A Brief History of Christianity by Bamber Gascoigne

Author:Bamber Gascoigne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472107602
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

9

IN SEARCH OF TOLERANCE

The Mennonites of Pennsylvania or Ohio are best known to the outer world for their determined rearguard action against such modern conveniences as electricity, the motor car and even the button, not to mention the zip. A bearded farmer – solemnly joining the hooks and eyes on his clothes by lamplight at crack of dawn before climbing into his horse-drawn buggy – can be made to seem a figure of fun in modern America. But an afternoon in the rolling landscape of Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania, left me with a different impression. Every few hundred yards there is a neat white farm, surrounded by perfectly kept and unfenced fields. The animals in the farmyard (geese walking purposefully among the cattle and sheep) contribute to the look of a child’s model farm, just as the occasional horse and buggy, turning out of the forecourt to trot away over the hill, complete the nostalgic photograph. A few years ago such a response would have seemed the purest sentimentality: and no doubt, in the real world of poverty and overpopulation, it still is. But this Mennonite world is precisely the Utopia which ecologists now preach. The wheel has come full circle. It is the reactionary Mennonites who find themselves most up to date.

In fact it is only one section of the Mennonite community, the Old Order Amish, which keeps to these ways. The majority of Mennonites look like any other Americans. What identifies them as one group with the Amish is a shared system of values and beliefs which dates back to the beginnings of Anabaptism in the 1520s: a strong sense of community; an insistence on the right of the individual to resist unacceptable demands by the state, such as conscription to carry arms; and an emphasis on personal religion, centred on the family and on study of the Bible. The Mennonites are split into many independent sects (seen at their most comic in certain practical results, as in the difference between those who will use a car, those who only ride in buggies, and, in between, the ‘black-bumper Mennonites’ who will own a car so long as all the frivolous chrome is painted black), but even this type of fragmentation dates right back to the beginnings of the movement. The community takes its name from Menno Simons, who became its minister in 1536. That was only eleven years after the beginnings of Anabaptism, but already Menno’s was just one among several Anabaptist sects.

During the sixteenth century three Protestant groups won for themselves the position of established churches in different parts of Europe: the Lutherans, the Calvinists and the Anglicans. From the start the Anabaptists were the outsiders, the radical wing of the Reformation, persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike. For them, as for other Protestant minority groups – the Huguenots in France, and later the Dissenters or Nonconformists in England – the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented one long and frequently blood-stained search for tolerance.

Anabaptism had its origin

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.