Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is Mennonites, Politics, Peoplehood: Europe, Russia, Canada, 1525-1980, by James Urry, published by the University of Manitoba Press, 2006, 400 pages, $27.95.

Marlin Jeschke, of Goshen, Ind., is retired from teaching at Goshen College.

Urry sets out to document that, contrary to common belief, Mennonites have not always been the “quiet in the land,” uninvolved in politics.

The earliest Anabaptists set forth their position in the Schleit­heim Confession that the sword was “outside the perfection of Christ.” But from the beginning Anabaptists and Mennonites had to wrestle with the implications of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the state. From the beginning they negotiated accommodation to the states in which they lived.

In the Netherlands, where Mennonites experienced tolerance the earliest, some Mennonites became civil magistrates from the 1600s onward.

However, as a religious minority, many Mennonites negotiated specific rights on the fringes of political systems for several centuries, especially in Prussia, as Jews also did. They lived by virtue of privilegia negotiated with Polish or German rulers.

Under the pressures and appeals of Prussian nationalism some Mennonites abandoned conscientious objection. In 1801 one Mennonite minister preached duty to the fatherland. One West Prussian Mennonite representative in the German parliament in Berlin objected to an appeal by fellow Mennonites for conscientious objection to military service. Other Mennonites, however, continued to arrange exemption from military service in exchange for special taxes.

Mennonites who migrated to Russia continued to live under privilege, especially Catherine the Great’s promise of exemption from military service. But, notes Urry, the privilege did not mention education or self-government. Mennonites developed these to create semi-autonomous communities not envisioned in the original privilegium. This created a distinctive and complicated form of political involvement for Mennonites in Russia.

By the beginning of the 1900s political circumstances in Russia had undergone significant change. As one Mennonite writer of that era put it: “[It’s] about time that we [Mennonites] get used to the idea that in the future we will have to live in a constitutional state alongside citizens with equal rights, and that in such a state it will hardly be possible to preserve our privileged position.”

With the Communist revolution of 1917, the situation changed even more radically. Mennonite religious and intellectual leaders tried “to continue with the system of special rights and political control they had enjoyed under the old régime,” Urry writes. But this was doomed to fail.

Urry continues the story of Mennonite involvement with politics in Manitoba. The first immigrants of the 1870s came with the mindset of privileges such as they had had in Russia. But they were required to adjust to a democratic government, which at first they were hesitant to trust. Provincial and federal political candidates appealed to the large Mennonite settlements as a “German” vote. But those Mennonites who did vote, at first a minority of them, divided their support between Liberals and Conservatives.