Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — When it comes to religious history, the standard college textbook has a blank, one a recent conference at Bethel College was planned to help begin to fill in.

From left, John D. Roth, a professor at Goshen (Ind.) College, Walter Ratliff, a filmmaker and writer from Herndon, Va., and Duane Friesen, professor emeritus at Bethel College, talk at the “Mennonites and Modernity” conference. — Photo provided by Bethel College

After more than 50 years of study of the Anabaptists, such a text nowadays will cover the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement in 16th-century Europe, the Kingdom of Münster and the Peasants’ War, said Mark Jantzen, Bethel associate professor of history. “But after 1550, [the Anabaptists] disappear.”

Jantzen and his colleague Mary Sprunger (both Bethel graduates, in 1985 and 1984, respectively), professor of history at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., were co-planners for “Marginal or Mainstream? Anabaptists, Mennonites and Modernity in European Society,” at Bethel June 25-26. More than 150 people attended.

The conference thesis was that Mennonites — far from retreating into obscurity as the textbooks suggest — were an important influence on European economics, politics and religion for centuries.

Sprunger said that keynote speaker Thomas Brady of the University of California-Berkeley suggested that Mennonites helped to create and spread modernity, especially in Eastern Europe.

“Mennonites introduced new models for doing business — capitalism — and new methods of agriculture and pushed the discussion of religious tolerance,” Sprunger said. “In the Dutch setting, they [modeled] a radical liberal democracy.”

After two days of presentations by scholars about evenly divided between the United States and elsewhere — Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Ukraine and Uzbekistan — and a bus tour to Mennonite museums in Goessel and Hillsboro, the conference wrapped up with a time to state initial conclusions.

“The question was, Is modernity negative or positive?” Sprunger said. “We [in the West are] all beneficiaries, in terms of educational opportunities and personal choice in many areas. On the other hand, there’s the fact of the secularization process and leaving behind of cherished traditions. There was a broad range of opinion [at the conference].”

Another issue raised, she said, was that of “the role of the state, also in terms of positive or negative, which is a common theme in European history of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Mennonites benefited from growing tolerance but also lost much of their autonomy.”

Other questions included the negative and positive aspects of Mennonite participation in European economies as well as the growing need to face issues of wealth and privilege; the particular experience of Dutch Mennonites, who experienced societal tolerance much earlier and therefore assimilated faster; the complex relationship between theology and culture; and the extent to which European Mennonites set their own agenda or had it set by the state or “the world.”

One of the conference funders was the Marpeck Fund, established by Robert Kreider and the late Gerald Kreider to foster interaction between Mennonite educational institutions. Several students attended from Bethel, Goshen (Ind.) College, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, EMU and Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary-Great Plains, as well as one student who came via Canadian Mennonite University.

“We had a goal of getting non-Mennonites to look at Mennonite history — and apparently, they are,” Jantzen said.