The Good Fight
The world’s oldest interfaith peace organization continues to spread the word from its Rockland County headquarters.
by Claudia Rowe
Returning violence for violence only multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
””Martin Luther King, Jr.
It was not so long ago that such statements captured the imagination of a generation. But these days, horror stories pouring out of Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo ”” even our own high schools ”” have raised public outrage to a level that seems to demand military might and swift punishment. The concept of pacifism like King’s sounds as realistic as confronting an army tank with a flower.
In effect, of course, that is how King and Mahatma Gandhi spent their lives, and it is their example that continues to inspire the people who support the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the world’s oldest, largest interfaith peace group, which has its U.S. headquarters in Nyack, Rockland County. Yet today, in the face of modern genocide, even members of the 85-year-old Fellowship find themselves admitting that at times sticking to a philosophy of nonviolence appears almost impossible.
“What are nonviolent folks to do, in actual fact, in the face of atrocious criminal acts?” wrote Rabia Terri Harris, coordinator of the Fellowship’s Muslim Peace newsletter. “Other, that is, than issue position papers and press releases, or maybe chum out a couple of sensitive poems. What are we to do that is not an insult to the real suffering of the actual oppressed?”
To begin with, says John Dear, the group’s stubbornly hopeful executive director, admit that bombing is not the answer. Though it may have forced Slobodan Milosevic to the negotiating table, it has had all the effectiveness of weeding a garden with a bulldozer, and certainly will do nothing to dispel one group’s hatred of another. “Killing people who kill is not the way to show them that they shouldn’t kill,” says Dear. “We still think the whole bombing was a disaster. It hasn’t sowed the seeds of peace and reconciliation. While we’re talking about Milosevic’s crimes, we have committed war crimes ourselves, incredible acts of murder, in the process. Literally, over 2,000 civilians were killed in Yugoslavia, including some of the refugees we were supposed to be helping, so I don’t call this a victory or a success at all.”
What would FOR have recommended?
‘There was a very active nonviolent movement that’s been asking for our help for at least six years,” says Dear. ‘They were begging for our help. But the US doesn’t support nonviolent movements anywhere. As the crisis developed, we should have all the more backed the United Nations, looking for a resolution. But we immediately resorted to military might. You can bring about change without violence ”” like the Solidarity movement in Poland did. It is possible.”
Dear, a 39-year-old Jesuit with a round, boyish face, spent the first eight months of his priesthood in jail. In 1993, following the Biblical teaching to beat swords into plowshares, he took a hammer to a nuclear F-15 fighter at the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. For that, Dear faced 20 years in prison: 10 years for conspiracy and 10 for destruction of government property. (The conspiracy charge was dropped, and Dear says he thinks the judge was reluctant to sentence him to the full extent of the law on the other charge.)
It was the first of many arrests, including six hours he recently spent in jail in Washington, D.C., after kneeling in the White House driveway with several hundred other protesters, beseeching President Clinton to stop bombing Yugoslavia.
Dear speaks about his work with a sunny conviction, but he is no Pollyanna. “Nonviolence is very difficult if you really get into the question,” he says. “It means complete disarmament, for one thing, and it applies to your personal relationships as well. I would argue that bombing has never stopped a war. All of our massive bombings have only continued to sow seeds of future violence ”” even going back to World War I. We’re still reaping the legacy of that in the Balkans today. I mean, it’s the ultimate question, the question of, does violence work, does war work? And I think the answer is a resounding no.”
To convince others, Fellowship members hold vigils, prayer services, demonstrations, and organized acts of civil disobedience like the White House gathering in June. Fellowship staffers send out thousands of packets of information to community groups and private citizens explaining how to mobilize against military action, hate crimes, and even “economic violence” against the poor ”” chiefly by raising awareness. They participated in some 50 demonstrations against the bombing in Yugoslavia, and in June, with peace groups around the country, they called on Congress for humanitarian aid to Kosovo and an end to the militarization of the region.
Some might consider these efforts futile, but Dear says the group does not think in terms of success or failure, but of their “lifetime commitment” to ending violence of all kinds. Fellowship staff visit war zones like Vietnam, Iraq, and now the Balkans, taking food and medicine to civilians on every side of a conflict. This summer, several staff members will travel to Kosovo and distribute 1,000 signed “Covenants of Peace” ”” statements from American citizens decrying both Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing and NATO’s bombing. The covenants will be given to both Serbs and Albanians.
Despite an apparently waning interest in the peace movement among the general public, some in the mainstream are beginning to take a new look. Actors Susan Sarandon and Martin Sheen joined the Fellowship in the spring, as did children’s television icon Fred Rogers and Sister Helen Prejean, whose book about capital punishment, Dead Man Walking, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Rogers convinced 12 of his friends to subscribe to the Fellowship’s magazine, too.
Dear finds it quite logical: “We’re all religions, all groups, and all people coming together for peace and reconciliation,” he said. “We’re trying to promote a global neighborhood of peace, nonviolence, and justice.”
Becoming a member of the Fellowship requires no money, just a pledge of pacifism at all times. But more people support the group with dollars than sign the strongly worded statement of purpose, which asserts that a member will “identify with those of every nation, race, gender, sexual orientation and religion … refuse to participate in any war or to sanction military preparations … [and] advocate fair and compassionate methods of dealing with offenders against society.” This, of course, would have meant refusing to support attacks against Adolf Hitler during World War II, something that even some Fellowship staffers find a difficult concept.
“There are lots of people who believe in what we do, but to sign our statement of purpose, pretty much you have to be a pacifist” says Doug Hostetter, a former director of the Fellowship who remains on staff as the secretary of international and interfaith affairs. “They know that war is bad and what we do is good, but they still might think that Milosevic should be assassinated, and they don’t want to say that if they were attacked in a dark alley they wouldn’t fight back. Frankly,” he admits, I don’t really know what I’d do in that situation either, so I guess you’d say I’m an aspiring pacifist.”
Still, the rolls are slowly growing. The Fellowship gains about 75 new supporters each month and counts about 12,500 actual signed-up members in the United States. Another 20,000 are active contributors, and a total of 67,000 people have been affiliated with the group in some way over the past decade. Internationally, there are an additional 400,000 people who consider themselves part of the Fellowship’s extended circle.
“We’re getting an awful lot of calls lately”, says Hostetter. “Whenever the world situation begins to look particularly unsettled or threatening, people get interested.”
At the group’s headquarters on a tree-lined drive in Nyack, the telephone does not stop ringing. Barbara Walters has called to request footage of civil rights activist Rosa Parks for a special she is doing on 100 great women of the century, and ABC News wants film of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both civil rights fighters were featured in Walk to Freedom, a documentary made by the Fellowship in 1957, which was distributed mainly to religious organizations and shown widely in the South.
King himself was a member of the group at the time of his assassination, and there are staff in the Nyack office today who knew him during the days of the Alabama bus boycotts and Freedom Rides of the 1950s and ’60s.
The Civil Rights movement was a comparatively recent initiative for the Fellowship, which has been at work since 1914. In that year, a group of Christians ”” ordinary men and women from around Europe who were concerned about an impending world war ”” met in Germany to talk about ways of preventing it. But fighting broke out before their conference had even finished, and the participants hurried back to their respective countries.
Two, Henry Hodgkin and Freidrich Sigmund-Schultze, found themselves together at the railway station as they waited for trains home. Though their countries were at war, they pledged to continue working for peace. The English Quaker and the German Lutheran founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Cambridge, England, later that year, and a United States branch followed in 1915, with headquarters in New York City. ‘Mat office moved to Rockland County in the ’50s when Shadowcliff, a 45-room mansion built for a Ford heiress, became available to them for $36,000. (The money, as is typical, was left to them in a member’s will.)
Since then the organization has been quietly at the forefront of many movements, some so much a part of American life now that they are all but taken for granted: During World War I they helped organize the National Civil Liberties Bureau, now the ACLU, and also worked to get legal recognition for conscientious objectors. (Even into the 1970s, the group was writing letters to judges on behalf of members who refused to serve in Vietnam, pointing out that these people had long before taken an oath of nonviolence.)
In the 1920s, they helped organize the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and in the ’30s marched on behalf of unionized labor. (“Violence can be structural,” explains one of the organization’s pamphlets, “as when economic systems deprive workers of decent living wages.”)
In the 1940s, the group successfully defeated a Pentagon campaign to require universal military training of all Americans. In the 1950s, they led nonviolence workshops throughout the South and held a six-year Food for China program to feed hungry families there.
In the 1960s, they formed the International Committee of Conscience on Vietnam, demonstrated against the war, and raised money for medical aid that went to both sides. In the 1970s, they called for a mass environmental movement. In the ’80s, working with a number of other peace groups, they initiated the Nuclear Freeze Campaign.
Today the Fellowship puts its $2 million annual budget, which comes almost completely from supporters’ donations, toward training young organizers for nonviolence at Peace Maker Training Institutes around the country. They also send delegations to Mexico and Latin America to meet with environmental activists, and have continually worked to raise awareness about Iraqi civilians devastated by United Nations sanctions. In addition, they publish a bimonthly magazine, Fellowship.
In 1993, Hostetter also began bringing Bosnian students to the United States to finish their education, something that was being denied them in their own country because of their ethnicity. Some, while they were here, took workshops on conflict mediation techniques and took those skills back home.
At the Fellowship’s mansion headquarters overlooking the Hudson River, a staff of 30 coordinate the group’s various campaigns. To keep up with each other, they meet for coffee each morning, under the gaze of King, Gandhi, and the nun Dorothy Day, who stare out from portraits on the walls in the large, airy dining room.
Each Thursday, the group hosts a guest speaker. Recently, they listened to a report from a visitor who had just returned from a trip to Bosnia with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The meeting had the relaxed but focused feeling of a good college seminar, as the guest described the destruction he had witnessed and the “madness” of Slobodan Milosevic. It was a rather dismal start to a spring day. But what keeps this group going is hope, not optimism.
“There’s a difference between the two,” says Richard Deats, another former director who has stayed on as editor of the Fellowship’s magazine and head of communications. “You can get very depressed looking at what’s happening in Rwanda, for example, or Kosovo, or even Littleton, Colorado, but if you have hope, which is more a faith in the future, at least you’re grounded in a commitment to make the world better.”
Deats’ son Mark, who runs the Fellowship’s bookstore, agrees. “If you do this kind of work, you have to give up feeling like you’re trying to have an impact,” he says, “because if you’re looking for impact you’ll always be like, ‘Oh man, I can’t believe this.’ You have to do it because you feel it’s right.”
Mark, a 40-year-old rock musician, travels in circles where his views are not always popular. “My friends said, ‘How can you not be for this war, isn’t Milosevic terrible?’ And I say ‘Yes, but I don’t think what we’re doing is right either.”’
Though he once scoffed at his father’s philosophy, Mark has come to believe that the concept of war will someday be obsolete. “It’s kind of like slavery in the US,” he says. “War will become a thing of the past, but right now we can’t imagine a world without it. We can’t see past it. If you see two people fighting, you can do one of three things: You can do nothing; you can get between them; or you can get a big gun and shoot them both, which is what we do in the US The leaders we have these days are no different from medieval feudal lords.”
Several Fellowship staffers, including Mark, say they are religious without adhering strictly to one faith. Claire Cocco, the 25-year-old membership outreach coordinator, was raised a Catholic in Rochester, New York, but now considers herself a Quaker. “I guess you’d say I’m searching,” she says. Lisel Lowen, an 88-year-old escapee of Nazi Germany, was born Jewish and became a Baha’i in 1960, joining a religion whose tenet is that all faiths lead to the same end ”” peace, love, and the will of God. She has been volunteering at the Fellowship for 23 years.
War will become a thing of the past, but right now we can’t see past it.
The religious foundation of the group ”” which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Hutterians, humanists, and members of some 20 other faiths ”” is an important reason for its survival, Richard Deats believes. “We began as a Christian organization but realized Christians didn’t have any monopoly on nonviolence. I mean, Gandhi was Hindu and the greatest proponent of nonviolence in history,” he says. “So our religious underpinnings broadened to include all faiths, and they’re a grounding for us, a center to go back to.”
Deats himself traveled a long road to get to the quiet, third-floor office he occupies today. A Texan whose father and brother served with distinction in both world wars, Deats joined the Fellowship in 1952, became active in the Civil Rights movement, and has been a member ever since. He also became a United Methodist minister, taught social ethics in the Philippines, witnessed the nonviolent overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos, met with the PLO in Tunis, lectured on active nonviolence in South Africa, and, along the way, collected more than 40 years’ worth of antiwar memorabilia to tack onto his office walls.
Ultimately, Deats hopes, the United Nations will develop a global police force to keep peace around the world (and he adds that the United States should pay its vast debt to that organization to enable it to be more effective). The UN would enforce laws with moral authority, not guns, and Deats doesn’t expect to see it happen any time soon. But when it does, the Fellowship will undoubtedly be there in the background, quietly helping it along.
Reprinted from the August 1999 issue of Hudson Valley, with permission of the magazine.
