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Beyond George Blaurock and the 500th anniversary: Vincent Harding and the Transformationist Anabaptists

Anabaptist leader George Blaurock, image created using DALL-E by Tim Nafziger, August 26, 2024

This article was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of MennoMedia’s Leader Magazine. Illustration of George Blaurock generated using DALL-E by Tim Nafziger, August 26, 2024

As Mennonites and other Anabaptists prepare to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism, we are marking the anniversary of January 21, 1525, when George Blaurock and Conrad Grebel gathered with others for a secret meeting in the house of Felix Manz in Zurich, Switzerland.

Earlier that day these reformers had lost a contentious theological debate in the city. Zurich city council had declared their meetings illegal and ordered them to baptize all their unbaptized children. Yet those gathered felt the bible was leading them differently: baptism should be an adult decision upon confession of faith. Blaurock turned to Grebel and asked him to baptize him. As the story goes, Grebel obliged and Blaurock became the first Anabaptist: twice baptized.

But this story is only one part of the Anabaptist origins. It is a story that has been told to intentionally minimize the stories of other radical reformers.

Mennonite Action and Vincent Harding

Before we tell the full origin story, let’s go 499 years forward to another January morning, this one in 2024. It’s January 16 and over a hundred Mennonites are walking through the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. This is part of the Capitol complex: “temple of our Democracy” according to house speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Those gathered are part of a group called Mennonite Action calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. On a pre-arranged signal, they all sit down. It is a creative disruption, like Jesus’ nonviolent direct action in the temple in Mark 11:11-19. Rather than pulling out a whip, the Anabaptists sit down and began singing hymns until they are arrested by Capitol police.

Mennonite Action is building on the work of groups like Pink Menno, Community Peacemaker Teams and On Earth Peace. These are Anabaptist-rooted groups who have gone beyond conscientious objection to actively working for justice and peace. They have often faced pushback from Mennonites who are more focused on personal holiness and traditional ideas of nonresistance.

Mennonite leader Vincent Harding was a key prophetic voice in challenging Mennonites to join the wider movement for peace and justice. In the early 1960’s he wrote: "We need somehow to move away from the passivity suggested by our dependence on the phrase ‘nonresistance,’ to a new sense of involvement and participation implied in the term ‘peacemakers.’" (Kerhrberg, Sarah, From Fort Peachtree to Atlanta: The Mennonite Story, Mennonite Historical Committee. For references see Mennonite Historical Bulletin, Volume 64, July 2003 on page 3)

Mennonite voluntary service director Edgar Stoesz embodied the Mennonite establishment position when he rejected Harding’s invitation to work for racial justice. "As we refrained from participating in its annihilation, but helped later to reconstruct Germany, so we decline to participate in the interracial conflict but seek rather to bring reconciliation and goodwill,” Stoesz said. (Kerhrberg)

Harold S. Bender and Passing as Proper & Protestant

This brings us back to the furtive Anabaptists gathered in secret on January 21, 1525. When US historian and scholar Harold S. Bender chose to focus on their story, his goals were similar to Stoesz. Bender and Stoesz were invested in an Anabaptist vision that didn’t rock the boat, but dutifully cleaned up in the wake of disasters, both natural and imperial. In his 1942 Anabaptist Vision, Bender emphasized the values of “freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and voluntarism in religion.” (Bender, Harold S, The Anabaptist Vision, American Society of Church History, 1943) These were all quite compatible with mainstream liberal Protestantism of his era.

When Bender wrote about the origins of Anabaptism, he chose to focus on Blaurock, Grebel and Manz in January 1525, while ignoring what was happening up the road in southwest Germany at the same time. At the time of the first rebaptisms, radical reformer Thomas Müntzer was traveling through southwest Germany rallying a movement of peasants to call for justice and liberation. The biblically based Twelve Articles they wrote were a seminal human rights document whose impact continues with us to today. Scholar Rodney Sawatsky calls these and other “apocalyptic” Anabaptists the “Transformationist” stream of Anabaptism (Sawatsky, Rodney, “The One and the Many: The Recovery of Mennonite Pluralism” published in Anabaptism Revisited; Essays on Anabaptist/Mennonite Studies in Honor of C. J. Dyck, Herald Press, 1992). But the transformationist Anabaptists were effectively suppressed and slaughtered in 1525 (and again in Münster in 1535) so that only the strictly pacifist streams of our tradition survived.

The radical reformation was a period of whirlwind and foment across the region. Most modern historians agree that a more accurate story of Anabaptist origins has many sources. It’s called polygenesis. It’s understandable that Bender would want to focus on the Swiss Brethren and ignore the other, more rowdy origin stories that make up the early Anabaptist tapestry. The embarrassing revolutionary cousins actively resisted the political and religious authorities and were killed. In 1943, Bender was trying to shepherd Mennonites in the midst of World War II when the largely German community (who refused to join the army) was viewed with deep suspicion by their neighbors. Respectability was a key part of survival.

Menno Simons and Survival

Menno Simons had similar survival goals in his church planting and support work with the early Mennonite church. He was distinguished among early Anabaptist leaders in a large part by his survival. His decades of writing and preaching and itinerancy were in the wake of the transformationist Anabaptist take over of the city of Muenster in 1534 and 1535. There were Anabaptist revolutionaries still living in the hills (the Batenburgers) who famously swooped down to slaughter 125 cows owned by a monastery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batenburgers). Simons understood that peace was not just good theology, it was also a practical path out of near extinction for the Anabaptist movement.

This is the history behind Edgar Stoesz’s resistance to Vincent Harding’s call for Mennonites to join the civil rights movement in working for racial justice. Harding and those of us in the modern transformationist Anabaptist stream were not and are not advocating the absurd cow killing violence of the Batenburgers. The murderous excesses of those early transformationist Anabaptist movements are clearly wrong. What we are embracing is their commitment to disrupting the power structures in the way that Jesus did.

In his address to Mennonite World Conference in July of 1967, Harding suggested Mennonites were “huddled behind the barricades of the status quo, praying the storm will soon be over so that life can continue undisturbed.” Harding challenged Mennonites for jumping too quickly to focus on the violence of the Black Panthers or other revolutionary movements without first understanding the massive systemic oppression that they faced. (Source: https://anabaptistworld.org/beggars-saints/ )

Revitalizing the Transformationist Stream of Anabaptism

We can bring the same curiosity to the story of the transformationist Anabaptists of the 1520’s and 1530’s. Let’s grapple with the messiness of our origin story rather than denying it as Bender did.

Sadly, Harding moved away from the Mennonite Church in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Yet the transformationist stream grew. It brought together a commitment to nonviolent direct action with resistance to the triple evils of militarism, racism and poverty. These were so named by Dr. Martin Luther King in in his April 4, 1967 sermon in which he came out against the Vietnam war exactly one year before he was assassinated (Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence, Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967). That speech was written by Harding (Berger, Rose Marie, https://sojo.net/magazine/april-2007/interview-man-who-wrote-kings-most-dangerous-speech 2007). Once again in the 1960’s, prophetic religious leaders were killed for speaking against the political authorities.

As the transformationist stream gathered steam in the 80’s it drew on the work of William Stringfellow and Walter Wink who understood the Apostle Paul to be using the language of “powers and principalities” to describe the spiritual, economic and political forces of domination in our world.

Organizers like Canadian Mennonite Hedy Sawadsky understood their faith as calling them to oppose nuclear weapons as part of a wider movement to abolish nuclear weapons. She moved to Texas to track the White train which quietly shipped nuclear weapons on train tracks across the country. Sawadsky herself was deeply influenced by years working in Palestinian Refugee camps with Mennonite Central Committee.

Sawadsky joined Gene Stoltzfus in founding Christian Peacemaker Teams in 1986 (Duane Ruth-Heffelbower, The Anabaptists Are Back: Making Peace in a Dangerous World, Herald Press, 1991). As we watch new movements like Mennonite Action and the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery rising up today, we would do well to remember that the transformationist Anabaptist stream has been with us from the beginning.

Mennonite power dynamics and status markers

Mennonite quilts at Sunset by Tim Nafziger

This essay was originally published in Anabaptist World in July 2022 as Quilts and Power: What Malcolm Gladwell is missing about Mennonites

On June 22, author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell published an essay on his participation in a Mennonite wedding in the town where he grew up in southern Ontario. Gladwell opens the piece by summarizing his previous coverage of Mennonites and expressing his deep affection for our community.

Gladwell writes enthusiastically that Mennonites are a “low power distance” culture. Power distance is a term from sociology that refers to the extent to which people of low status accept unequal distribution of power. In other words, Gladwell is saying Mennonites are wary of hierarchy. He says we have abandoned “the aggressive pursuit of status markers.”

Resisting political domination and illegitimate authority are at the core of Anabaptism. However, Gladwell’s public relations campaign on our behalf is problematic. Here’s why: Mennonites do have status markers, they are just different (sometimes) from those of dominant culture in the U.S. and Canada. If you advertise Mennonites as having no status markers, you set up false expectations that will lead to disillusionment by people who start attending Mennonite churches. (more…)

Amish Cyberpunk: ChatGPT self-corrects its theology on peace in a short story

Generated by Stable Diffusion 2.1 with prompt: Samuel the Amish man with a highly detailed cyberpunk background

For the last few weeks I’ve been hearing a lot about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that can tell stories, write code and answers questions. My brother had told me he’d had it write code for him and then correct bugs in the code when he pointed it out to ChatGPT. I was intrigued. I’d experimented some with Stable Diffusion that generates art based on prompts and also with short stories written by AI, but the buzz on the internet seemed to indicate this chat bot was taking things to a new level.

This evening I finally sat down to try it out. I started by asking ChatGPT to generate some Amish romance stories set in space, which it dutifully did with fairly cliched results. Then I moved on to a a much more obscure sub-genre: Amish Cyberpunk. This is a microgenre of which I am a huge fan boy. There’s only three novels in it that I am aware, all by author Stephen Beachy. If you want to hear more about it, check out this podcast interview I did on his first Amish Cyberpunk Novel: Zeke and the Singularity.

I thought that Amish Cyberpunk would provide a novel challenge for ChatGPT: combining a well known religious community (which many of my ancestors were part of) with a well known science fiction genre. (more…)

The last, best hope of earth: John McCain and US weakness

This was originally posted on Facebook on February 12, 2008.

I just read John McCain’s victory speech after today’s Republican primaries. This passage caught my eye:

They will paint a picture of the world in which America’s mistakes are a greater threat to our security than the malevolent intentions of an enemy that despises us and our ideals; a world that can be made safer and more peaceful by placating our implacable foes and breaking faith with allies and the millions of people in this world for whom America, and the global progress of our ideals, has long been “the last, best hope of earth.”

It’s interesting to read this passage in light of Confessions of an Econonomic Hit Man by John Perkins which I’m just finishing. The book is a highly readable exposé of Perkin’s own role in America’s “mistakes” – actually America’s tremendous success in building a global corporatocracy. It’s this corporatocracy that has directly (see Mujahideen) and indirectly nurtured corrosive grievance into extremism. (more…)

Armed Flash Mobs: insurrectionist crowd dynamics, technology and guns in the storming of the US capitol on January 6, 2021

In understanding the storming of the capitol one year ago today I’d like to focus on the framework of the “armed flash mob,” a term used by scholar Darrell Miller that connects with concepts introduced to me by Bill Wasik, an article in Wired magazine 10 years ago. I’m also drawing on the 40 minute NY Times’ documentary Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol (published June 30, 2021) that offers minute by minute analysis of January 6, 2021 drawn from thousands of primary sources including a lot of video from the rioters themselves.

I’ll look at each term in the phrase “armed flash mob” in detail in the context of that day.

Mob – Insurrectionist crowd dynamics

We’ll begin by understanding how the insurrectionists on January 6 functioned in ways familiar to scholars of mob behavior. One of the key moments in the storming of the capitol happened at 12:50 pm. “Day of Rage” covers this moment in detail starting at about 10:00 in the video. They emphasize the role of the Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs and his brief conversation with Ryan Samsel, a Trump supporter who was the first to approach the police and challenge them. While leaders like this played an important role, it is important to understand the broader context of the crowd dynamics (both in this moment and as things escalted) to violently attack police. (more…)

Anonymous as a Tactic

This was originally published by Tim Nafziger in Jesus Radicals on December 18, 2010

Post image for Anonymous as a Tactic

The arrest of Assange and attacks on Mastercard, Visa and Paypal by “Operation Payback” have garnered far more attention than the cables themselves. Their denial of service attacks shut down these major sites by loading the site over and over again very quickly. The real world equivalent might be a huge crowd of people showing up to the mall with no intentions of shopping so that no one could get in to shop.

The New York Times quoted one Internet guru comparing Operation Payback to the battle at Lexington that started the Revolutionary war in the United States. (more…)

Redefining a Historic Peace Church Against Whiteness and White Supremacy

Photo: Participants at the February 2017 Hope for the Future gatherings. From left to right: Rafael Barahona, Calenthia Dowdy, Ann Jacobs, Evelin Gonzalez and Colleen Whigham-Brockington. Photo by Jenny Perez Castro.

This piece was originally published in June 2017 in The Mennonite magazine.

It’s been seven months since I last wrote in this space about the results of the U.S. presidential election. Since then the broader shape of Trumpism has become clearer: there is a growing wave of misogynist and openly white supremacist groups in the United States that are emboldened to target women, Muslims, immigrants, black people and many others.

For many of us who are white, this feels new and different, but for peoples indigenous to this continent and for people of color, this is simply a highly visible form of what they’ve faced for a long time. My friend Dr. Joe Pruitt recently told me the story of his father, a black man, who fled the south after he received lynching threats due to his friendliness with white women. Closer to home and more recently, my friend Raul Lopez talked about visiting the Ojai valley in California, where I live. As a young man (10 years ago), he and his friends were followed around by white men in white pickup trucks who made it very clear he that he and his friends were not welcome. That hatred is invisible to me as a white person. (more…)

The complicity of nonviolence with white supremacy amidst the fires in Minneapolis

Hundreds took to the streets in South #Minneapolis last night to show their disapproval for the recent killing of an unarmed Black man. Many gathered in front of a burning #3rdPrecinct building – the former place of employment of the MPD officers who killed #GeorgeFloyd.

This post was co-written by Tim Nafziger and Mark van Steenwyk in 2017 (see original) in response to the backlash against anti-fascists actions in Charlottesville, Virginian in August 2017. We’re reposting it with a new title because it feels even more relevant today as we watch the white liberal response to the burning of the police precinct building in Minneapolis last night. If you’re not a pacifist, see what happens when you substitute the word “liberal” for “pacifist.” If you aren’t Mennonite, consider what our message might look like to your own community.

This is the second in a series of pieces we’ve co-written. This article builds on our first together in 2010: Oppression analysis on its own isn’t enough: Becoming an Ally

In the last two months, in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, we’ve read many white people in my Mennonite community and others committed to nonviolence reiterating their commitment to peace. In a recent article for Anabaptist historians, Tobin Miller-Sherer describes these “smug and satisfied declarations about the superiority of nonviolence” as “bumptious.” This is a good word because Mennonites are extremely skilled at being proud in a humble way.

Why? Let’s take a closer look.

White Mennonites are eager to love their Neo-Nazi enemies who showed up in Charlottesville on August 12, but Mennonite pastor Isaac Villegas calls us to be more honest about who their enemies are: (more…)

Learning from Bernie’s mistakes: an analysis of “How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders”

Fires set by police burn on Backwater Bridge, November 20, 2016

This morning’s NY Times piece, “How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders” is a must read for every supporter of the Sanders campaign. It’s not a pleasant article, but learning from mistakes is critical collective work, even when it happens in a painful public way. While the focus of my political work has not been electoral campaigns, I think we have to recognize that the Bernie movement is inextricably tied to electoral politics. So it must, to some extent, submit to measuring itself by that framework, which is the focus on the NY Times piece. It must also grapple with a grasroots movement measuring stick as well given that the campaign claimed that mantle. Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin do not speak that language and so I will try to do some extrapolation work from their journalism. (more…)

A poem for Michael J Sharp

This poem was written two and a half years ago when I heard of the assasination of Michael J Sharp in the Congo. This poem previously published here. MJ was a contributor here on YAR for a few years. You can read his blog posts here.

Lima Bean Eulogy

We planted lima beans the morning after
villagers found MJ’s body.

The rotund little green dumplings
nestling to the damp earth

He nestled in a shallow grave with Zaida and Betu
along the road from from Bukonde to Tshimbulu in Kasai.

In a few weeks those dumplings will bust up, burst out
and wind their way above our highest hedges.

So this is what it feels like when a friend

(smiling smart blackjack shark, wisecracking lark, goofball genius, fingernail biting adventurer, rainbow vacuum salesman, globe-trotting strategist, adorable hunk, creative critical mind, mass grave documenter, consummate UN professional, Johnny Walker philosopher, lock picking ninja, Mennonite golden boy, rebel leader networker (at church), slightly bespectacled gadget nerd (according to the New York Times if you trust them), loyal comrade, Hot Doug’s line-waiter, burnt out social justice warrior, charismatic conversationalist, noble old soul, pugnacious puppy trainer, binge watching Netflix enthusiast, reconciliator, frequent flier, subversive prankster punk, bright brave peace worker, canny researcher, francophone fish, dummie teller, smooth talking soccer jock, sarcastic lover, humble impresario, fast talking militia deserter recruiter, board game geek, persistent investigator, fiercely independent expert, earnest-really-doing-that-swords-to-plowshares-thing-we-all-talk-about-doing-in-a-way-that-makes-us-feel-a-little-awkward-but-we’d-never-admit-it type, tuxedoed porsche driver, cherry eating long-distance trekker, bantering buddy, authoritarian undermining report writer, box free thinker, charming diplomat, cool calm calculated political operator, lovable troublemaker and texas hold-em chip supplier)*

becomes a seed.

*Thanks to all of you who have contributed to this compilation of memories of MJ on social media and elsewhere over the past two days. Each story shines new light on his life for the rest of us. This poem is expandable. Feel free to leave your own alliterative adjective and noun pairs in the footer.

An invitation to Mennonites to the 2019 Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute

BCM staff member Chris Wight speaks on the opening night of the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute 2019

Two years after the election of Donald Trump as the next president in the U.S. it is easy to feel like there’s nothing left to say. However, I want to engage with my family of faith: Mennonites stretched across this country and far beyond who are committed to living out Jesus’ call to shalom: peace with justice.

Understanding where we are

One way of understanding the transition we are in is that we have moved to a higher awareness of the structural injustice we have in the U.S. over the last two years. For some of us, this is very scary. For others of us, it might be energizing to realize that now everyone can clearly and unmistakably see the power of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism and homophobia in our country. At the same time, it’s clear that LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, people of color, and those with high health care needs are bearing the brunt of the Trump presidency.

(more…)

Poem: Advent’s Eve, 2005

I was a reservist with Christian Peacemaker Teams living in London in 2005 during the kidnapping of Norman Kember, Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney and Tom Fox. Today is the 13th anniversary of the date they were taken.

On that last day of ordinary time
Norman, Harmeet, Jim and Tom walk across a parking lot
in Baghdad and get into a van.
Years later, Jim can’t remember “those last, unremarkable motions.”

The next morning (the first Sunday of Advent)
The BBC called me at noon.
The voice at the other end of the line was chasing rumors:
We heard that four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams were kidnapped.
What do you know?

What if Christians took the same risks for peace…

The van exits the lot, abruptly stops;
Men with big guns open the door,
shove the four to the floor
and into the tomb.

(more…)

Mennonites and #MeToo: 4 Ways to Challenge Rape Culture

Three boxes of tea on the window sill with flowers

This post was originally published on my blog for The Mennonite two years ago

This week we’ve seen audio of Donald Trump’s bragging about sexual assault open up a nationwide conversation about rape culture, which is the set of beliefs and ideologies which blame victims of sexualized violence and normalize sexualized violence, often by men (for more, see this series of definitions).

U.S. Presidential elections are like conversations around a giant water cooler. For a brief time the themes in the elections shape our conversations in the U.S. (and beyond) for better or for worse. These spaces are an opportunity for us.

In the last day, three more women have stepped forward to describe Trump groping, assaulting and kissing them without consent. These accounts join a long list of existing allegations against Trump by women. Two of these stories were reported in The New York Times and one in People magazine.

(more…)

Divisiveness and nonviolent direct action

Note: This piece was first published two years ago on my blog for The Mennonite. It was written in response to the 2016 shooting of police offers in Dallas by Michael Xavier Johnson.

In the wake of the shootings of police and civilians in Dallas, many voices are blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and the growing opposition to police violence and white supremacy. But now more than ever we need movements of committed, militant nonviolence.

Shootings like the one in Dallas grow out of what scholar Ron Mock calls corrosive grievance. These are grievances that build up over time around injustice that is not addressed: the injustice of the mass incarceration of black men in our country, racial inequality in of the U.S. education system and the healthcare system and many other layers of systemic racism. For more, watch this 2 minute video from Mennonite training organization Roots of Justice:

Grievances about these injustices become corrosive when people feel powerless and unheard. In his blog post yesterday Mennonite activist theologian Ched Myers reminded us of John F. Kennedy’s observation along these lines 55 years ago: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

(more…)

Social Media as a tool for holding those with power accountable

Grashopper on a blade of grass

This blog post was originally published on my blog for The Mennonite two years ago.

In his address to graduating students at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) on May 2, President Loren Swartzendruber complained about social media. On May 2, the Daily News-Record quoted him:

“Here’s the challenge we face,” he said, “namely the question of how we engage in meaningful, life-changing, civil conversations in a world that’s impatient for quick answers … and is all-too ready to vilify those who disagree.”

He said important discussions “are extremely difficult to conduct via social media,” and require intra-personal relationships.

There’s plenty of reasons to be concerned about social media, but there’s a story and a pattern behind this complaint that needs a closer look. Swartzendruber’s critique comes after months of pressure on his administration around its handling of Luke Hartman’s employment at EMU. Social media played an important role in that pressure.

(more…)