Christian pacifism (nonresistance)

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.

Pacifism is a defining mark of the traditions that hold it, the Mennonites and other Anabaptist bodies, and the Quakers, collectively known as the historic peace churches, and it has led their members to conscientious objection and, at times, to persecution and migration. It contrasts with the just-war tradition worked out in the wider church, which permits force under strict conditions. The affirmation flows from a reading of the gospel as requiring a visibly distinct community that renounces the sword, and it has given these small traditions an influence on peace witness out of proportion to their size.

Quaker pacifism developed independently of Anabaptism, formalized in the Peace Testimony that George Fox and other early Friends issued to King Charles II in 1660, declaring that they utterly denied all outward wars and strife and would not fight with any weapon for any cause. The shared conviction of the historic peace churches shaped twentieth-century law as well as doctrine: their sustained advocacy contributed to the legal recognition of conscientious objector status in the United States and Britain during the First and Second World Wars, a concrete civil accommodation that traces directly back to convictions these small traditions had held, at real cost, for centuries before the states in question were willing to formally recognize them.