His doctrine of nonresistance to evil had an important influence on Gandhi.
Himself once (in the late 1880s) a tentative disciple of the Tolstoyan simple life, and also of nonresistance to evil as advocated by Tolstoy, Chekhov had now rejected those doctrines.
In 1837, in the wake of financial panic and the failure of abolitionist campaigns to gain support in the North, Garrison renounced church and state and embraced doctrines of Christian "perfectionism," which combined abolition, women's rights, and nonresistance, in the biblical injunction to "come out" from a corrupt society by refusing to obey its laws and support its institutions.
They considered William and Mary to be usurpers, adhered to their oaths to James II, but adopted a policy of nonresistance to the established authorities.
The Kwantung Army met little resistance in its conquests because Chiang Kai-shek, who was intent on establishing his control over the rest of China, ordered the commander of the Chinese forces in Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang, to pursue a policy of nonresistance and withdrawal.
But he would claim that the pacifist has not faced squarely the possible evils that would result from the alternative policy of a country's nonresistance in the face of external aggression: the possible subjection of conquered peoples to regimes that would suppress just those values that the pacifist stands for.
I almost got fired for that, but somehow by patience and nonresistance I survived".
Seventeenth-century Anabaptists believed that nonresistance was purifying in a corrupted world.
(Of course, absolute pacifists who emphasized complete nonresistance will not accept such violence at all).
Nonetheless, some pacifists, such as Tolstoy, do advocate nonresistance.
In the West, absolute pacifism is often derived from the Christian ideal of nonresistance to evil as required by Jesus' pronouncements about nonresistance in the Sermon on the Mount (in Matthew) or the Sermon on the Plain (in Luke).
