Despite the impression given by the headnotes above, this is intended to be one book in two parts. As the author explains in the first paragraph of the work:

This is a peculiar book, intentionally so, in part because it calls on members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, to regain their historic sense of peculiarity.

Douglas Gwyn is well-known to specialists in Quaker history as a prolific author, what in the seventeenth century would have been called a “Public Friend.” Although he has a PhD in Religion, he has spent his career almost entirely in Quaker settings, as pastor in Quaker meetings in California, Indiana, and Maine and on the staff of the Quaker study centers Pendle Hill near Philadelphia and Woodbrooke in Birmingham, UK. His work has been directed as much at fellow Friends as at fellow scholars. Quakerism today is extremely diverse. Public perceptions of Friends in North America and Western Europe are largely set by the Friends who hold to traditional forms of unprogrammed worship combined with theological liberalism and leftist politics, particularly in antiwar movements. The majority of the world's Friends today, however, has embraced a pastoral form of worship and is evangelical in theology. In the United States, the pastoral majority is as likely to identify with the Christian Coalition as the American Friends Service Committee. Gwyn is one of a handful of Friends who has worked across these divisions. This book, however, is clearly aimed at liberal Friends.

The first half of the work, Peace Finds the Purpose of a Peculiar People, combines an exposition of the First Epistle of Peter with an overview of the first century or so of Quaker history, focused on pacifism as a central Quaker doctrine. Gwyn argues that 1 Peter's description of early Christians as “aliens and exiles” embodies how seventeenth-century Friends viewed themselves. Gwyn acknowledges the work of recent historians who have pointed out that Friends before 1660 were not consistent pacifists and included military men. He asserts, however, that Friends committed to being guided by the Inward Light would “renounce the immoral, inequitable, and violent norms of society” (43). That, in turn, would remove the “occasion” for war. But until the society around them followed their lead, they would be called to stand apart from it, “peculiar” in the sense not of difference for the sake of difference but because God had set them apart.

Gwyn concludes this section with an analysis of contemporary Quakerism aimed squarely at liberal Friends. He finds them changing the Inward Light, the Light of Christ inwardly revealed in early Quakerism, into “an inner light, the source of freely adopted subjective viewpoints,” coupled with “a vague notion of continuing revelation . . . used reflexively by Friends to shrug off uncomfortable truths from past generations of Friends and to make any current faith and practice subject to perpetual revision” (68). Gwyn sees too much contemporary Quaker activism as shaped by “the wider progressive sector of civil society” rather than rooted in historical Quakerism (68).

The second portion of the book, however, Militant Peacemaking in the Manner of Friends, dispels any impression that Gwyn wants us to rest contentedly in contemporary American society. He opens with a reading of the Book of Revelation and then proceeds to argue that its depictions of Babylon, the False Prophet, and Dragon are comparable to contemporary American capitalism and empire. For example: “The False Prophet of our time is embodied by the right-wing ideologues and apologists—both religious and secular—for the military-industrial complex. . . . As we rue the clergy who submitted to the intimidation of the Third Reich, so those who wrap themselves in the flag today will be exposed by the Word of God” (88–89). But Gwyn is clear that he considers it self-defeating for liberal Friends simply to throw themselves into Green or Democratic Socialist politics. “It is crucial—in the true sense of crucifying our hearts and minds to the world—that we discern carefully, at every step, the true gospel faith of our Quaker tradition from whatever ideological and theoretical thought frames that appear convergent with it” (91).

This is, then, a work of both history and advocacy, and is always open in its aims. As history, it is generally convincing. Gwyn has only a handful of peers in his command of seventeenth-century Quaker writings. When he ventures into broader historical settings, he occasionally falters. For example, few U.S. historians would agree that the Revolutionary War began in 1775 because “the hot-heads at Lexington and Concord sparked a violent revolution that hijacked the robust argument and nonviolent resistance that American colonists were already waging against Britain's imperial domination” (43). Indexes would have been a welcome addition to the volume as well. But these are minor flaws in readable, deliberately provocative work.