Anabaptists and Quakers affirm Christian pacifism, or nonresistance, the conviction that followers of Jesus must not use violence, participate in war, or take up arms, but are called to love their enemies and overcome evil with good. They ground it in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus counsels turning the other cheek and blessing the peacemaker, and in his own non-violent suffering. For the historic peace churches this is not a counsel for the exceptional but a plain requirement of discipleship, extending to a refusal of oaths, lawsuits, and coercive power in the Anabaptist case.
The Anabaptist position received its earliest formal statement in the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, drafted by the Swiss Brethren shortly after their break with the mainstream Reformation over believer's baptism; its sixth article addresses the sword directly, teaching that the use of force belongs to civil government outside the perfection of Christ and that true believers should neither hold civil office requiring the sword nor use force even in self-defense, a position that went well beyond the milder just-war accommodations most Reformers retained and that marked Anabaptists as a distinct and, in the eyes of both Catholic and Protestant authorities of the time, dangerously radical movement.