IN GOING OVER some of the series I posted radio dramas from, I listened to one that I'll try to post soon in which Mennonites play a major role, not Old Order Mennonites or even very conservative Mennonites, which are another matter entirely. Though not entirely unconnected. By chance listening to it soon meshed with my reading Studies in Mystical Religion by Rufus Jones. The Anabaptists play a large role in the book, leading up to both the present day Mennonites and Amish but also the Baptists (English Anabaptists) and Quakers. I hadn't understood the connection before. Jones also ties them in with much earlier movements like the Lollards though he admitted there weren't documentary links to prove that. Once there is a literary paper-trail, the links are more secure.
It's certainly a different kind of Christianity than I'm used to, having been originally a Catholic and now a Catholic+ accepting whatever I find in other kinds of Christianity, Judaism, etc. which seems to be on the right way to me. I've read and listened to a number of things, not by Old Order or the kinds of conservative Mennonites or Anabaptists who don't use that kind of technology. It seems wise to limit exposure to that kind of media if you have impressionable adults or children around, it's what's made so many Americans into amoral idiots. Some use of technology by some Mennonites might give some hints for using it while not being corrupted by it.
Many of the Mennonites, even some quite conservative ones who I am reading and hearing are remarkably reasonable about their religion and those who don't follow it. Some of them are downright liberal in some things as even some of the conservative ones are quite radical by current American secular Mammonist standards. Of course they don't tend to be libertarian liberals because they have a moral center and motive in what they do, they take the New Testament quite seriously, which would lead someone in most cases to be radical if you take equality and justice and economic justice as seriously as that would tend to make you. I can't really take to things like the fixed notion of gender roles in much of it and most of the various denominations are far from welcoming to LBGTQ+ People.
In giving up ideas of an ordained priesthood, the ideas of the Sacraments that are held by Orthodox, Catholic, many Protestants, they certainly give up some things valued in those traditions but they also gain other things, a remarkable flexibility in the creation, implosions and rearrangements of local congregations and larger groupings. They base much of their religion on the local congregations, some of which split voluntarily if the members feel those are getting too large. There's a lot to be said for that. As well as splitting due to what seems to outsiders as minor or major theological disagreements, details of discipline or interpretation of the Bible. There is a great deal of that and there has been from the very beginning of the movement.
It's a bit ironic that most of the public consciousness of Anabaptists is based on the rigid holding to ways of life and conduct that were passed by in the general culture in the 19th, 18th or even 16th century, minor things like buttons and lengths of shirt sleeves have been enough to split up over. If those seem minor to me, well, I'm not in the groups so I don't have any way to know what it means to those who are.
I have a problem with the limits of education some of the groups impose because if the children choose to leave, are kicked out or otherwise lose the support of their family and community, they can be left in a serious state of distress. I've never thought that a religious choice made out of ignorance of the wider world is a real choice or a safe means of finding solid belief. But the same thing can be said of children who go to other private or even many public schools. I doubt that a child whose education was, in reality, replaced by TV, the internet or mindless entertainment so common in secular, a-religious America is much better off. I know of a 19 year old who graduated from high school last year who is as up the creek as anyone who was never educated past an 8th grade level in antique Plat-Deutsch.
I am most interested in what would probably be called "liberal Mennonites" some groups of which have stopped calling themselves Mennonites while staying identified as Anabaptists. One of the things I've listened to were the presentations of the Mennonite Writers Conference held at Goshen College in 2022, the keynote address was given by Casey Platt, a Mennonite trans-woman whose writing I'm planning on reading when I can get around to finding them. The others who spoke were as interesting. It gave me an insight into a world that I never knew existed before. It's a different kind of "evangelical" Christianity than you're going to get from the American media. It's certainly more centered in the radicalism of the Gospel, Acts and Epistles than 95% of what you'll hear called "evangelical Christianity" in the media.
Christianity is changing, that's certainly the case, just as it always has. Reading Gregory of Nyssa and some others, I'm convinced it's supposed to change as the universe and our life in it is always changing. I believe in The Living God and the Living Christ, there is no past that we can ever recover or long preserve. I would bet that even the most reactionary of Mennonites or Amish congregations really live in the past of their families and groups. The trad-Catholic cult may be able to continue to make believe it's still 1952 for quite a while with the billionaires trying to harness Catholicism to push capitalist-fascism in politics - though I'm hoping Francis and his successor can suppress that heresy. "Mainline churches" in Protestantism seem to have problems similar to Mennonites only translated to their own vocabularies. I don't consider many of the Baptists to be Christians anymore, they having gone over to Mammon worship like the trad-Catholics have, and from what I gather from listening to critics in American Orthodoxy they feel Orthodoxy has undergone the same kind of hostile takeover that Catholicism in America has.
Reading in Rufus Joneses book how 17th century English Protestantism devolved into the Ranters looks remarkably familiar in the general outlines of the majority of "white evangelicals" in America. Only those People were more marginal with less money and generally didn't have automatic weapons and memberships in fascists and Nazi organizations. They weren't getting billionaire money or its equivalent. The "white evangelical" and "trad-Catholics" of the Republican Party are if anything more ga-ga than the Ranters were. And I'd include a number of the members of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops in that, Strickland in Tyler, Texas is certainly in their number as is the putrid Raymond Burke. I'd put Barron among them, too, though he has more media savvy.
Maybe the future of Christianity is in small independent churches, probably a lot of them house churches supported by their local congregation and householders. I have a friend who is working on writing and compiling a small hymnal for such a small congregation. Believe me, he never thought he'd be doing that fifty years after we were in college together. But I'd never have thought I'd be writing something like this. Maybe the future of Christianity is going to be a lot like the ferment of the early Reformation in which old forms and ways are going to have to give way to newer ones, Women's roles, LGBTQ+ issues, different cultural and regional ways found where old forms and ways have failed. I don't think that big churches and even many small church buildings are going to play much of a role in it. And there is also the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement. Maybe that was where things started to go wrong, to start with, building big churches. Earliest Christianity was pretty much a home-church affair, that's what the Protestants imagined they were restoring, though that's not possible or, perhaps, even what we're supposed to be doing.
I would recommend Rufus Foxes book readable from the link above, though there is some of it I don't agree with. He has slight regard for the great Orthodox tradition in favor of the later Western, Latin tradition. I find St. Gregory of Nyssa quite a bit better than St. Augustine who I think led Western Christianity down a terrible path which it still is far from recovering from. I think his analysis of the early corruption of Protestantism through Luther's and Zwingli's dependence on secular powers and, so, allowed their reforms to conform with what secular powers were comfortable with. The enormous and deadly attempt to suppress and summarily murder to get rid of Anabaptism was, I think, a combination of the attempt to protect the power of both the state and the established churches - I do agree with Jones that the persecution and mass murder of Anabaptists is one of the darkest episodes in Christianity, not that there were not other such mortal sins committed by the Churches as soon as those allied themselves to secular power in the early centuries of Christianity.
I would also recommend reading and listening to the Mennonites and other Anabaptists, even if things like Women covering their hair or the rejection of LGBTQ+ People by some of them might make you angry.
One thing I did like is that so many of them have such a robust practice of congregational singing. I'd heard how impressive it can be to hear how Mennonites who come together from different places can sing in 4-part harmony at the drop of a hymn title. While some of it has the limits of mediocre 19th century Protestant hymnody, some of it is quite a bit better than that. One of the articles I read about churches splitting over being welcoming to LGBTQ+ People ended with a minister saying, well, we can still sing together.
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