At 5:15 one afternoon last week, Norman Morrison, 31, his clothing doused in kerosene and his youngest child, 18-month-old Emily, cradled in his arms, stood outside the river entrance to the Pentagon and burned himself to death. As hundreds of departing officers and civilian workers watched—no photographers were on the scene—Army Major Richard Lundquist grabbed the child away from the flames. Army Lieut. Colonel Charles Johnson, who had seen two Buddhists incinerate themselves on the streets of Saigon, and two Air Force sergeants tried to smother the flames with coats and jackets. By the time an ambulance arrived, 70% of Morrison’s body was burned. He was declared dead on arrival at Fort Myer Army Dispensary.
Morrison’s self-immolation, his wife Anne soon explained, expressed “his concern over the great loss of life and human suffering caused by the war in Viet Nam. He was protesting our Government’s deep military involvement in this war.” The suicide ended a life centered on religion since boyhood. Morrison was born in Erie, Pa.; when he was 13, his widowed mother moved the family to Chautauqua, N.Y., where he became the first youth in the county to win the Boy Scouts’ God and Country Award. He was raised a Presbyterian, but gradually became interested in Quaker beliefs, particularly pacifism, while a student at Wooster College. He later studied at a Presbyterian seminary in Pittsburgh and at the University of Edinburgh, and joined the Society of Friends in 1959. Since 1962 he had been executive secretary of the Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore. In recent months, Morrison had. been deeply disturbed about U.S. bombing in Viet Nam, although colleagues detected no outside sign of a psychosis that might explain his death.
Thou Shalt Not Kill. For other Quakers, Morrison’s act raised questions both as a suicide and as a pacifist protest. Although the Friends profess deep reverence for human life, their doctrine includes no specific condemnation of suicide; most Quakers were content to let God judge Morrison’s self-slaughter. And while they could quarrel with his grisly form of martyrdom, there was no disputing that the vast majority of Friends shared Morrison’s misgiving about the Viet Nam war, or any other war. Along with the Brethren movement and the Mennonites, the Friends have been the most ardent spokesmen for the pacifist movement within Christianity, calling upon men to accept literally God’s commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”
The peace churches came to this conviction through Bible-based, turn-the-other-cheek idealism. The more than 100,000 plain-living U.S. Mennonites, whose best-known sect is the Amish farmers of Pennsylvania and Ohio, take their name from Menno Simons, one of the leaders of the Reformation’s Anabaptist movement. Because they sought to abandon all church structure and live simply by the Gospel alone, the early German Mennonites were killed or outlawed by Catholics and Protestants alike. A century later, England’s George Fox and the Friends (now 122,000 strong in the U.S.) were persecuted for trying to build a church free of ritual, creed or priest and based on God’s “Inner Light,” granted to every man. The turn of the 18th century saw the birth of the pietistic, back-to-the-Bible Brethren movement in Germany—a reaction against the still remembered horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and the spiritual rigidities of the established Protestant churches. The desire to pursue their separate ways in peace led all three groups to seek freedom in the New World.
During the Civil War, the peace churches in the U.S. joined forces to gain Government recognition of the rights of conscientious objectors. In 1940, they again cooperated to set up the National Service Board for Religious Objectors, which arranged for assignment of C.O.s to Government-approved civilian jobs in time of war. The Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers accounted for more than half of the 10,230 men who were conscientious objectors during World War II.
Aid to Viet Nam. All three faiths openly denounce U.S. military action in Viet Nam—and at the same time work at projects that tend to make the U.S. look good there. The Brethren have had voluntary workers in Viet Nam since 1955, most of them effectively involved in community development, education and now refugee resettlement. The National Council of Churches’ Division of Overseas Ministries channels its relief support to Viet Nam through the Mennonite Central Committee. Recently an inspection team from the American Friends Service Committee toured Viet Nam, is now formulating proposals as to how the Quakers can give nonmilitary help to the country.
Although their goals are the same as many nonreligious Vietnik protesters, the peace churches generally disapprove of activities that clearly violate U.S. law, such as draft dodging and burning Selective Service registration cards. “This is exhibitionism,” says Francis Brown, general secretary of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends. The peace-churchmen seek only to live to the letter of Christ’s injunction (in Luke: 6: 27-29): “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.”
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