The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy called patriotism ‘the savage superstition’, a dissembling preoccupation that can turn black into white, and white into black. It was, he argued, a force at war with the universalizing principles of the Christian faith. Indeed, it was the foundation of war. Patriotism, Tolstoy argued, allowed Christian nations to fall back into what he called ‘the pagan conception of life’, centring on ‘the family, the tribe, and the nation’. Patriotism effected a dechristianization of Christianity by subordinating the love of neighbour to the love of self. It was, he said, egoism dressed up as duty and loyalty to the state or the sovereign. Ultimately, he warned, everyone has to make a choice between a flag-waving orthodoxy or the Sermon on the Mount. He quoted a pacifist Christian minister who had said at a recent conference: ‘If I understand the Scriptures, I say that men are only playing with Christianity so long as they ignore the question of war.’Footnote ¹

Polemical as it is, Tolstoy's perspective resonates with the history of the United States, where attitudes to education, health care and economics, not to mention war itself, have been coloured by notions of exceptionalism and divine favour. During the Cold War, economic individualism was sacralized as a godly antidote to the atheistic collectivism of the Soviet Union. Jill Lepore's magnificent recent history of the United States, These Truths (2018), shows how resistance to the ostensibly neutral project of providing national health insurance mobilized around fears of the ‘Prussianization of America’. When California passed a constitutional amendment providing for universal health insurance in 1917, it was opposed as something that would spell ruin for the United States. Every voter in the state received a pamphlet in the mail with a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the words: ‘Born in Germany. Do you want it in California?’ The amendment was defeated. California's attempt to provide a European-style health system was defeated, washed away on a flood of patriotic sentiment.Footnote ²

If progressive reform on healthcare represents ‘inspiration’ in this particular conflict, nationhood was the ‘institution’, the higher meaning that moderated and ultimately crushed the energies of dissent. Nationhood, in other words, frames what is permissible in the body politic: an invisible yet controlling consideration that transcends even the hallowed terms of the United States Constitution. This may be seen in many areas of public life and policy, but in none more strikingly than in attitudes to firearms and violence. Speaking at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1983, Ronald Reagan swatted away anxieties about what guns actually do with a political sermon about what they mean within the larger history of America. ‘We're a free people, a democratic people,’ said Reagan, ‘we believe in God and we love peace. But let us remember what George Washington warned in 1790 – that to be prepared for war is one of the best means of preserving the peace.’ ‘The United States remains the last, best hope for a mankind plagued by tyranny and deprivation’, he continued, borrowing a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, which was itself a modification of a phrase of Thomas Jefferson. The effect was to trounce disagreement as a failure to grasp America's inner meaning. The goodness of guns rested on the goodness of America: a nation of innocence and force, goodness and power. ‘Standing up for America’, Reagan concluded,

Reagan's speech, like his better-known animadversions on ‘the evil empire’ of the Soviet Union, is an example of what the psychologist Rollo May has termed ‘pseudoinnocence’, a device which processes power through imagined virtue. This can be personal or national. For ‘[i]n America,’ May writes, ‘pseudoinnocence has a history as long as the country's. A “Chosen People” set sail from England, turning its back on a Europe that … stood for sin, injustice, aristocratic exploitation, and religious persecution’ to establish ‘righteousness, justice, democracy, and freedom of conscience’. This doctrine of chosenness turned ego into piety, ‘and the genocide of the Indians – an enterprise the guilt for which we have not yet confronted – is the will of God. This is the hallmark of pseudoinnocence: always identify your self-interest with the design of Providence.’ May speculates that America's exceptionally high homicide rates – three to ten times higher than those of European nations – are connected to this exalted pedigree. ‘This violence’, he observes, ‘exists side by side with a remarkable tenderness and warmth in the American character. We cannot escape the conclusion that some special conflicts must be present in the consciousness of Americans to account for the simultaneous existence of violence and tenderness.’Footnote ⁴

This article will discuss the role of puritan theology in creating the ‘institution’ of nationhood and the resulting force field of innocence, before exploring the ‘inspiration’ of charismatic sects, and what was seen as the heresy of peace. Anthony Berens has written of the ‘New Englandization’ of America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,Footnote ⁵ and others have identified the salience of puritan ideas in the Civil War, not least in the mystical providentialism of Abraham Lincoln.Footnote ⁶ In 1901, Albert Beveridge could describe the American conquest of the Philippines as an event ‘divinely logical’ and a continuation of the New England idea. America was ‘a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe, a greater England with a nobler destiny’.Footnote ⁷ From John Winthrop's famous sermon on the Arbella in 1630 to the great histories of the Indian Wars written by Increase and Cotton Mather towards the end of the seventeenth century, the concepts of land as entitlement and war as divine activity have been powerful considerations in decisions to go to war.

Charity is central to Christian discipleship, argued Winthrop and the Mathers, but it focuses on the family. God's love is uneven. As Increase Mather put it with ominous equanimity: ‘the dealings of God with our Nation … and with the Nations of the World is [sic] very different’. The sins of ‘other Nations’, he explained, God ignores up to a point, ‘and then he utterly destroyeth’ them. In contrast, ‘our Nation’, God watches, protects and reproves, ‘so he may prevent our destruction’.Footnote ⁸ Puritan theology created an aristocracy, and grace became a principle of war.

‘Consider’, boasted Increase in 1675, ‘[t]hat there are no persons in all the world unto whom God speaketh by Providence as he doth to us. … Mention, if you can, a People in the world so priviledged as we are!’ We of ‘this New-English Israel … are more involved than any men Living’ in a new ‘Age of Miracles’. We are, said Cotton Mather, ‘the Apple of God's eye, … prospered … beyond ordinary ways of providence’. We have been ‘dandled in the lap of his providence’.Footnote ⁹ A humourist expressed the logic of a Puritan town meeting thus: ‘Voted, that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.’Footnote ¹⁰ Under the doctrine of election, violence was destiny. Killing was divine.

Histories of the Pequot War (1638) and King Philip's War (1675–8) reveal the stabilizing power of puritan mythology, to the point of crediting God with the accuracy of their weapons. This was perfect innocence. In Captain Underhill's narrative of the Pequot War, one can sense the power of theology to settle nerves and ease consciences. Underhill described the ‘dolefull cry’ of the Pequots as English fire rained down on them ‘at the breake of day’. He recalled the hesitation of his men, adding that ‘if God had not fitted the hearts of men for the service, it would have bred in them a commiseration towards’ the Indians; ‘but’, he noted, with a chilling turn of phrase, ‘every man being bereaved of pitty fell upon the worke without compassion’.Footnote ¹¹

The slaughter was no different, he said, from scenes in the Old Testament in which David ‘harrowes’ and ‘sawes’ whole peoples, under God's instruction, putting them ‘to the most terriblest death that may bee’. Indeed, ‘sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents; some-time the case alters: but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.’Footnote ¹² Emboldened by Scripture, Underhill could marvel at the efficiency of the English weapons against the ineffectual arrows of the Indians. Mocking the indecision of the natives, ‘changing a few arrowes together after such a manner’, Underhill said ‘they might fight seven yeares and not kill seven men’.Footnote ¹³ But ‘finding our bullets to outreach their arrowes’, the Pequots were overwhelmed. And, he added, ‘wee could not but admire at the providence of God in it, that souldiers so unexpert in the use of their armes, should give so compleat a volley’. It was ‘as though the finger of God had touched both match and flint’.Footnote ¹⁴ Some friendly (Narragansett) Indians ‘rejoyced’ at the manner of the victory, amazed to see a man turned ‘over with his heeles upward’ by a single shot. But even admirers came to think that the English mode of war was ‘too furious, and slaies too many men’.Footnote ¹⁵ Underhill was acknowledging the other side of the affair. It did not stop him reporting coldly on the war's greatest atrocity, in which hundreds of Pequots were burnt alive at Fort Mystic. Underhill's men were shocked ‘to see so many soules lie gasping on the ground so thicke in some places, that you could hardly passe along’, but he ascribed the slaughter to a stern and nerveless deity who ‘hath no respect to persons’.Footnote ¹⁶

In his account of the slaughter, William Bradford, governor of the New Plymouth colony, revelled in the terror that befell the Pequots. He found providence in every detail, including the assistance of the wind:

The importance of theology was not simply to establish the righteousness of the conquest, but the efficiency. The two concepts were linked. ‘Sermon histories’, as Richard Slotkin has written, distorted chronology and censored the details. Time and again, one reads of battles in which enemies fall like flies and, in Cotton Mather's words, ‘not one of ours was wounded’.Footnote ¹⁸ War is clean, decisive and godly. For Cotton, holy warfare was an ‘antidote’ to the ‘poison’ of unbelief, a living sermon. ‘The power of God’, he argued with Augustinian relish, ‘is the glory of God’.Footnote ¹⁹ Following his account of God's ‘revenging flames’ at Mystic Fort, when ‘five or six hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them’, Cotton reports that one of the Indian allies was converted to Christianity: ‘Know, reader, that after this battel Wequash had his mind wonderfully struck with great apprehensions about the glory of the Englishman's God’.Footnote ²⁰ He introduced a sequence of slaughters in the same book: ‘Let us adore the justice of that God, who thereby many times has cut off his adversaries; and let us adore the goodness of that God who therein preserves us from imminent and impending desolations’.Footnote ²¹

In Cotton Mather, faith is strongly identified with national honour. Unbelief is insult and insolence. His account of a battle with the ‘nation of the Narragansetts, … one of the most populous and powerful among all the Indians … [in] this mighty wilderness’, shows how gospel and honour were fused.

When Metacom is finally ‘shot … thro’ the heart’, Mather describes the event as justice for a ‘monster’ who had pulled a button off the coat of ‘[t]hat renowned evangelist of our Indians, the reverend [John] Eliot. … So do the rejecters of thy grace, perish, O Lord!’Footnote ²³

Gospel, war and English honour are one. And Mather promises more, adding:

One part of the country where ‘the ordinances of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ’ have been rejected, has ‘now been made an Aceldama’ (‘field of blood’). ‘The jealousie of the neglected Lord Jesus Christ, has broke forth like an unquenchable fire against those plantations; the fiery wrath of heaven has brought a swift destruction upon them.’ Their punishment for ‘prodigious … enmity against the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ’ was to be ‘horribly roasted alive’.Footnote ²⁵

Time and again, Providence tidies up the ethics and mechanics of war. Increase described a scene in which some soldiers crept up on a large number of Indians camping near one of the English garrison houses. The darkness was such that ‘an English man could not be discerned from an Indian, yet ours being forty in number, discharged several times upon the enemy, and (as Indians taken since that time do confess) God so disposed of the bullets that were shot at that time, that no less then [sic] thirty Indians were wounded, of whom there were fourteen that dyed’.Footnote ²⁶

Where Indian violence is bloody, messy and perfidious, English gunfire is clean, decisive and effective. In a sermon for soldiers, delivered during King William's War (1688–97), Cotton Mather addressed the difficult question of how to combine courage with trust in God. How could soldiers be aggressive without compromising the passive dependency of faith? The answer was to understand war as an expression of faith, love by another name. When you fight, it is not you who fight, Mather preached: ‘Tho’ you carry your Lives in your Hands, yet they are not in your own Hands; no they are in the Hands of that God, without whom not a Sparrow falls, and by whom every Bullet is directed.’Footnote ²⁷

In the same sermon, Mather advised soldiers to think of ‘the Glory of God’ as they discharged their weapons, arguing that if God may be worshipped in ordinary toil, how ‘much more’ may he be honoured in war.

The act of killing is a sacred event. He quotes a Spanish soldier who said ‘[t]hat if we have a Good Cause, the smell of Gunpowder in the Field is as sweet as the incense at the Altar’, to which he adds: ‘Let the Reader judge after these things, what scent there was in the Gunpowder spent for Nine or Ten years together in our War with the Indian Salvages [sic].’Footnote ²⁹

Mather was no crank. He was a vastly learned and intelligent man, a pioneer of smallpox vaccination, a future Fellow of the Royal Society, a man of extensive charities. He thought of himself as a serious historian. ‘We have’, he writes, ‘by a true and plain history secured the story of our successes against all the Ogs in this woody country from falling under the disguises of mythology’.Footnote ³⁰ But his history is mythology, and one that blends Christian theology with the martial imagery of pagan antiquity:

Mather's glee is unending, his delight centring on the conviction that the ‘armies of the Aliens’ are comprised of those who ‘are not a People’.Footnote ³²

In one especially disturbing image, Mather invites soldiers to think of God as ‘the Star to Guide us’ in battle, and then suggests that this light may twinkle in the eyes of the enemy, disclosing their location: ‘Let every Bullet be shot with an Eye taking aim at this White, when you are Firing upon the Blacks in the Swamps of the Howling Wilderness.’Footnote ³³

The Quaker, Edward Wharton, wrote to a friend in London during King Philip's War: ‘Our Rulers, Officers, and Councellors are like as men in a maze, not knowing what to do: but the Priests spur them on, telling them the Indians are ordained for destruction; bidding them go forth to Warr, and they will Fast and Pray at home in the mean time: yet’, he said, in a poignant corrective, ‘their General, with some other Officers, complain and say, with tears, They see not God go along with them.’Footnote ³⁵

Theologians found God where soldiers did not. And they were managing the narrative to ensure that the mythology outlived military realism. When the Quaker, Thomas Maul, disputed the morality of conquest, Mather accused him of ‘goring the sides of New-England’, as if he, the critic, were the aggressor. Maul had complained that the puritans had dealt cruelly with the native Indians from the start, a charge Mather refused to take seriously: ‘And those Unrighteous Dealings, he Explains, to be the Killing of the Indians, (or Murdering of them) by the Old Planters of these Colonies, in their First Settlement. … Thus are the Ashes of our Fathers vilely staled upon’.Footnote ³⁶ In the mirrored chamber of puritan ethics, a complaint against the ‘murdering’ of natives is sacrilege, whilst the act of killing is holiness.

In her excellent history of violence in the puritan imagination, Susan Juster describes warfare as a Protestant substitute for sacrament. It binds the community in holy awe.Footnote ³⁷ It also involves a ruthlessly selective approach to Scripture that has been weakly acknowledged by historians. Were the Calvinists people of the book? Or did they, as Spinoza accused, raid it rather than read it, ransacking its pages for the febrile rationality of war? Speaking of Mather's Dutch Reformed contemporaries, Spinoza alleged: ‘There is nothing they interpret with less hesitation and greater boldness than the Scriptures.’Footnote ³⁸ Three Quaker missionaries who suffered the removal of their ears in Boston in 1659 made the same point. Had Jesus left ‘any Precept’ for cutting off ears?Footnote ³⁹

But the future was with Mather, or rather an Americanized version of the New England creed. Theological nationalism was blown across the colonies in the first Great Awakening and it provided one of the motors of the War of Independence. The Great Awakening made a sectarian idiom the common sense of the colonies. As John Berens writes, when ‘a New England Calvinist and a non-New England Anglican’ could speak in 1763 with the same ‘intensity’ on the theme of national election, the political salience of a revival becomes apparent. New England became America.Footnote ⁴⁰

Jonathan Edwards was no less inclined to nationalized readings of divine activity. His vision was more expansive than classical puritanism but ultimately no less divisive. Christians can kill because God has killed first. His famous sermon, ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, is a frenzy of loathing and anthropomorphic petulance, picturing the deity as an enraged schoolmaster who has finally cracked and has now decided to torture the children. God hates you, Edwards tells his congregation after what must have been a very bad week, and it is only by his sovereign ‘pleasure’ – ‘the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God’ – that they are not already in hell:

‘You are’, he says, ‘a burden’ to creation. And ‘the sun don't willingly shine upon you’.Footnote ⁴¹ Edwards describes a God toying with his progeny, and delighting in their destruction. If you call out to God after you die, Edwards warns, ‘he will only laugh and mock’. He ‘will inflict wrath without any pity’. Indeed, Edwards continues with truly disturbing imagery:

Edwards peppers his sermon with martial imagery:

It should be no surprise that, with this foundation of theological wrath, Edwards should have fallen back on standard puritan positions on war and divine providence. Edwards writes with formulaic enthusiasm of British prerogative and British success, describing for a friend in Scotland how God was governing their fortunes during King George's War (1744–8). With ‘the air … full of bombs’, during the siege of Louisbourg, Edwards said it was a ‘miracle’ that so few Englishmen had died. The bombardment had continued day and night:

In fact, Edwards noted, God even used enemy fire to clear obstacles out of their way:

The English God was guiding the French bombs, turning destruction into deliverance.

Edwards joined a long line of clerical cheerleaders, making war attractive by parsing the details. Historians have noted errors in Edwards's account of the battle,Footnote ⁴⁶ and the notion that soldiers actually bask in the impotence of the enemy stretches a theory. So does the Mather-like claim that by the end, ‘it was apparent to the French … that God fought for the English, and some of them said, “that their God was turned an Englishman”’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Noting the decisive role of the weather in the taking of the French stronghold, Edwards again pointed to the mind of a partial and protective deity: ‘Thus the clouds and winds, and sun, moon and stars in their courses, from the beginning, fought for us.’ ‘This place,’ he added, ‘since it has fallen into our hands, has proved a snare to our enemies abroad’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This is theology in the first person. Jehovah was English. ‘Edwards was a patriot, a loyal British subject’, writes James Byrd. His participation in ‘one of the great moments of colonial American patriotism’ was as an Englishman.Footnote ⁴⁹ His theology of violence, complete with its images of a God crouching with bow and arrow, was unavoidably anthropomorphic. He was swimming in the same water as Mather, ennobling violence by moulding Christianity around national concerns.

Of Christ's celebrated response to Pontius Pilate, ‘If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight’, Edwards offered imperious evasion. Jesus, Edwards reasoned, did not mean anything theological or existential. What he meant was that, since his followers were not in secular authority at that particular time, they would not fight. Were they in charge of an earthly kingdom, as modern Christians are, then of course they would. So when Christ said, ‘If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight’, what he actually meant was ‘that it is lawful and necessary to fight for the maintenance and support of temporal kingdoms’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Voltaire would have had a field-day. The Bible was a fountain of innocence, a treasury for the warrior. As Byrd remarks drily, the palpable drift of the New Testament passages on ‘the kingdom of God’ was that ‘Jesus and his disciples advocated peace, not violence – an otherworldly kingdom instead of a worldly one. If Edwards saw this difficulty, he ignored it.’Footnote ⁵¹ As Spinoza contended, theologians such as Mather and Edwards were not servants of Scripture: they were masters.

In the French and Indian War (1756–63), Edwards galvanized Mohawk and Mohican co-operation by situating the Catholic enemy outside the will of God. He rallied the English troops with David's challenge to Goliath: ‘Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come unto thee in the name of the LORD. … I will smite thee, and take thine head; … for the battle is the LORD's, and he will give you into our hands’Footnote ⁵² The fair-skinned youth standing before the grizzled warrior is a picture of innocence for a naval superpower fighting what Winston Churchill called ‘the first world war’.Footnote ⁵³ Edwards concluded with a warning against the sin of pride.Footnote ⁵⁴ The idea was to master the weapon but to trust in the weapon-giver to direct its power.

Like Mather, Edwards holds a cosmic struggle between God and Satan as the basic reality of international affairs. As such, he recasts ethics and strategy as secondary concerns. Enemies were ‘Edomites’ and minions of ‘Antichrist’. When the choice is between Light and Darkness, it is difficult to see grey. When the enemy is a concept, not a person, it is easier to kill. With their ‘miracles’ and ‘remarkable judgments of God’, men such as Mather and Edwards were sanctifying war as Providence. They were also trivializing it as a game of easy wins and guaranteed outcomes. And with ominous deference to the will of the state, Edwards denied that ordinary subjects had a right to oppose war, saying, ‘God has not made them judges.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Christianity's inversion was complete. What Christianity once condemned outright was not only acceptable but spiritual and sacramental. As Samuel Davies preached to the militia of Hanover County, Virginia, when the cause is right, ‘the Sword is, as it were, consecrated to God; and the Art of WAR becomes a Part of our Religion. Then happy is he that shall reward our Enemies as they have served us. Blessed is the brave Soldier; blessed is the Defender of his Country, and the Destroyer of its Enemies.’ In such circumstances, the curse of God was not on the soldier but on him ‘that keepeth back his sword from blood’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The rules had changed, as Davies was honest enough to admit: ‘we have no Method left, but to repel Force with Force, and to give them Blood to drink in their Turn, who have drunk ours’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The force of this gospel of violence was evident in the capacity of war to build patriotic unity from sectarian division. ‘Old Lights’ and ‘New Lights’ (as opponents and exponents of the revival were known) settled their differences under the banner of nationhood. Preaching in July 1745 in celebration of the victory that had thrilled Edwards, Charles Chauncy, the ‘Old Brick’ of Boston and original scourge of the revivalists, drew the same lessons about military success. ‘I scarce know of a Conquest, since the Days of Joshua and the Judges, wherein the Finger of God is more visible’, he told his congregation.Footnote ⁵⁸ Meanwhile in Philadelphia, Chauncy's theological opponent, Gilbert Tennent, proclaimed: ‘How admirable … is the mercy of God in giving into our Hands this strong Hold of the Enemy of our Religion and Liberties!’ Evangelicals could do theology in the first person as well as any puritan. There was universal rejoicing that ‘British colours once more adorn the walls of Louisbourg … Thus the kind Hand of Providence, has been pleased to assist us in our undertaking, to crown our Endeavours with Success, and make all our Enterprizes terminate to our wishes.’ ‘A gracious God’, marvelled Tennent, had ‘sent undeserved and almost unexpected Salvations to us.’Footnote ⁵⁹ George Whitefield, the flamboyant revivalist, had coined a Latin dictum for the assault on Louisbourg: Nil Desperandum, Christo Duce (‘Never despair, Christ leads!’). All of this suggested that patriotism, the god of us, trumped Christian universalism in a time of war.Footnote ⁶⁰

Within a decade, the very arguments used by theologians such as Jonathan Edwards in the French and Indian War of 1754–63 were turned back on the colonial parent, as Britain attempted to pay for its adventures with a series of ill-conceived taxes. Indeed, one of the ironies of the Revolution was that it was motivated in part by a Whig- and Enlightenment-inspired anti-militarism: a seething resentment of gun-toting Redcoats, military chieftains and martial law. In consequence there was a kind of Lockean and Jeffersonian Revolution, on the one hand, and a theocratic or Calvinist Revolution, on the other. These tensions are still with us.

Representing the theocratic tradition was John Witherspoon's sermon, ‘The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men’ (1776), in which the Princeton president implored soldiers to perceive ‘a spirit of revenge’ as a ‘necessary and laudable’ aspect of war.Footnote ⁶¹ War ‘praiseth God’ and ‘promotes the good of his chosen’, he argued. ‘There is no part of divine providence in which a greater beauty and majesty appears, than when the Almighty Ruler turns the counsels of wicked men into confusion’.Footnote ⁶² In early Christianity, Witherspoon observed, it was noted ‘that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of christianity’.Footnote ⁶³ God was working the same miracle now, but with the blood of the proud British. ‘Has not the boasted discipline of regular and veteran soldiers been turned into confusion and dismay, before the new and maiden courage of freemen … ?’Footnote ⁶⁴

In ‘God Arising and Pleading His People's Cause’ (1777), Abraham Keteltas declared more plainly that ‘God loves his people, infinitely more than all the rest of the world.’ ‘God so loved the church, that he redeemed it by his own blood, he spared not his own Son, but gave him for his chosen people.’Footnote ⁶⁵ So the dominion was not of Providence over the passions of men but of passion over theology. Not that Britain could complain. The tug of Providence was felt on all sides, except perhaps amongst those who deconstructed it on theological grounds.

When a group of Quakers were brought before a court at Plymouth in 1678 for ‘declineing to preserve his majesties intrest’ during King Philip's War, both the accusers and the accused cited the same biblical passage about love. By refusing to fight, said the petitioners, the Quakers violated Jesus's command to love one's neighbour as oneself. The defendants agreed that the command to love neighbours was sacred. But they defined ‘neighbour’ to include the ‘enemy’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Quaker peace testimony developed unevenly, but it found a rock and a foundation in the concept of universal love. The new covenant was open to all. Puritan gunfire smelled not of God but of man. It suggested a narrow and anthropomorphic deity. As Samuel Fisher challenged the defenders of the eternal decrees around 1660: ‘Are ye not ashamed thus to engross the grace of God … among yourselves and a few like your sinning selves? … For the elect are very few with you.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Explaining his alienation from Reformed orthodoxy, the Quaker apologist, Robert Barclay, made the same point about salvation and charity: ‘such as confined God's Love, did consequentially confine their own’.

Predestination was unchristian. It was to toy with ‘heathen’ notions of ‘blind’ fate. And it was an idea that ‘so leaveneth and defileth with an unlovely humour, such as strictly and precisely hold it, that for most part they are observed to be Men of peevish and persecuting spirits’, Barclay ventured. This principle of ‘absolute Reprobation among Protestants [was] the very root and spring, from whence flows that Bloody and Antichristian tenet of Persecution’. ‘And this’, he maintained, ‘goes directly against, and destroys the nature of Universal Love’.Footnote ⁶⁹ ‘God never loved the world, according to this doctrine, but rather hated it greatly’, Barclay indignantly inferred. So, he concluded, ‘[t]his doctrine is highly injurious to mankind.’Footnote ⁷⁰

Barclay's judgement was echoed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his vastly influential treatise The Social Contract: ‘It is impossible to live in peace with people you think are damned. To love them would mean you hate God who punishes them. You have either to convert them or torment them. Wherever theological intolerance is allowed, it necessarily has civil consequences.’Footnote ⁷¹ Quakers, on the other hand, preaching ‘love to enemies’ and ‘suffering Injuries without Revenge,’ held ‘it Unlawful for Christians to fight or use carnal Weapons’.Footnote ⁷²

For another influential Quaker, Anthony Benezet, war was not a Christian affair but ‘a sad consequence of the apostacy, and fall of man’. It grieved him to see the American colonies sliding into European sin: ‘look at all European Christendom sailing round the globe, with fire and sword, and every murdering art of war, to seize the possessions and steal or kill the inhabitants of Africa and the Indies’.Footnote ⁷³ Again, he came back to the doctrine of salvation, that Christ's love extended to all:

The peace testimony, writes Meredith Weddle, was ‘the foolishness … and the magnificence of a people whose time has not yet come’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This is true, but it perhaps understates the degree to which such thinking succeeded in the political and legal realms, when it failed in the church as such. The democratic tradition retained some of this theological generosity, what one scholar has termed ‘the loving heresy of universal salvation’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Benjamin Rush, physician and social reformer and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, couched his republicanism on ‘the original and natural equality of all mankind’. It was a Christian conviction that defined his politics: ‘A Christian, I say again, cannot fail of being a republican, for every precept of the Gospel inculcates those degrees of humility, self-denial, and brotherly kindness, which are directly opposed to the pride of monarchy and the pageantry of a court.’Footnote ⁷⁷ War and capital punishment were the echoes of European despotism. But Christianity taught otherwise:

Or take ‘Brutus’, one of the most eloquent of the anti-federalist writers to whom we owe the measured grandeur of the Bill of Rights: ‘The European governments are almost all of them framed, and administered with a view to arms, and war, as that in which their chief glory consists; they mistake the end of government – it was designed to save men[’]s lives, not to destroy them.’ ‘Let the monarchs, in Europe, share among them the glory of depopulating countries, and butchering thousands of their innocent citizens, to revenge private quarrels, or to punish an insult offered to a wife, a mistress, or a favorite: I envy them not the honor, and I pray heaven this country may never be ambitious of it.’Footnote ⁷⁹

Finally, Thomas Jefferson, on assuming the presidency in 1801, said that America's part would be ‘introduce between nations another umpire than arms’,Footnote ⁸⁰ and in 1814 disdained the wisdom of the war ‘hawks’ with the opinion that ‘it is better to suffer much from the scalpings, the conflagrations, the rapes and rapine of savages, than to countenance and strengthen such barbarisms by retortion.’ ‘[M]y hope,’ he said, ‘is in peace. … One war, such as that of our revolution, is enough for one life’.Footnote ⁸¹

Alexis de Tocqueville had a slightly rosy appreciation of American liberty, but it is remarkable that as late as 1835 he could marvel at America's immunity to European sins of militarism and national honour:

This was a generous appraisal, and Jefferson's stance was, by the time the Frenchman was penning his eulogies on the new nation, a minority report. By the time that Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan sparred over America's place in the world in 1899, a position that had been normative for Jefferson and Rush had assumed a texture of idealism. And if the First World War prompted an unprecedented effusion of American pacifism, as coalitions of Christians, socialists and anti-imperialists opposed a war that seemed to be destroying what it attempted to save – democracy – the rise of Hitler and Italian fascism settled the argument in the other direction.Footnote ⁸³ The justice of America's involvement in the Second World War was clear to most Christians outside the radical firmament of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker,Footnote ⁸⁴ a position articulated by the most influential public theologian of the day, Reinhold Niebuhr.Footnote ⁸⁵

Yet history can resuscitate this tradition of peaceable scepticism simply by showing that it was there and it never died. De Tocqueville was appalled and embarrassed by the election to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a brutal killer known to the Native Americans as ‘Sharp Knife’. De Tocqueville tried to explain it away as an exception to the rule of American wisdom and liberty. But his idea that American exceptionalism could exist as a reluctance to fight is surely a valuable one, and a concept that occasionally resonates in liberal and conservative commentary.Footnote ⁸⁶ In a nation that continues to think like a church, such a re-centring of the heretics and peacemakers at the heart of the American story seems an urgent task. As Boris Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago: ‘Happy are the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves.’Footnote ⁸⁷