When Woodrow Wilson asked the American people in August 1914 to remain ‘impartial in thought as well as in action’, he explained that sustaining neutrality in the midst of catastrophic war would depend on ‘what individuals and society and those gathered in public meetings do and say, upon what newspapers and magazines contain, upon what ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their opinions on the street’.

To be sure, Wilson's call for impartiality from the pulpits of America was ignored by many ministers, priests and rabbis, and increasingly so over time. After US intervention in 1917, the Wilson administration and the Creel Committee sent sample sermons to churches for how to preach on Liberty Loan Sundays and other national occasions. Churches, evangelists, denominational magazines, theological journals and seminar professors became wrapped up in the war. At least, certain types of leaders who had no qualms about politicising and mobilising their pulpits did so. But that militant response was far from the whole story, in that war or any American war. Regardless of Wilson's intentions and expectations in 1914, he knew something that careful historians of religion and war ought not to ignore or underestimate: America's response to the World War depended to an important degree on ‘what ministers utter[ed] in their pulpits’. If we apply that phrase beyond the pulpit to cover religious experience in all its complexity, then the point becomes even more relevant. The war affected every mainline denomination: Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pietistic and confessional Lutherans and Presbyterians, Jews, liberal and conservative Evangelicals, and the Brethren, Mennonites and Quakers of the historic peace churches who faced great difficulty as they negotiated with and sought accommodation from the federal, state and local governments.

Isaac May's no-nonsense history of the American Quaker experience in the wars of the twentieth century is a fine example of how to proceed with the type of focused studies necessary for a larger synthesis and any hope of generalising about religion and war. But it is valuable not only as a means to another end. Its chief merit lies in the attention May gives to particulars rather than being satisfied with abstractions or convenient categories and labels. To borrow a phrase from the Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs, May does not allow vocabulary to substitute for thought. As a result, May avoids the trap of determinism. American Quakers did not all think and act the same way, driven solely by their theology and history. May's Quakers are living, breathing human beings who adapted themselves and their ideas in response to a complex and changing world. May maintains both sympathy and critical distance. He is fair-minded and judicial. And that allows for needed texture and nuance. He demonstrates that Quakers presented no uniform response to America's wars in the last century. Indeed, the title of his book could have been ‘Friends Divided’. Quakers’ use of the historic ‘peace testimony’ varied widely, from Evangelicals to liberals and from war to war, and not always in ways we might expect. Responses to war ranged from strict pacificism and nonviolence, to draft resistance and claims of conscientious-objector status, to public protests, and even to support for war – whether World War I, World War II, Korea or Vietnam – as a painful but necessary means to peace and justice. For some, nonviolence was a matter of personal conviction and was modestly offered as an example of how to live one's life as a ‘prophetic witness’ against the power, violence and ambition of the world. Other Quakers universalised nonviolence as a divine mandate to transform the world and critiqued not only war itself but the state apparatus that waged it. Quakers found themselves forced to confront the government, from local draft boards to the Secretary of War and, in a sense, had to become political in order to protect an apolitical sphere. And that experience laid the groundwork for more intentional direct action in the future in antiwar protests and draft resistance. This is an admirable study, and May manages to accomplish all this and more in less than a hundred pages. It repays a careful reading.

May's work is synthetic, drawing from a large body of secondary and primary sources, but it ‘also aims to fill the gaps in scholarship and provide a single short narrative history of Quaker involvement in several twentieth-century conflicts to provide groundwork for more detailed studies in the future’. In this he succeeds. And the groundwork he provides will not only help in the writing of ‘more detailed studies in the future’. It will also contribute to the writing of comprehensive studies of war and religion. After more than a hundred years, there is still no general history of American religions and the First World War, nothing comparable to the work done on the War for Independence and the Civil War.

Historians today have no excuse not to do excellent work on religion and war. The scope and depth of resources now available has no precedent. In fact, the amount of material is overwhelming. Online digital archives provide access to hundreds of American newspapers, theological journals, denominational magazines and widely circulated Evangelical periodicals such as The Sunday School Times (published from 1859 to 1966). The complete run is available at the Internet Archive. Careful study of even this one magazine would overturn a lot of preconceptions about where theological boundaries lay before the Fundamentalist-Modernist upheaval of the Twenties.

Wilson's neutrality proclamation came into view again on 3 September 1939 when President Franklin Roosevelt faced the prospect of a second world war. As he contemplated what he expected of the American people as Germany and the Soviet Union rolled into Poland, he turned to the Bible. And what he said takes on a striking character in light of May's book: ‘Most of us in the United States believe in spiritual values. Most of us, regardless of what church we belong to, believe in the spirit of the New Testament – a great teaching which opposes itself to the use of force, of armed force, of marching armies and falling bombs. The overwhelming masses of our people seek peace – peace at home, and the kind of peace in other lands which will not jeopardize our peace at home.’ ‘This nation’, he continued, ‘will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.’

But the problem of conscience lay at the very heart of what Quakers faced in World War II and the Cold War to follow. And they remained divided over Korea and deeply so over Vietnam. It was none other than the Quaker Richard Nixon on whose tombstone would be inscribed, ‘The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.’