Pentecostal and Holiness Statements on War and Peace

Beaman, Pipkin

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898658
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Many Pentecostal groups have forgotten their legacy of war resistance and doctrinal history opposing killing. To rectify this loss, we have catalogued Holiness and Pentecostal denominational statements on war and peace. Numerous Holiness groups and virtually all early Pentecostal groups had some form of pacifist statement against war. This antiwar collection gives us an almost uniform picture of the early Pentecostal movement as largely pacifist in orientation. The commonality of these statements across both Holiness and Pentecostal movements is evidence they are a continuous group and not two separate movements. While their early doctrines opposed killing, many named in this book are now widely considered to be stalwarts of the Religious Right, or at least staunch supporters of Christian participation in war. Our hope is that this book will frame the official position of early Pentecostals on war and peace, and encourage Pentecostals today to reflect on their antiwar heritage.

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Introduction

By Jay Beaman

I have a recurring experience. I send an email to someone on Ancestry.com, the genealogy site, and tell the person that I have found a relative of theirs who claimed religious objection on their World War I draft card as a member of a religious denomination opposed to going to war. The relative—a granddaughter, a nephew, and a son—writes back and says, in so many words, that I must be mistaken, and where did I get the idea that their relative was against going to war. Let me share two examples.

One retired Pentecostal minister was sure I must be mistaken because he knew that his father had served in World War I. He also told me that after the United States entered World War II, his father who was also his pastor, had not discouraged him on the day he graduated from high school from joining up and fighting as a soldier. He also had no recollection that his own denomination had changed its original statement against going to war while he himself was serving as an official of the denomination and as a pastor of one of its large churches.

Many years before this conversation, I had interviewed another elderly Pentecostal minister who told me that he remembered this man’s father as a young friend who had been a pacifist during World War I. So, here I was with a friend of his father who testified to his pacifism, and an official draft card claiming religious objection on the basis of his Pentecostal faith, and a surviving son who had fought in World War II and was astonished to hear me claim his father had been a pacifist during World War I.

The son, who is now an old man himself, told me he had photographs of his dad in uniform during the war. I asked if there was any chance his father served as a medical orderly, cook, or a member of the Quartermaster Corps in supply, transport, or engineering? I explained that the only option the government gave religious objectors drafted in World War I was to serve in some noncombatant capacity in one of these roles. Then he told me that this explained something he had never understood—why his dad had been a cook in World War I. He sent me photographs of his dad in a cook’s outfit taken while he was at a military camp during the war. Apparently, the father came home from the war and became a Pentecostal minister, but never preached against World War II and never told his son that he had been a religious objector and a noncombatant in World War I, based upon his Pentecostal denomination’s official stance against fighting in war. The son was both surprised and enlightened by this forgotten episode from in his father’s early life. I could repeat many similar instances where later generations are totally unaware that their forebears had been pacifist.

A second example comes from the opportunity I had a few years ago to visit the archive of a very small Pentecostal denomination. I was graciously received, even though the gentleman escorting me assured me that his denomination had never expressed pacifism. I told him that I thought I had seen a paragraph on pacifism in the doctrinal statement printed in their publication. He said that he knew the doctrinal statement, and was quite sure that it had never changed, and quite sure that it did not include pacifism among its core beliefs. I asked if I could browse through the publications. Soon enough, I came across the doctrinal statement I had seen before, and it contained no reference to pacifism. I continued to browse through the archives until I found publications dating to the timeframe of World War I. And there it was, their statement of pacifism. The denomination had forgotten, but the government vigilantes from World War I had found this statement and used it as evidence of the group’s seditious activities. That is how I knew about the doctrinal statement. When I showed my host the document in his own denomination’s publication, he was shocked. A forgotten legacy. However, he quickly recovered. He told me that he did not think I would find any individuals from his denomination who had been objectors to war. I asked him if there were any early records of names of members. There were such records. From these I was able to find draft cards for quite a number of men. A clear majority listed their religious objection to war, and many did so citing the name of their Pentecostal denominational membership as the reason. So, a core belief of the denomination a century earlier had been against going to war and members of the denomination had followed that teaching and resisted going to war. But today the denomination had completely forgotten its early doctrinal history. Even those who had access to the historical records were unaware. The memory of pacifism had been completely lost.

It is for this reason that we have compiled this book of statements by Holiness and Pentecostal groups advocating resistance to warfare, many made during or immediately prior to World War I. Living as we do, nearly a hundred years after The Great War as it is also known, these statements of faith are particularly surprising because the denominations, taken together, represent a large cross-section of what is often referred to today as the American Christian Right. Given that the Christian Right has been known to champion many of our nation’s wars in recent years, we are led to wonder how these denominations produced statements, which on their face, read as pacifist tracts, and which are numerous enough to fill a small book. More curious still, why are these statements unknown to most of us, even to the most well-informed of us among these groups?

Most of the statements in this book are official denominational statements taken from pamphlets, often called “Disciplines,” representing the denomination’s most basic beliefs and identifying features. They were named thus because they were seen as manuals for Christian discipleship. In this book we are using the term pacifism to identify denominations that once upheld Christian nonviolence as official doctrine. In some cases, we quote a leader associated with a particular group, when we have no such official denominational statement or when the leader sees themselves as representing the group. While many of these groups did not self-identify with the term pacifist, they did fall within a common definition of pacifist in their attitudes on war and peace, as later historians recognized. We should not be surprised that they did not use the term “pacifist” since World War I propaganda and “war hysteria” could result in imprisonment for being associated with words such as pacifist, yellowback, slacker, conchie, and the like.

How and why a book like ours has come about is sometimes as much accident as divine appointment. In 1979, Professor Carl Piepkorn published a four-volume collection titled, Profiles in Belief.1 About the same time, Robert Mapes Anderson had just written a new interpretation of Pentecostal origins, Vision of the Disinherited, in which he mentioned the pacifism of some early leaders.2

I was a seminary student at the time and one of the questions that I was trying to answer was how widespread pacifism had been in the early Pentecostal movement. Piepkorn’s, Profiles provided brief summaries of each denominational group. Piepkorn, a military chaplain, communicated his findings about denominations to the government, perhaps so the military could apportion the appropriate number of chaplains to serve the beliefs of drafted men. He noted groups that had taken a position relative to members going to war. This information allowed me to draw up a brief list of denominations opposed to war, and in turn convinced me that the pacifism referred to in Anderson’s book was just the tip of the iceberg. Having been raised in the Assemblies of God and having trained for pastoral ministry at one of their colleges, I was shocked that almost all awareness of this heritage had been lost by the time of the Vietnam War, when the evening news almost every day carried stories about my peers at state universities who were protesting the war. Most Pentecostals I knew either did not remember or did not want to remember their pacifist roots. So in 1982 I wrote my master’s thesis on the subject which was published later in book form.3 While studying for my thesis, I came across the paper by Donald Dayton and Lucille Sider-Dayton on “Holiness and Attitudes toward War.” This paper has charted the rough outlines of all my subsequent work. I am constantly making fresh “discoveries” only to find when I reread their paper, that I should have been pointed there a generation ago. It was also apparent that the Holiness and Pentecostal movements had parallel legacies of war resistance; indeed, closer examination showed it to be more than parallel. Many of the Holiness leaders who advocated pacifism subsequently became Pentecostals and continued their peace witness. It was not two movements but one.4

In an attempt to partially rectify this loss of memory, we have collected the official statements from these many groups and placed them together into one compilation, which you have before you. It is a recollection of a lost peace movement, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A part of recollection is recollection of what has been lost, or in many cases misplaced—even occasionally deliberately forgotten. Some of these documents are now housed in the International Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center in Springfield, Missouri, at the headquarters of the Assemblies of God. Many more were found by returning to Piepkorn, whose archival collection is now held by the Graduate Theological Union Library in Berkeley, California.

In cases where we could not locate official denominational statements in disciplines or manuals, we were sometimes able to find credal equivalents in magazines, some of which are now available digitally from the various Pentecostal archives. In our re-collecting, we have tried to identify the earliest possible date associated with each submission. Sometimes we knew the piece was early, but the publication we got it from was not dated or was a later date. These have been included in the footnote and the early date has been provided with the submission. The purpose is to reconstruct for the reader a time and chronology where the reader can see when pacifism was more clearly stated. Although it has taken years to accomplish, the result is that we now have access to many more of the original documents. In my previous attempts, relying largely on Piepkorn, two-thirds of early Pentecostal groups were identified as pacifist. Now, however, there is evidence of pacifism in almost every early Pentecostal group, as well as in many Holiness groups. This represents something of sea-change in the findings.

However, recollection is more than just assembling documents in one place. It can also be an attempt to “revivify” or bring to life again. It is to remember. We do not wish this book to be an act of nostalgia for the “glory days” of the early Pentecostal movement. It is more important to focus on the present, and as we examine how pacifist beliefs deeply influenced the larger worldview of these groups, to ask the hard question of why these beliefs disappeared.

We have also included a few “Antebellum” Holiness documents. Reading these statements written before the Civil War is very poignant and troub...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Anabaptist Peace as Context
• Chapter 3: Antebellum Holiness Statements
• Chapter 4: Radical Holiness Statements
• Chapter 5: Pentecostal Statements
• Chapter 6: International Holiness and Pentecostal Statements
• Appendix
• Bibliography