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This chapter examines the social structures within which Protestant pacifism flourished and the routes by which people became pacifists. Pacifist culture is similar to a spider web, spreading outward from center to perimeter, with crosspieces connecting the radii at various points. Protestants exploring pacifism might begin at almost any point on the perimeter—they might follow one strand directly to the center or might travel along several of the crosspieces to other radii, but eventually they would reach the same center. An impact at any point in the web would affect the whole thing. The chapter shows how those social structures and channels of transmission changed around 1940, one manifestation of the paradigm shift that was taking place.

This chapter summarizes the book's main themes and presents some final thoughts. This book showed that pacifism between World War I and the Vietnam era was a multidimensional culture rooted in the particulars of its time and context. It laid out some particulars of that culture in all their overlapping complexity. The book argued that cross-denominational mainline Protestantism was the center of religious pacifism after World War I, and that this Protestant pacifist culture underwent a paradigm shift around the beginning of World War II, primarily between 1939 and 1942. The paradigm shift carried forward many elements of the existing culture, but realigned them and added newer cultural materials. New-paradigm pacifism moved from a mainstream position to a sectarian and marginal one; from an embrace of modernity to skepticism about it; and from a Christian center to a pacifist one.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to help readers see pacifism through broader lenses, especially those of American religion, culture, and history. The focus is on mainline Protestantism, which constituted the center of public religious pacifism in the United States during the large-scale peace movement after World War I. The book argues that that religious pacifism was, and by implication is, a culture, not only an ethical or moral commitment. It traces continuity and change through cultural practices rather than through the usual approaches of intellectual and political history. The book looks at eight dimensions of the culture: social networks, theology, performance, iconography, individual spiritual practice, rituals of identity, narratives, and material culture.

This chapter surveys the most important sources of pacifism—the liberal, evangelical, Social Gospel, and modernist movements—and looks at their most significant critique, neo-orthodoxy. The first section focuses on the period before the paradigm shift, sketching the theological contexts of mainline Protestant pacifism. The second and third sections consider the way these various strands of thought found expression in two important cultural contexts: the works of popular writer and speaker Kirby Page; and the hymnody of peace.

The range of pacifist performance is wide. Individuals and groups enacted their pacifism for intimate gatherings and for the larger public. Speeches, discussion, marches, picket lines, rallies, and public pledges emerged early and remained standard forms of pacifist action. This chapter focuses on the interwar period and on three modes of group performance that were widely used: worship services, plays, and pageants. It considers the written texts of readings, liturgies, and scripts; the gestures, actions, and visual signals through which the texts were embodied and enacted; and the effects of word and embodiment on participants and audience.

In the 1940s, the cooperative farm emerged as a paradigmatic form of pacifist living—not the only model for such living, but unquestionably an essential and central one. However, there is no necessary, self-evident, or biblical connection between milking goats or grinding one's own wheat, on the one hand, and world peace on the other hand. This chapter asks why pacifists made that connection beginning in the early 1940s and considers some of its meanings. It questions Pacifists' own sense of history, which located the connection in early Christian and Anabaptist communalism and in Tolstoyan peasant practices. The chapter considers the nature of life on the farms, and its spiritual foundations and expressions. Finally, it returns to the question of the meanings of cooperative farms in pacifist life and culture.

This chapter examines what Harold Studley Gray's Character “Bad” reveals about the culture of Protestant pacifism. Character “Bad” was an edited collection of letters written by a young man who turned to conscientious objection during the First World War and struggled with its implications. It circulated widely among pacifists and appeared on reading lists for Protestant youth groups through the end of World War II. Character “Bad” introduces persistent themes of pacifist culture—liberal and modernist theological reflection, scrupulous ethics, consistent living, cooperative economics, rural life, prison, and fasting—as well as mutable or contested themes such as conversion.

This chapter looks at the ways everyday pacifists appropriated and circulated biblical texts and theological assumptions to build their own unique cultural language—a language that was sustained through the paradigm shift. It is not concerned with pacifists' reasoned argumentation as much as with the assumptions and allusions that they took for granted, used, and understood.

This chapter examines the most widely used and widely recognized pacifist imagery, the fundamentals of the iconography. These fundamentals fall into four categories: the Bible visualized, especially the image of beating swords into plowshares; heroic and hagiographic images; gardens; and the Peaceable Kingdom. These images cross the boundaries of the paradigm shift in time and content.

This chapter examines the particular interface of mystical spirituality with mainline Protestantism and pacifism, using sources from the 1920s through the 1950s. It presents a historical text that was central to mainline Protestant mystical practice; four spiritual teachers whose thought and practice were well known; and testimony from ordinary practitioners of Protestant pacifist mysticism. The discussion shows how mystical spirituality functioned in part as a religious response to modernity, and how liberal Quakerism offered the primary institutional space for it.

This chapter focuses on Marjorie Swann, a mother with four children, who participated in a civil disobedience action at a nuclear-weapons site near Omaha, Nebraska, in the summer of 1959. Swann was tried and sentenced to six months in federal prison. The judge who sentenced her said, among other things, “You are a bad mother.” Swann's story illustrates continuities and discontinuities in Protestant pacifist religious culture and raises new questions about it.

This chapter first examines the manifestations and meanings of the practices of Protestant peace activists, both before and after the paradigm shift. It then turns to a crucial text that was in many ways a reaction against the verbal character of Protestant activism, even as it retained a measure of confidence in human improvement. Richard Gregg's Training for Peace offered a new model for the “way of life” pacifists advocated. In it one sees both traditional sources and the emergence of a new understanding and practice of peacemaking. The chapter summarizes Training and considers its implications for religious thought, the body, folk arts, and ritualization.

This chapter explores Protestant pacifist exempla. The exempla are among the most revealing of pacifist cultural productions. They define and explore the meaning of peace and what it means to live as a pacifist, and in so doing reveal a worldview, a set of shared assumptions about the nature of reality. Elements of this worldview have been seen in other pacifist cultural practices; the chapter explores how it was shaped and sustained by narratives. These narratives fall into three overlapping genres: brief heroic biographies, often tending in the direction of hagiography; stories that express a commonly held belief, such as the feasibility of international peace; and stories that show how to live a life consistent with pacifist convictions.