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8 January 1885—11 February 1967

Peace Is the Way

Night after night in the mid-1960s, an elderly man in an oversized coat and hat stood in front of the White House with a lit candle in his hand. His vigil was both a protest against the Vietnam War then raging and a general witness for peace. His name was A. J. Muste, and he was once described by Time magazine as the “Number One U.S. pacifist.”

Muste was born in the Netherlands but immigrated with his family to the United States when still a boy. Raised and eventually ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church, he left it in 1914 because he felt unable to endorse either its support of the war that erupted that year in Europe or its theological defense of apartheid in South Africa. He joined the more theologically liberal Congregationalists. But his relationship with that denomination came to an abrupt end as well. On Easter Sunday 1918, after preaching an anti-war sermon, Muste was immediately fired and ordered to vacate the parsonage that same day. He eventually joined the Society of Friends, but not before going through a period in the 1930s when he abandoned his Christian pacifism for Marxism-Leninism.

For Muste, it was Jesus rather than Marx or Lenin who was the real revolutionary. Muste saw the birth of Jesus as the harbinger of a new age in which human beings would build a new society based on peace with justice. The ideals taught by Jesus, Muste believed, radically challenged existing social, political, and economic institutions. They were revolutionary but nonviolent, because the kingdom of Heaven proclaimed by Jesus is nonviolent, and bad means simply can’t lead to good ends. As Muste insisted, “There is an inextricable relationship between means and ends; the way one approaches one’s goals determines the final shape which those goals take.” That’s why, Muste famously said, “There is no ‘way’ to peace. Peace is the way.”

Muste was a longtime member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, serving as its executive director for thirteen years, including during World War II. He was also a member of the War Resisters League’s national committee. In the 1950s, he protested the proliferation of nuclear weapons by refusing to participate in civil defense drills and by joining fellow pacifists at various nuclear testing sites across the globe to witness for peace. When accused of laboring under a naïve idealism that failed to appreciate the dangers of the “real” world, he responded that in fact it’s Christian pacifism that is realistic, because it renounces “obviously suicidal” war and war preparation and allows us instead to devote our funds and energies to “carrying a great ‘offensive’ of food, medicine, and clothing to the stricken peoples of the world.”

In early 1967, Muste travelled to North Vietnam to meet with Ho Chi Minh to discuss ways of ending the war. He died two weeks later.