This Summer, the Lutherans, or at least the Swiss-based Lutheran
World Federation, apologized for persecuting pacifist Anabaptists
400 years ago. But given the ascendancy of Anabaptists among many
U.S. evangelicals, their days as a small, persecuted minority are
clearly long over.
“We remember how Anabaptist Christians
knew suffering and persecution, and we remember how some of our
most honored Reformation leaders defended this persecution in the
name of faithfulness,” solemnly intoned Bishop Mark Hanson during a
joint service of repentance in Germany with Mennonites from around
the world. Hanson is both president of the global Lutheran group
and chief prelate of the liberal-leaning Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America.
Anabaptists are best known as Mennonites, Brethren,
Moravians, and, in their more dedicated forms, Amish. Quakers are
sometimes associated with the tradition in outlook though they have
separate historical origins. Traditionally Anabaptists are pacifist
and separatist from society to varying degrees, foreswearing
national loyalties. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestant
and Catholic governments persecuted them for their perceived
theological and political subversion. Many Anabaptists immigrated
to colonial America, where they prospered.
But the Anabaptist tradition has often emphasized its
history as victim and outsider. Mennonite World Conference chief
Larry Miller confessed to the Lutheran reconciliation service: “At
times, we have claimed the martyr tradition as a badge of Christian
superiority. We sometimes nurtured an identity rooted in
victimization that could foster a sense of self-righteousness and
arrogance, blinding us to the frailties and failures that are also
deeply woven into our tradition.”
Even Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was
present to offer his own repentance and sympathy with the
Anabaptists. “All the ‘historic’ confessional churches have perhaps
most to repent, given the commitment of the Mennonite communities
to non-violence,” Williams insisted. “We look at a world in which
centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much
unchallenged in the practices of power.”
Archbishop Williams’s quote about “collusion,” “violence”
and “power” illustrate increasingly how mainstream liberal
Protestants and Evangelicals now share essential Anabaptist
pacifist and pseudo-separatist beliefs. Traditional Anabaptists,
such as the Mennonites, foreswore military service and public
office while not contesting the civil state’s responsibilities,
including armed force. But the new neo-Anabaptist movement is more
aggressive, demanding that all Christians, and society, including
the state, bend to pacifism. Traditional separatism has also
compromised, with today’s many outspoken neo-Anabaptist voices
pushing many insistent political demands that invariably align with
the secular left and religious left.
Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University is today’s most
prominent Anabaptist thinker. He is himself a follower of the late
John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite who taught at Notre Dame, and whose
classic 1972 “Politics of Jesus” remains deeply influential.
Minnesota megachurch pastor and theologian Greg Boyd also espouses
an Anabaptist message since he renounced his more conventional
conservative beliefs in a controversial 2004 sermon series called
“The Cross and the Sword” that earned him a 2006 New York
Times feature story. He also wrote a popular book called
The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political
Power Is Destroying the Church. A younger neo-Anabaptist is
self-proclaimed “urban monastic” Shane Claiborne, a thirtysomething
popular lecturer whose 2008 book, Jesus for President: Politics
for Ordinary Radicals, likened America to the Third
Reich.
All these neo-Anabaptists denounce traditional American
Christianity for its supposed seduction by American civil religion
and ostensible support for the “empire.” They reject and identify
America with the reputed fatal accommodation between Christianity
and the Roman Emperor Constantine capturing the Church as a
supposed instrument of state power. Conservative Christians are
neo-Anabaptists’ favorite targets for their alleged usurpation by
Republican Party politics. But the neo-Anabaptists increasingly
offer their own fairly aggressive politics aligned with the
Democratic Party, in a way that should trouble traditional
Mennonites. Although the neo-Anabaptists sort of subscribe to a
tradition that rejects or, at most, passively abides state power,
they now demand a greatly expanded and more coercive state
commandeering health care, regulating the environment, and
punishing wicked industries.
Even more strangely, though maybe unsurprisingly,
mainstream religious liberals now echo the Anabaptist message,
especially its pacifism. The Evangelical Left especially
appreciates that the neo-Anabaptist claim to offer the very simple
“politics of Jesus” appeals to young evangelicals disenchanted with
old-style conservatives but reluctant to align directly with the
Left. Most famously, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, once a clear-cut old
style Religious Left activist who championed Students for a
Democratic Society and Marxist liberationist movements like the
Sandinistas, now speaks in neo-Anabaptist tones.
Most neo-Anabaptists would identify with Shane Claiborne’s
angry and defamatory “liturgy of resistance”:
With governments that kill… we will not comply. With
the theology of empire…we will not comply.… With the hoarding of
riches… we will not comply.… To the peace that is not like Rome’s…
we pledge allegiance.”
Neo-Anabaptist rhetoric is especially pervasive at
many evangelical schools, suburban megachurches, intellectual and
hipster circles. Its themes permit a naughty sense of rebellion
without having to stray too far from Christian orthodoxy. A rising
force, the neo-Anabaptists now politically overshadow some of the
“Constantinian” Protestant forces that once persecuted them. At
some future reconciliation service, will repentant neo-Anabaptists
apologize to other Christians for their hyperbolic denunciations
and sweeping political demands?
