In Kingdom to Commune, Patricia Appelbaum does two things. First, she offers a rich account of what she calls “Protestant pacifist culture” during the middle of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the ethnographic turn in the study of American religion, she argues that “pacifism is not a purely intellectual, moral, or ethical stance but exists in a matrix of culture and lifeways” and that the pacifist cultural matrix of the twentieth century was “historically contingent,” shaped by a variety of accidental factors (2).

Appelbaum uses a mix of sources to illuminate pacifist culture, devoting one chapter to the “pacifist vernacular”; another to liturgies, plays, and pageants; and yet another to the “iconography” of pacifist artists. She explains how pacifists associated in such groups as the Fellowship of Reconciliation imitated exemplary “heroes” from Jesus to Gandhi and told themselves stories about soldiers making friends across enemy lines and women offering breakfast to armed intruders. Such practices molded Protestant pacifists into a distinct “folk.”

This is an illuminating approach to a group of people who might seem to be significant primarily for their failures. Protestant pacifists could not keep the twentieth century from becoming the bloodiest on record, but they could sustain a shared identity. Reading Appelbaum's book, I repeatedly mused that if there is any meaning to the contested category of “religion,” one of its traits might be that it is better at sustaining group identities than at changing the world.

Appelbaum's second task is to chart a historical transition. Around 1940, she claims, the flavor of Protestant pacifist culture changed. In a “turn of the cultural kaleidoscope,” a tradition that had been optimistic about modernity and at home within the Protestant mainline became instead “antimodern,” “sectarian,” and committed to “pacifism itself” rather than to “Christianity as the source of pacifism” (3). The new pacifists streamed into Friends General Meeting, helping to push that strand of Quakerism toward a post-Christian spirituality. They also “milked goats for peace” at more than a dozen agrarian communities. Appelbaum's account of this transition illuminates the roots of 1960s communalism. Anyone who has gone folk dancing just before “crossing the line” at a military base will find here a convincing explanation of how those two practices became intimately linked.

I was perplexed by several aspects of Appelbaum's argument. She bookends her narrative with case studies of World War I pacifist Harold Gray and Cold War peacemaker Marjorie Swann, but the differences she highlights have more to do with gender than with a turn away from modernity. She never fleshes out the picture of pacifism before the transition, concentrating instead on identifying the cultural strands that would coalesce in 1940. This omission makes it difficult to assess the transition. Was the old pacifism a longstanding tradition or an ephemeral expression of the post–World War I zeitgeist? Did the new pacifism emerge because modernist pacifists turned sectarian, or because they ceased to be pacifist? (In both cases, the latter answer is closer to the truth.)

Appelbaum's terminology expresses unresolved tensions. One of the words she uses to describe the new pacifism is “sectarian,” echoing Valarie Ziegler's distinction (in her study of antebellum pacifism) between the “sectarian radicals” of the New England Non-Resistance Society and the “champions of Christian civilization” in the American Peace Society (The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], 3). But Appelbaum also acknowledges that, unlike classic sects, post-1940 pacifism “permitted multiple belonging,” “lacked explicit rules for discipline and expulsion,” and was dispersed among diverse theologies and organizations (43). Thus, in the epilogue she claims that “folk group” is a better term than “sect” (206). I wish she had made this terminological choice more consistently, reserving “sect” for those few postwar pacifists who joined the Bruderhof or other theologically exclusive groups.

Similarly, Appelbaum's most frequent label for the transition is “paradigm shift,” a term borrowed from Thomas Kuhn. But she also describes the new pacifist culture as an “abeyance structure”—a term used by sociologist Verta Taylor to describe “structures that preserve the lore and skills of a movement in small social units until conditions favor the movement's resurgence on a larger scale” (34). A footnote implies that Appelbaum was introduced to this concept late in her research. I wish that she had consistently replaced “paradigm shift” with “abeyance structure,” for the latter term beautifully conveys the way in which communal and agrarian practices helped pacifists keep the faith through World War II and the Cold War, allowing them to emerge as mentors for the new Vietnam generation of activists.

“Paradigm shift,” by contrast, implies a decisive and non-reversible change: after Einstein, there is no going back to Newton. American pacifist culture is more like a swinging pendulum. Had Appelbaum extended her narrative back to the beginning of the twentieth century, she would have found agrarian Tolstoyans at Georgia's Christian Commonwealth farm; had she looked forward she would have found mainline Protestant leaders condemning the Iraq War with one voice. Even the shift from normative Protestantism to a looser spirituality is nothing new: back in the 1850s the pacifist Henry Clarke Wright espoused a religion of humanity, while others moved from Protestantism to spiritualism.

This is not to challenge Appelbaum's persistent use of the term “Protestant,” but to radicalize it. She rightly defines “Protestant culture” broadly enough to include Quakers and Unitarians; I would add that the socially radical wing of American Protestantism has always had a fuzzy boundary with post-Christian spiritualities that drew converts from Protestantism and shared its bias against centralized authority. Prior to Vatican II, the line separating Catholics and Protestants in America was actually sharper than that separating Christians from non-Christians, and many social radicals were “Protestant” in their thinking without being Christian.

This is one of two new books devoted primarily to the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The other, Joseph Kip Kosek's Acts of Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), is a more conventional institutional history, and readers who wish to know who did what and when will want to read it first. Remarkably, the books offer distinct accounts of the Fellowship's legacy: for Kosek, it paved the way for the use of Gandhian nonviolence in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements; for Appelbaum, the heirs of the Fellowship could be found on hippy communes, Quaker meetings, and interfaith dialogue groups. Both accounts are correct, and their juxtaposition suggests that twentieth-century pacifism may have more surprises in store for historians.