conscientious objection

Conscientious objection is the refusal to undertake military service when legally required to do so. Although it has often been portrayed as a form of cowardice, in fact historically it has required more courage to stand up and be counted as an individual opposed to war in general, certain wars in particular, or to military service in general, than it has to go along with the majority and submit to authority, even though secretly convinced that it is wrong. Because such objection challenges the very exercise of collective power itself, those insisting that they must and will obey the dictates of their individual conscience have generally had a very thin time of it at the hands of the governments they defy.

It should be remembered that early Christians were persecuted for reasons of state, not religion, chief among those reasons being their refusal to bear arms. The experience of the British in India with Gandhi and his followers is a more recent example of how extremely provocative pacifists can be, although it hardly needs pointing out that non-violence as a tactic can only work against those who themselves entertain doubts about the legitimacy of using force. The early Roman emperors had no such doubts, hence the high-protein diet of the lions in the Circus Maximus.

After Christians became the oppressors rather than the oppressed, the Sixth Commandment was of course finessed and we hear little of conscientious objection through the Middle Ages. It is with the appearance of aptly named Nonconformist sects such as the Mennonites in Europe, the Quakers in England, and the anarchist Dukhobors in Russia that conscientious objection became an issue again. Of these, the last rejected all authority, including the Bible, but others could cite Scripture in support of their stand and, surprisingly, survived. Respect for the refusal to bear arms or even to serve in a non-military capacity as a statement of individual conscience caused the most institutional problems in Britain, mainly because it was one of the last countries to introduce conscription. During WW I, special tribunals granted absolute exemptions to a few, generally those whose work was deemed to be of national importance. Of the conditional exemptions, some 7, 000 men agreed to undertake non-combatant military service (often as hugely respected stretcher-bearers), while a further 3, 000 were placed in labour camps. Approximately 1, 500 men, whose case for exemption had been rejected, continued to refuse to serve. Most of the latter were non-religious objectors for whom non-combatant military service would simply have been to support an imperialist war effort by indirect means. Many of them were transferred to military units anyway, where they would become subject to military law. For 41 of them a rather more gruesome fate was briefly contemplated, apparently the brainchild of Kitchener, the war secretary. They were sent to France where, as well as being under military law, they would also be nominally on active service and thus could be sentenced to death by courts martial. They were, but at the insistence of PM Asquith the sentences were not carried out. After the war, those who had refused military service of any kind were disenfranchised for five years.

During WW II the scale of the problem was greater but it was managed in a more measured way and with much less bitterness. Of the 60, 000 men and women who applied to be recognized as conscientious objectors, two-thirds were given a conditional exemption and required to undertake war work. A further 3, 000 were granted unconditional exemption. Of the remainder, approximately 5, 000 were prosecuted, most of whom were imprisoned. Other countries, where the right to object to military service was granted, if at all, only to well-established members of pacifist religious sects, seem either to have had less problems or less publicity was given to the issue.

Since 1945, conscientious objection has been widespread, notable examples being France during the campaign in Indochina and the Algerian independence war and the USA during the Vietnam war. During the last, perhaps the most celebrated case was that of heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, who was first declared unfit to serve on the basis of subnormal intelligence, and when this failed to humiliate him reclassified and stripped of his title. The broad discretionary range of the Draft Boards and the availability of safe billets in the National Guard meant that the children of the ruling class were often comfortably exempted from active service; it was those who lacked political connections who fled to Canada or went to prison.

Conscientious objection has become a more subtle and complex subject, no longer a relatively straightforward matter of refusing military service. Two issues have become prominent. The first concerns the problem of incompatible ethical codes, where the requirement for a soldier to obey orders might clash with other ethical obligations. In a celebrated case in the USA in the late 1960s, a US army doctor was court-martialled for refusing to provide medical training for special forces. The second is broader still and concerns the individual moral conscience of the soldier. The defence of respect for authority and obedience to orders was specifically rejected at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after WW II, which found individual soldiers to be morally and legally responsible for the commission of war crimes. Thus a principle far more subversive than conscientious objection was established: that the fighting soldier himself must decide what orders are morally acceptable. But decision-making in warfare cannot be a rolling referendum, and the right to disobey orders is one that the US military in particular is still wrestling with. Other armed forces heaved a sigh of relief after the abolition of conscription and proceed on a contractual basis. Where compulsory service still exists it is the target of international organizations such as the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, which argues for conscription to be banned or at least for non-military alternatives to be offered, and for conscientious objection to be recognized as a fundamental human right.

— John P. Campbell/Hugh Bicheno

Whenever government in America has employed compulsory military training or service, it has been confronted by those who, on principle, refuse to bear arms. The early colonists included many members of pacifist Protestant sects—Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren—who believed the Bible and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth prohibited them from participating in war or engaging in any violence against other human beings. Colonial officials fined them for refusing to serve in the militia, but since they were economically productive and otherwise law‐abiding, most colonial governments eventually exempted them from personally bearing arms.

In the Revolutionary War some objectors were forced into militia service, but several states recognized religious conscientious objection as a right and excused objectors if they paid a special tax. In 1790, James Madison sought to include protection for religious objectors in the Bill of Rights, a measure that passed the House, but failed in the Senate.

Both the North and South dealt with religious objectors in the Civil War. Some suffered severely, but ultimately both sides recognized their sincerity and stubbornness. Drafted members of the historic peace sects were allowed to purchase an exemption or hire a substitute. When some refused, the Lincoln administration gave them the option of aiding in the care of wounded soldiers or former slaves.

In World War I, the Selective Draft Act of 1917 recognized only members of the historical peace churches as “conscientious objectors” (COs), but required them to serve in the military in non‐arms‐bearing roles. Some 64,700 men, most of them not members of the pacifist sects, claimed CO status on religious or political grounds. Local draft boards classified 57,000 as COs, and 20,900 COs were inducted into the army. In the training camps, 80 percent abandoned their objections. Some 4,000 remained COs; ultimately most were furloughed into agricultural work, and 1,300 others served in the medical corps. But 450 “absolutists,” who refused to cooperate in any way, were court‐martialed and sent to military prisons.

The harsh and fumbling experience with COs during World War I contributed to a more liberal policy in World War II. The Selective Service Act of 1940 provided CO status for all religious objectors. It also allowed them to choose non‐arms‐bearing military service or alternative civilian service. In 1940–45, 50,000 draftees were classified as COs, most serving in the military, primarily the medical corps. Some 12,000 chose civilian alternative service, working without pay on soil erosion control, reforestation, and agricultural experimentation in one of seventy Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps operated for the Selective Service System by the historic peace churches. Another 2,000 COs worked in mental hospitals and 500 volunteered as subjects for medical experiments on disease. Some 5,000 absolutists refused to cooperate and went to federal prison—a majority of them Jehovah's Witnesses, but also some pacifist social activists such as A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, and David Dellinger.

The 1948 draft law in effect reiterated the 1940 CO provisions throughout the Cold War; but with no CPS camps, most of the 35,000 COs performing alternative service between 1951 and 1965 worked in local hospitals or mental institutions. During the Korean War, the percentage of inductees exempted as COs grew to nearly 1.5 percent, compared with 0.15 percent in each world war.

In the Vietnam War, the traditionally small group of religious objectors was succeeded by massive numbers of secular and religious young men applying for CO status or simply refusing to cooperate in the draft. The new COs tended to come from better‐educated and higher socioeconomic groups. They received support from mainline religions—Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic—plus antiwar and antidraft groups. Established antidraft organizations included the War Resisters League (founded 1919); the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (1940); and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (1948). Numbers of African Americans applied as COs, most prominently Muhammad Ali, a Black Muslim and heavyweight boxing champion, who was sent to prison when he refused military service after his CO claim was rejected.

The Supreme Court, in the Seeger (1965) and Welsh (1970) decisions, expanded the criteria for CO status from religious to secular moral or ethical beliefs. More than 170,000 registrants were classified as COs between 1965 and 1970. CO exemptions granted to registrants as compared to actual inductions soared from 8 percent of inductions in 1967 to 43 percent in 1971, to three times that ratio in 1972, when more people were being exempted as COs than were being drafted into the army. Additionally, between 1965 and 1973, approximately 17,500 members of the armed forces applied for noncombatant status or discharge as COs.

Compulsory draft registration was reactivated in 1980. When 500,000 failed to register between 1982 and 1984, the Reagan administration prosecuted a few of those who publicly proclaimed their refusal to register. The Justice Department soon abandoned such an approach. Instead, Congress, adopting an amendment by Representative Gerald Solomon (Rep.‐N.Y.) penalized nonregistrants by denying them student financial assistance from federal funds.

Within the armed services, even without conscription, conscientious objection became a public issue again during the preparation for the Persian Gulf War, when between 1,500 and 2,000 persons in reserve and regular military units applied for discharge as COs. The army eventually reassigned or released these soldiers, but the Marine Corps court‐martialed and imprisoned nearly fifty Marine COs.

In the 1990s, the right of conscientious objection in many other Western nations was being expanded to include recognition of secular and religious COs in and out of uniform and in some countries, selective objection. Derived from the Vietnam War and new directions in Western political and ethical thought, this trend demonstrated that the tension between concepts of freedom of conscience and the citizen‐soldier continued to redefine conscientious objection in America.

[See also Conscription; Draft Resistance and Evasion; Pacificism; Peace and Antiwar Movements; Selective Draft Cases.]

Bibliography

• Edward Needles Wright, Conscientious Objectors in the Civil War, 1931.
• Mulford Q. Sibley and Philip E. Jacob, Conscription of Conscience: The American State and the Conscientious Objector, 1940–1947, 1952.
• Lillian Schlissel, Conscience in America: A Documentary History of Conscientious Objection in America, 1757–1967, 1968.
• Michael F. Noone, Jr., ed., Selective Conscientious Objection: Accommodating Conscience and Security, 1989.
• Cynthia Eller, Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War, 1991.
• Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II, eds., The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance, 1993.
• James W. Tollefson, The Strength Not to Fight: An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors of the Vietnam War, 1993.
• Heather T. Frazer and John O'sullivan, “We Have Just Begun to Fight”: An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors in Civilian Public Service During World War II, 1996.
• Rachel Goossen, Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Home Front, 1941–1947, 1997

A conscientious objector refuses to participate in war because of ethical, moral, or religious principles. Congress and the Supreme Court have struggled to accommodate such beliefs to two public interests: first, the power of the national government to raise an army; and, second, the First Amendment prohibition on an establishment of religion and its related guarantee of free exercise of religion. According to the Court in United States v. Seeger (1965), these First Amendment provisions acquire special meaning because of “the richness and variety of spiritual life in our country” and because “over 250 sects inhabit our land” (p. 174). Conscientious objection issues are presented when the government raises an army by conscription, or when someone who has enlisted in the military undergoes a change of views and becomes opposed to participation in war.

The 1917 Draft Act required all able‐bodied males to serve but provided that members of any “well‐recognized religious sect or organization” whose creed forbade “members to participate in war in any form” would be assigned to noncombatant service. Draft‐age objectors claimed that this provision violated the Establishment Clause because it excluded honest believers who were not members of historic “pacifist churches,” such as the Society of Friends, and infringed on free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court tersely rejected both claims in the Selective Draft Law Cases (1918).

The Court revisited the issue in United States v. MacIntosh (1931), holding that the Constitution does not require Congress to exclude conscientious objectors from military service. Five justices held that the naturalization statute could be construed to require MacIntosh to declare his unqualified willingness to bear arms. In dissent Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes argued that the statute did not require an oath that the applicant bear arms and that respect for religious conviction and our national history of tolerance for conscientious objection counselled the Court to construe the statute favorably to the applicant.

When Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, it relied upon Chief Justice Hughes's analysis and provided a conscientious objector exemption that included anyone who was conscientiously opposed to “war in any form” by reason of “religious training and belief,” regardless of whether that belief was part of the dogma of an established church. The draft statutes from 1948 through 1967 further defined religious training and belief as limited to belief “in relation to a Supreme Being.”

Despite statutory changes, the Supreme Court's views on conscientious objection have remained consistent since World War II in draft cases and those arising in the military. The Court has never qualified its view that there is no constitutional right to exemption from draft registration or military service and has upheld the requirement that those who obtain conscientious objector status may be compelled to do alternative civilian service. It has, however, continued to construe statutory exemptions broadly.

The Court in Clay v. United States (1971) evaluated conscientious objector claims under a three‐part test: is the belief “religious,” is the claimant opposed to “war in any form,” and is he or she sincere (p. 700). A religion‐based claim may include even views that are not theistic, as in Seeger, where the registrant had “a belief in and devotion to goodness and virtue for their own sakes” and renounced “belief in God, except in the remotest sense” (p. 166).

In Gillette v. United States (1971), the Court held that opposition to war in any form excluded those who object only to particular wars, even if the objection is religious in character. However, an objector need not be a complete pacifist. Willingness to fight in self‐defense is not disqualifying, nor is a belief in theocratic war directed by a supernatural being, the justices concluded in Sicurella v. United States (1955).

The issue of sincerity has proved troublesome, because officials charged with administering conscientious objector provisions have often been hostile to claimants and have masked their political disagreements behind vague assertions that the claimant seemed insincere. The Court took pains in Witmer v. United States (1955) to require that denial of a claim as insincere be supported by objective, nonspeculative evidence.

See also Religion.

Bibliography

• Michael E. Tigar, The Rights of Selective Service Registrants, in The Rights of Americans, edited by Norman Dorsen (1971), pp. 499–517

— Michael E. Tigar

Conscientious objectors are those who, for political and religious reasons, oppose war. Their opposition may take several forms: refusing to serve in the military, to register for the draft, to pay war taxes, or to contribute labor and resources to any war effort.

Prior to the American Revolution, most conscientious objectors belonged to "peace" churches. Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites, Rogerenes, and Schwekenfelders--all of whom opposed war as a matter of Christian principle--were among the first European colonists of North America, and conflict between white settlers and Native Americans provided the first test in the New World of their beliefs. Members of peace churches who refused to fight or help build fortifications were persecuted by Puritans who considered war against Native Americans the "Lord's Revenge."

By the mid-1600s some colonies had exempted Quakers and other members of peace churches from military service. Other colonies, however, were less tolerant, fining or imprisoning citizens who refused to serve in militias or maintain forts. During the French and Indian War, for example, colonial governments forced them to pay for substitutes or face property confiscation.

During the American Revolution, anti-British forces expected conscientious objectors to help provision troops and raided the property of those who refused. Moreover, as the army's need for soldiers increased, some pacifists were forced into service.

During the War of 1812 American political leaders considered national conscription to supplement state militias, but Daniel Webster successfully argued before Congress that such a measure would be unconstitutional. Thus, conscription remained a matter for individual states to decide. Peace church members continued to resist military service and to refuse payment of fines or war-related taxes. As a consequence many, such as pacifists in Baltimore, had their property confiscated by local authorities.

By the 1830s peace had become a political as well as a religious issue. Such organizations as the American Peace Society and the New England Non-Resistance Society linked Christian ethics, abolition of slavery, and pacifism. In 1846, both groups led an organized campaign against the Mexican War. In his essay on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau, a representative of political pacifism, presented his rationale for refusing to pay war taxes, and his subsequent imprisonment became a classic example of nonviolent resistance as a means of social change.

During the Civil War, Congress enacted the first federal conscription legislation, requiring all male citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five to serve in the military if called. The act provided no exemptions for conscientious objectors, but excused from service anyone who paid three hundred dollars. Draft riots erupted among poorer citizens, who could not afford the fee, in protest against the class bias implicit in the legislation. In July 1863 white workers in New York protested the draft by destroying the central recruiting station, factories, transportation lines, and the homes of wealthy citizens. The rioters, viewing African-Americans as the cause of the war, also attacked and killed black citizens. Similar protests erupted in the cities of Boston, Newark, Toledo, and Troy, New York. Quakers, too, objected to commutation fees and, in 1864, pressured Congress into passing the first national legislation allowing members of peace churches to perform alternative service. The law also exempted those whose beliefs forbade any form of service or commutation payment. Confederate conscription legislation initially exempted peace church members who provided substitutes or paid a fine, but these exemptions were eliminated as the need for conscripts increased. In the South, as well as the North, overzealous officers, enlistees, and civilians subjected some objectors to forced service and physical abuse.

During World War I only members of recognized peace churches were granted noncombatant alternatives to military service. Those who belonged to religious sects without a traditional antiwar stance, who opposed war for political reasons, or who refused any form of compulsory service were forcibly inducted, court-martialed, and sentenced to terms in military camps and prisons. Of the 500 objectors who were court-martialed, 17 received death sentences and 142, life terms. Although none of the death sentences were carried out and other terms were reduced, physical abuse in military camps was common. Guards subjected objectors to compulsory exercise, cold showers, solitary confinement, inadequate rations, and cruel punishment. One young man who refused to wear a uniform contracted pneumonia and died. His body, dressed in a uniform, was sent home to his parents.

The majority of World War I objectors were Quakers, Mennonites, Molokans, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Brethren, and members of other peace churches. There were also smaller numbers of political objectors, including socialists, anarchists, members of the International Workers of the World, and nonaligned radicals. Social worker Jane Addams, anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and Socialist party founder Eugene Debs were outspoken supporters of conscientious objectors and of the First Amendment rights of all Americans to voice opposition to war. The government and most citizens, however, viewed all objectors as subversive radicals and silenced the antiwar position along with other dissenting voices by suspending constitutional rights to freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. Goldman, along with several thousand suspected alien "subversives," was deported without formal trial under the Alien Act of 1918. Debs, charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for giving an antiwar speech, was sentenced to ten years in prison. The Espionage Act, strengthened by the Sedition Act of 1918, virtually destroyed the American Left through government-sanctioned censorship of its press and prosecution of its leadership.

During the Second World War, the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 exempted from military service those who "by reason of religious training and belief" opposed war and mandated alternative service in work of "national importance." Objectors who accepted alternative service worked in civilian public service camps on conservation projects, staffed mental hospitals, or volunteered to be human guinea pigs in government-sponsored experiments on diet, endurance, and the transmission and control of malaria, hookworm, typhus, and infectious hepatitis. Objectors received no pay or benefits and had to rely upon families and churches for support.

Those who refused to register for the draft, opposed compulsory service, or failed the test for religious conviction were sentenced to prison. Most imprisoned objectors were Jehovah's Witnesses, but roughly a thousand were radical pacifists affiliated with the War Resisters League, the Catholic Worker movement, or the Socialist party.

Approximately four hundred African-Americans also refused to serve in the military in World War II. Some belonged to the Nation of Islam, which viewed the war as a "white man's conflict." Others refused to serve in a Jim Crow army or to fight for a country that denied basic democratic freedoms to its black citizens.

During the Vietnam War, Selective Service denied exemption to conscientious objectors whose views were "essentially political, sociological, or philosophical." But that war, unlike World War II, was widely viewed as unjust, and the number of political objectors far outnumbered those who held deep religious convictions. Moreover, objectors had a great deal of public support. By the mid-1960s, the peace movement had become a politically powerful and broad-based coalition of radical pacifists, civil rights advocates, nonpacifist anti-imperialists, liberals, and members of the traditional peace churches. This coalition not only helped objectors file for exemption but encouraged those who were denied objector status to resist induction. By the end of the war, 50,000 conscientious objectors had fled the country or assumed false identities in the United States. An estimated 250,000 never registered, and another 110,000 burned their draft cards. High levels of noncompliance with the draft, mass opposition to the war, and declining military morale ultimately forced the government to end its involvement in Vietnam.

Following the Vietnam War, many Quakers, members of other religious groups, and radical pacifist organizations such as the War Resisters League, advocated nonpayment of taxes allocated for military use and the creation of an alternative Peace Tax Fund. In the 1980s, with the reinstatement of draft registration, these organizations supported a new generation of conscientious objectors who refused to register. Tax resistance and nonregistration--both federal offenses--became the central forms of American conscientious objection.

Bibliography:

Robert Cooney and Helen Michalowski, eds., Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States (1987); Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels against the War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 (1984).

Author:

Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo

See also Addams, Jane; Conscription; Day, Dorothy; Debs, Eugene V.; Draft Riots; Goldman, Emma; Quakers; Thoreau, Henry David.