Many North Carolina Friends, including Lyndon Hobbs and his wife Mary, strongly supported the Peace Testimony and the newly established American Friends Service Committee. Mary Hobbs’ pacifism was deeply ingrained and keenly felt. "As the daughter of Nereus and Orianna Wilson Mendenhall, [Mary Hobbs] had witnessed her father’s resistance to war and the draft during the Civil War and remembered vividly her father’s tearful decision to remain at the Boarding School at New Garden when they could have lived in peace, prosperity, and freedom in the North." In an article entitled "Our Testimony," she wrote:

After explaining the religious basis for the Friends’ Peace Testimony, she felt impelled, like many pacifists, to affirm clearly that she was a loyal American: "There is no disloyalty in [our position]. We would lay down our lives rather than betray in the slightest degree the land we love." She then adds that "the Government has recognized this fact and has given us opportunity to serve our fellowmen in some non-combatant way."

Friends had good reason to be careful about affirming their loyalty and patriotism. As Schlissel observes, "Americans went to war in a state of giddy hysteria. Men and women long restrained by Puritanism tended to find, through war, a release of emotion, a near sexual excitement." Despite popular enthusiasm for the war, many American went to great lengths to avoid the draft and public sentiment fiercely opposed these "slackers." For this reason, the US Government hesitated at first to recognize the right of conscientious objection. But the peace churches convinced the government that according its members CO status would help avoid the kind of opposition and dissension that occurred when England had cracked down on pacifists. "A number of religious and liberal pacifist organizations—Quakers, Mennonites, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the AUAM—had sought to convince the government to grant such freedom of conscience. They argued that the British experience of 1916-17 had shown that the clash of wills between committed conscientious objectors and the administrative apparatus of the State, particularly the military, could result in miscarriage of justice and severe, even fatal, brutality."

At the recommendation of the Secretary of War, Congress decided to limit CO status to those from traditional pacifist churches and exempted them only from combat, not non-combat military service.

Within a few months after the United States entered the war, the American Friends Service Committee was established to provide alternative service opportunities to Friends and other religiously oriented COs. The Friends Messenger reported that as of July 1, 1917, a unit of 100 young men was to be trained at Haverford College for reconstruction work in France. Mary Hobbs recommended this option to draft-age Friends.

Many Friends felt very strongly that they had a moral obligation to do everything they could be of service during time of war, to prove not only their loyalty but also their religious faith. North Carolina Friend Alice Paige White wrote: "Whatever opportunity offers to do relief work, to aid in reconstructing dismantled homes and villages, to feed the hungry and to conserve the food supply of this country, especially by preventing waste and extravagance, there Friends should be in the van. Let us not placidly hide behind our ancient testimony and smugly feel excused from active work…"

The peace work of Friends at this time often emphasized its patriotism. North Carolina Friends had instituted a "Peace Medal," awarded to children for projects promoting peace. In the Friends Messenger, the Peace Committee lifted up as an example the work of Friends who show the patriotic side of Quaker service: "Probably most people, even children, know that Friends do not believe in war. Perhaps some of the boys are indeed a little ashamed of this principle of Friends in these stirring times. Our Bible Schools have a splendid opportunity to hold up the heroic side of Quaker principles, to keep our members informed of the positive work of Friends both in England and in this country, in these days of devastation." The article describes a project by Brooklyn Friends advertising the service of Friends in wartime. "Over these typical Quakers was placed a frame trimmed in the colors of the American flag" with images of Quakers doing relief work and thereby "indicating that Friends are not slackers."

While many Friends sought non-military ways to express their faith and do their patriotic duty, some were not adverse to cooperating with the military. Many were drafted, or voluntarily joined the army. Some helped the military effort in other ways. Thomas Newlin, for example, decided to work for the YMCA after leaving Guilford. Like most Quakers, he said that he deplored all war, but he also admired the spirit of self-sacrifice and service that he saw as a "byproduct" of America’s involvement in Europe’s struggles. He lifted up the example of those who were willing to give up personal comforts and well-paying jobs in order to serve in the military. For this reason, he extolled the YMCA because it "is in the army for no other purpose than to exemplify sacrifice and service." Like many involved in the Holiness movement and revivalism, he embraced the idea of personal salvation and individual moral uplift. The purpose of the YMCA’s outreach to the army was to help young men avoid the moral pitfalls of military life, as Newlin makes clear:

This problem is described much more colorfully in an anonymous article that appeared in the Friends Messenger during this period. Called "Our Boys in Camp," it depicts the moral perils of military life in language suggesting an age of innocence:

The author says that "the Y.M.C.A.s, and other religious organizations, are doing fine work in the camps" to protect young man from these moral dangers. This was the kind of morale-boosting work undertaken by Thomas Newlin, and supported by North Carolina Friends of the evangelical type.

With characteristic enthusiasm, and hyperbole, Thomas Newlin described his work at Camp Jackson: "I never felt more clearly in my life that I was in my right place. The Y.M.C.A. is undertaking one of the greatest pieces of work ever entered into by any Christian organization. I feel that I am representing the church in this work." He writes that "there will be eight large buildings in addition to the Administrative building, and in each of these buildings there will be religious meetings, lectures, entertainments or educational or Bible classes every evening and at many hours of the day….It seems to me that the world is experiencing a new Pentecost when Russia, France, and Italy have all asked for the American Y.M.C.A. to come to organize the religious work in their armies."

While Thomas Newlin was at Camp Jackson helping to protect the morals and raise the morale of the troops (as well as usher in a new Pentecostal age!), Howard Brinton was quietly paying visits on COs imprisoned at this same camp. On June 18, 1918, he wrote a letter to J. Algernon Evans, describing a visit to Camp Jackson, where COs were being detained. During this period, CO’s were often not allowed to communicate with those outside of prison, and even their names were sometimes hard to obtain. [One can’t help thinking of the Muslims who were detained immediately following September 11, 2001.] Brinton was at first rebuffed by the captain in charge, but was finally able to "thaw him out" and acquire the names of Friends who were incarcerated. He was even allowed to exchange a few words with several of the men. The captain told Brinton that the men would be "sent to France to work in the fields where the bullets were flying" and "that would show whether they had a yellow streak or not." Brinton concludes, "The captain is a strong, able fellow, well able to protect his charges and treat them fairly with little sympathy for them as he regards most of them either as yellow or below normal in intelligence." This experience no doubt had a strong impact on Brinton.

After leaving Earlham in 1918, Brinton went on to work for the AFSC. So did another Guilford man, Richard J.M. Hobbs, the son of Mary and Lyndon Hobbs. Richard Hobbs wrote that five Quaker volunteers from North Carolina, all from Eastern Yearly Meeting, were serving in France:

The American Friends Service Committee also stressed the patriotic element in Quaker service and its value for America’s long-term interests in the world. Writing about the feeding program in Upper Silesia, Howard Brinton (a publicist for the AFSC) made clear that this work had immense public relation value:

Brinton’s appeal to patriotism is of course tinged with a criticism of an American foreign policy based on self-interest and isolationism. He felt that Friends were successful in their relief efforts and their Christian witness because they did not become flag-waving patriots and abandon their pacifist principles. "Their pacific attitude has placed them in a strategic position for taking the lead in relieving the evils effects of war," wrote Brinton. "In so far as they have been faithful, just so far they have gained in power and influence." In Brinton’s view, "the Christian ‘church’ as whole failed during the war because it allowed other organizations, such as the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A, to do its work. It clung to the old theory that Christianity was a sort of life line thrown out to rescue the perishing from the evil of the world, rather than a method of making the world less evil." In other words, by not challenging the assumptions of the modern state and its military machine as the Quakers did, most Christian denominations lost credibility and failed in their prophetic mission.

It is worth recalling, especially during our times of increasing militarism and patriotic fervor, that North Carolina Friends and Guilford students and faculty were willing to uphold the Friends Peace Testimony and to make sacrifices and take risks, including the risk of imprisonment, for the sake of their faith. In doing so, however, they also stressed that peacemaking was patriotic. As a result, the First World War did not have as traumatic or devastating an effect upon North Carolina Friends as did the Civil War; in fact, quite the opposite. "The old opposition to Friends has not only disappeared," wrote Mary Hobbs in 1923, "but quite the contrary has taken its place," with Friends as legislators, attorneys, teachers in the state universities, principals and teachers in high school, active in all movements for social improvement, and "leading business men in our cities."

By providing opportunities for constructive war-time service, organizations such as Guilford College and the American Friends Service Committee may have helped Friends to express their Peace Testimony in ways that did not seem as threatening as Friends’ opposition to slavery. As a result, most Friends in North Carolina and elsewhere—to quote an old Quaker joke—"not only did good, they also did well." Whether this success helped, or hindered, Friends’ subsequent work as peacemakers, is a question open to debate and further study.