording around pacifism is about absence—the absence of violence or the absence of fighting—when it should be viewed as the activity of making peace.

I think that people who question pacifism also underestimate its challenge to those systems that promote warfare. As Quakers, we all accept and understand peace, but this is not a view as widely held as we would like. An instructive example is a lone Quaker protestor at the UK air force base in Aberporth, West Wales. She has sat for some time at the gate of the base with a banner objecting to the base being used for training in drone warfare. Observers might think her ineffective and assume that the base commanders would not care about an elderly Quaker with a banner sitting at the entrance. However, a newly appointed base commander happened to move into a house in the vicinity and made the mistake of discussing the protest with his new neighbor, unaware that she was a Quaker. Apparently, the base has been very worried by the local protestor and expended a great deal of energy to work out who is paying her, what her “real motives” are, and what she wants. Pacifism is a challenge to the worldview of people in positions of worldly power, and it still has the power to upset them.

This is to concentrate only on war, however, and I started by saying that there are two misapprehensions about the peace testimony: that it is ineffective and that it only applies to war. Perhaps the second misapprehension arises because pacifism is most high-profile in times of war. Yet I regard pacifism as the refusal to use violence to resolve any conflict. I have already used Jesus’s example to us, but pacifism is not just about fighting; it is about conflict of any kind. To non-pacifists, I always ask if they would settle an argument with their partner by hitting them. They are always appalled at that suggestion, so I then tell them that they are a pacifist. To me, a refusal to fight in a war is simply a different point on the same scale of refusing to fight loved ones when you disagree with them.

The concentration on war also deceives us into thinking that we live in a nonviolent society. Again, the media will highlight murders, shootings, stabbings, or any other kind of violent crime, but for me, the root of pacifism is the rejection of all violence of every kind. That means being honest about all the aggression we feel, whether we act on it or not. However annoying it is to pick up the phone to a sales call about double glazing, I am still going to be courteous and polite to the salesperson because they are also a child of God. (They are also doing a job where everyone insults them; I know because I’ve done jobs like that too.) Even refusing to be aggressive to a sales call is a statement of pacifism.  

There have been several occasions in my life where I have had my pacifism tested in potentially violent situations. In the first one, I was standing in a phone booth with my girlfriend while she phoned her parents. (It seems a strange thing to write now that everyone has their own phone, but this was nearly 40 years ago, before mobile phones, when people would routinely wait in line in the street to use a phone.) A man outside the booth decided that my girlfriend had taken too long on the call and started to bang on the booth angrily. Then he tried to open the door; these booths only had handles on the outside. I could have responded violently to this, but instead I chose to stand between my girlfriend and the assailant, absorbing whatever violence he chose to use as he tried to get to her. After finding himself blocked from being able to pull her out of the box, he swore at us both and ran off. The situation was not defused, but sometimes responding nonviolently does not lead to making peace!

I have had to block violent actions since then, too. I once found myself in the middle of a group of people on a night out when some minor, drunken insult had started an argument between two people. I chose to stand between them, and when one of them lunged towards the other, I placed my hands so that he could not move forward and throw a punch. I did this several times before the would-be assailant gave up and complained to friends that I kept getting in the way. On both occasions, I suffered physically for my intervention, but on both occasions the situation did not escalate as a result. To me, this is peacebuilding in action as much as would trying to bring warring parties to the negotiating table. Of course, ideally peace should prevail, and in neither of these situations was I anything as heroic as, for instance, school staff who have talked a potential shooter out of committing their crime. My point is that pacifism does not have to be something passive; it can be very active. Too much of the wording around pacifism is about absence—the absence of violence or the absence of fighting—when it should be viewed as the activity of making peace.

That some Quakers now question the peace testimony saddens me, but I find it understandable. We do all have feelings of needing to take revenge and to retaliate; we can all be prone to holding grudges. Indeed, we live in a society where that violence is celebrated. Not long before writing this article, I was in Shrewsbury, a picturesque town in the west of England. Being a lover of history, I visited Shrewsbury’s impressive red sandstone castle. Within it though was the Soldiers of Shropshire Museum. In the museum were three floors that celebrated war: from the Napoleonic Wars of the nineteenth century to the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s. In filmed interviews with British troops who had been in Yugoslavia, one of the former army officers talked about “the sport of war.” In this museum, there was a small case showing letters from grieving relatives over the years, and I learned that this had only recently been put on show and had caused some objections, because the museum had not wanted to show anything negative about warfare. This is the society we live in; pacifism is a challenge to this, and I believe that Quakers who wish to use violence for any cause need to consider how they might be contributing to our warlike society. 

My point of view as a Quaker is that if we truly believe in that of God in everyone, we have to believe it applies to everyone. I tend to find non-Quakers like to hear about equality until you explain to them that it includes their enemies. Quakers need to bear this in mind, too, because there was someone who did directly call us to love our enemies. It should be a principle that runs throughout Quakerism. Quaker business meetings are unlikely to erupt into violence (that I know of!), but even they are built along ideas of consensus and inspiration from God rather than conflict. We already have a religious society based on principles other than conflict. I see the Quaker mission to be spreading those values to the wider society we are part of, however hard that task is.

If spreading peace seems impossible, I would leave you with the conclusion found in a book I read many years ago, which detailed a history of Quakers in the UK from the 1860s to 1920. In 1920, the International Conference of Young Friends restated the Quaker commitment to peace. The author of the book—not a Quaker herself—finished with these words about the Quaker commitment to creating world peace: “If you know society, you won’t be surprised to know that they haven’t succeeded. If you don’t know Quakers, you may be surprised to know that they have never stopped trying.”