Honest Yet Respectful Dialogue

Everyone belongs to a tribe, and traditional Anabaptists may as well embrace their heritage with enthusiasm.

But it gets complicated. Amid countless interactions over the past few years, I have come to sense tribes within our tribe. My accumulated data are hardly scientific, but it seems clear that many of us embrace one of three quite different modi operandi. They are as follows.

1) Accept the status quo. The Amish and Mennonites fill a niche that privileges them with a nearly unassailable socio-economic status. A successful work ethic has all but permeated our genes. Everyone likes to buy something Amish-made. To lay hold of economic security, an ethnic Anabaptist has only to do what’s expected:

• marry someone of a similar background.
• buy a house (though an increasingly rare privilege, for us there’s Old Money to reach around).
• serve on school boards and sewing committees.
• read John Piper.
• get buried at the Shady Grove Beachy Amish Mennonite Christian cemetery, leaving behind Old Money for your children who will marry, buy a house, serve on committees…

And, certainly, there are far worse ways to live your life. People in this category are often earnest Christians and peaceful neighbors, and they seldom hold up banks.

2) Engineer an exit. This option can be very easy or very hard, depending on your exit strategy; easy, if you leave Anabaptism via the ladder that progresses seamlessly from Old Order to New Order to Beachy Amish to BMA (Barely Mennonite Anymore) to Rosedale to God-knows-where; hard, if you follow your convictions/delusions and leave cold turkey. Recently I heard of someone who went from Beachy Amish to Greek Orthodox. Now that takes chutzpah.

3) Work toward renewal. Traditional Anabaptism is highly ethno-religious. To my wife and me, leaving still feels like dissociating from one’s birth family. Furthermore, we find historic Anabaptism deeply compelling, not least its emphasis on community over alpha individuals and rock-star pastors; fruit-bearing over mental assent; and simplicity over consumerism and luxury. Most importantly, to be truly Anabaptist is to live out Jesus’ vision of suffering love and nonviolent societal engagement.

And yet. Call me alarmist, but I find these qualities to be waning among many Anabaptists today. Thus neither accepting the status quo nor leaving are great options, and on most days I find myself among those (takes on obnoxious and pretentious tone) who advocate a kind of renewal movement.

But hear me out. Renewal is not a dirty word. In fact, as Peter Enns points out, any movement that has kept its momentum has learned the value of renewal and reform. Baseball, for instance, kept its original magic while also embracing change. In the Yankees’ lineup today Babe Ruth would be like a lost child, but he would still recognize the sport, and if he interacted with 21st century New York for any length of time he would understand why the changes have been necessary.

So also the Anabaptist faith tradition must adapt, even as it stays rooted in its original hallmarks of authentic community, embodied faith, and suffering love. If we fail to adapt, the rest of the world will continue calling us quaint and idyllic, but we will be left to muddle along with an adolescent worldview in an increasingly complex world.

To avoid this, I propose three areas in which our generation must not fail to act.

First, our wooden Biblical literalism must mature into wrestling with the Bible. At times Bible scholars denude scripture by focusing on the original context so much that they fail to explore its transformative message for today. As a result, traditional Anabaptists have overcorrected and skipped any serious study of ancient biblical settings, causing them to dogmatize beliefs that are increasingly untenable. (Since I have decided not to name any specifically, I won’t mention Young Earth Creationism, Penal Substitutionary Atonement, or Eternal Conscious Torment.) This reactionism has also been lethally coupled with a crushing need to be right; too often we have subtly viewed our Christianity as superior to all other High and Low Church traditions.

The result? Our interactions in the gloriously messy contemporary conversations around hermeneutics–as well as the arts, science, and many other areas of societal engagement–have been stifled. Felix Manz would not approve.

Second, our ethno-centric practices must mature into transformative, universally-applicable practices. The young revolutionary Anabaptists may well be disillusioned with arbitrary rules like mandatory Nehru jackets (plain suits). However, that should not lead them to reject a rule of life outright. In fact, a rule of life should make more demands on us, not fewer, and it is commendable to sit down as a community and decide how cross-bearing should look. Yet wearing ethnic clothes and prohibiting alcohol and the cinema are not what it means to bear the cross of Christ. (Sheri Yutzy has written lucidly on this here and here.)

Third, our societal lethargy and right-wing political leanings must mature into Christocentric engagement. At a recent after-dinner conversation, a respected Beachy Amish pastor insisted there is a conspiracy afoot in the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of Donald Trump. He ended his riff with: “Oh, well, if they get Trump impeached, it’ll be Mike Pence, and he’s even better.”

Though the church leader’s statement is problematic on so many levels I can hardly formulate a critique, we must not blame him for a much more sinister, widespread problem. Official Mennonite teaching holds that political power doesn’t bring change, which sometimes works itself out in a benign quietism. Other Anabaptists, however, assume that the horn-rimmed “family values” of the 1950s are what God secretly desires and since the Republican Party wants to restore those values, why not lend them covert (or overt) support?

But nationalism and quietism are both insidious mutations. The original Anabaptist vision anticipated deep Christocentric engagement with societal woes, so deep that thousands of its followers were martyred. Today’s societal woes and injustices are different from those of 16th century Europe, but hardly less urgent. They cry out for a response–nonviolent and nonpartisan, yet confrontational and prophetic. Perhaps if we were real Anabaptists, we would still be getting persecuted for our faith, and we would be a dying breed in quite another sense.

Thus the longer I think about renewing Anabaptism, the more I keep bumping against the sacrifice that’s required. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go reexamine those other tribes within my tribe.