| AUTHOR: Kent, Stephen; Spickard, James
SOURCE: Journal of Church & State. v36 n2, Spring 1994, p. 373.
PUBLISHER: J.M. Dawson Inst. of Church - State Studies
An exerpt from the TEXT:
THE "OTHER" CIVIL RELIGION AND THE TRADITION OF RADICAL QUAKER POLITICS
HISTORY OF QUAKER CIVIL ACTIONS
No religious group has been more involved in sectarian civil religious
action than the Quakers, and this insight holds as true for Britain as it
does for the United States. As one scholar observed,[45] "Friends, in
fulfillment of their peace testimony, have remained at the core of nearly
every important twentieth-century peace organization and, indeed, in every
movement that defends and insists upon the sanctity of human life."[46]
What makes Quaker radicalism worthy of sociological scrutiny is its
religious basis. In the three and a half centuries since its founding,
Quakerism has opposed an array of governmentally sanctioned policies on
religious grounds.
In Cromwellian England, for example, Quakerism harbored those who opposed
paying tithes to ministers and gentry.[47] During the bloody persecution
that followed the return of the Stuart monarch, fifteen thousand Quakers
were imprisoned for their refusal to conform to the established church. At
least 450 died in jail,[48] making their group the most persecuted
religious faith in England during the Restoration era.[49]
A few generations later, prominent Friends began a trans-Atlantic movement
to oppose slavery. By the end of the century, even George Washington knew
of the Quaker-run "underground railroad" (as it later came to be called)
for slaves who were trying to escape their bondage. In this effort, "the
Friends were undoubtedly the most persistent Anglo-American lawbreakers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."[50] By the early nineteenth
century, of course, the anti-slavery cause had been taken up by other
groups. But in reaction to these groups' exclusion of activist women, a
Quaker, Lucretia Mott, issued a call for the full rights of women in
society.[51] The Equal Rights Amendment, a celebrated cause for American
feminists in the 1970s, got its name from Mott's early efforts.[52]
Quakers have continued their interest in civil fights into the current
century. Prominent civil rights organizer and pacifist Bayard Rustin--the
person most responsible for the success of the 1963 "March on
Washington"--was raised by his Quaker grandmother, and "through the
Quakers, Rustin was introduced early to the idea of pacifism, of service,
and of racial equality."[53] The legendary peace and civil rights
leader A.J. Muste--who, among other things, was head of The Fellowship
of Reconciliation and a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality--
joined the Society of Friends sometime after World War I.[54] Martin Luther
King, Jr. first encountered Gandhi's teachings through a book by a
Quaker he read while a divinity student. This book, Richard Gregg's The
Power of Nonviolence (1934), "more than any other source helped to
popularize Gandhi's teachings in America."[55] Both Quakerism and
Gandhianism--and their mixture--had a significant influence on other
civil rights leaders as well.
Working for peace always has been at the heart of the Quaker agenda. In
1801, the American Congress so disapproved of the peace efforts of a
self-appointed Quaker diplomat that it passed the Logan Act to keep private
citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. Quakers, though,
continued to violate that law as a matter of conscience. During the Vietnam
War, for example, a Quaker delegation tried, though unsuccessfully, to
negotiate directly with Hanoi.[56]
World War I saw the birth of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC),
which, despite its somewhat patriotic origins, became "one of the world's
leading charitable organizations."[57] Along with its British counterpart,
it won the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize for its relief work in a Europe
devastated by World War II.[58]
In its years of operation, however, the AFSC's "less popular" projects
often have found it at the forefront of disputatious causes, to the
occasional discomfort of government officials in the United States.[59]
The AFSC's Stewart Meacham, for example, was a key figure in the New
Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, under whose direction grassroots
anti-war groups were established across the U.S. Perhaps the most famous
non-violent protest against nuclear weapons took place in 1958, when a
Quaker convert named Albert Bigelow attempted to sail his boat into a
nuclear test zone in the Pacific.[60] After U.S. agents in Hawaii seized
Bigelow's boat, his friends, Earl and Barbara Reynolds, rerouted their
round-the-world voyage through the area. They were arrested by the U.S.
Navy on the high seas, in violation of international law. Though not
Quakers at the time, both Reynolds later converted and became well-
known Quaker activists.
Moving into the next decade, one Quaker's dramatic form of anti-Vietnam
protest "shocked many Americans into asking--for the first time -- why are
we in Vietnam?" In November 1965, Norman Morrison doused himself with
kerosene, lit a match, and immolated himself within sight of the Secretary
of Defense's office. Seven other Americans replicated Morrison's protest by
1970, including an eighty-two-year-old Quaker named Alice Herz.[61] Quakers
later sustained a ten-month peace vigil in front of the White House, and
frequently were arrested for their anti-war activities.[62] To keep the
anti-war movement peaceful, they set up programs to train demonstration
marshals in non-violence techniques, a tactic that has been used in
demonstrations ever since.[63] Perhaps the most famous Quaker antiwar
protester from the 1960s was Joan Baez, the protest singer who assimilated
the tradition from an early age under the influence of her father.[64]
The fundamental right to dissent in American society is guaranteed by the
Constitution and a Bill of Rights whose very foundations early Quakers
helped to lay. When the first-generation Quaker, Edward Byllynge, acquired
land in the trans-Atlantic colonies, he (perhaps working with another
Quaker, William Penn) enacted into law "what has been termed one of the
most remarkable documents in American history: 'The Concessions and
Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders, and Inhabitants of the Province
of West New Jersey'."[65] These Concessions of 1677 guaranteed religious
liberty (even more broadly than did the liberal Rhode Island Charter of
the period), "trial by jury, fair public trials, and freedom from
imprisonment for debt." These ideas mark "an important step in the
development which culminated in the federal Bill of Rights."[66] Moreover,
its provisions about "the common law or fundamental rights and privileges.
. . agreed upon. . . to be the foundation of the government," against
which no contradictory laws were to be passed, represent an early form of
"a binding Constitution and the doctrine of unconstitutional
legislation" that serve as pillars of American governmental
protections.[67]
Byllynge's contemporary Quaker, William Penn, instituted two documents for
his colony of Pennsylvania that were, "in many ways, the most influential
of the Colonial documents protecting individual rights."[68] Arguably the
most significant of the two was the Pennsylvania Frame of Government of
1682. It established "for the first time the fully representative type of
government that has come to characterize the American polity," and it even
contained an amending clause--"the first in any written Constitution."[69]
Penn drew directly upon "his own experience as a persecuted Quaker" by
conceiving "of a government limited in its powers by the rights possessed
by the governed." The Frame of Government's most direct influence on the
American Bill of Rights had to do with judicial procedure, whereby
citizens were guaranteed trial by a jury whose members had the freedom to
decide guilt or innocence of accused parties.[70]
With the changing decades have come changing issues, but the tradition of
protest has remained. In the 1980s, Quakers formed a major part of the
Sanctuary Movement. Recently the AFSC challenged the legality of a law
directed against illegal aliens.[71] (The challenge failed.) The
organization continues to counsel victims of political torture,[72] and
remains active in international efforts to provide food and material to
underprivileged nations.[73] Demonstrations against war and nuclear
weapons, of course, continue as well.
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