Category Archives: Book Review

Histories of the Postsecular: An Interview with Maxwell Kennel

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This interview is about Maxwell Kennel’s new book Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time, published by Palgrave Macmillan in November 2021. In the exchanges below, coordinating editor of Anabaptist Historians Joel Nofziger asks how the book stands in relation to Anabaptist history and political theology, and questions how the book relates to the history of memory and the construction of national identity.

Postsecular History advances a critique of certain ways of dividing up time and history. Drawing from the field of political theology, it questions how theological and political ideas combine to form powerful legitimation strategies; and drawing from thinkers who approach the politics of time, it is concerned with how temporal and historical terms are periodized – especially how historical categories of ancient, medieval, and modern, and temporal categories of past, present, and future, are used in value-laden ways.

Joel Horst Nofziger: How did you become concerned with the ways that theopolitical thought creates temporality and historical periods?

Maxwell Kennel: I think that whether we are talking about reading and writing or teaching and research, scholarly activity is always influenced by biography, circumstance, and experience. The construction of historical periods and the configuration of time became important issues for me during my graduate studies, which is a time when the unstructured temporality of ‘study’ tends to replace more common ways of living in time (like the 9:00-5:00 schedule of the work-week).

As I managed my time and mediated between my academic work, family life, and other labor, I noticed that the terms and images I was receiving and using were simultaneously theological and political. One place where this realization came through most clearly was in the factory I worked in during the year between my masters and doctoral degrees. I wrote a personal essay on these experiences called “Factory Time,” which has recently been published in Hamilton Arts & Letters, and I think that it is a good introduction to the underlying concerns and problems that prompted my more abstract inquiries in Postsecular History.

JHN: Postsecular History is a theopolitical text. How do you understand political theology as a field?

MK: I think that, at its best, political theology should be a paradigm or lens through which to understand how concepts that appear to be secular often have very religious histories and structures.

For me, the field of political theology is far more diverse than one might gather from the anthologies that have been published in the past few years by Blackwell and T&T Clark. The term ‘political theology’ need not solely refer to the theological use of political analysis, and there are many scholars who work in political theology without doing so for the benefit of a particular religious tradition. By contrast with approaches that prioritize theology, I feel drawn toward the more pluralistic way of thinking about political theology that I see in the Political Theology Network, which presents its work as a rigorous form of interdisciplinary inquiry that is critical of power and oriented toward justice.

That said, political theology struggles to reckon with the traumatic memory and reception of its founding figures; the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt being the most salient example. Schmitt’s insight was that many modern state concepts are really secularized theological concepts, and the field of political theology has used this narrative of partial secularization to analyze a variety of social and cultural phenomena. But I worry about how enmity, competition, and violent forms of conceptual displacement remain within the discourse on political theology. In Postsecular History I critique the ways that political theology can be taken in by the desire for religion (especially Christianity) to remain in a relationship of competition or enmity with secularity, such that the identification of religious structures within secular concepts would represent another victory for religion over some caricatured image of secularism. In my dissertation I critique an exemplary expression of this pattern in John Milbank’s work, which first constructs an enemy called ‘secularism’ and then uses insights from political theology to position Christianity as the solution to the crises we experience in the ‘postsecular’ world. Instead of being beholden to this competitive displacement of secularity by Christianity, I think political theology is well equipped to think beyond dualistic oppositions between secular and religious ways of thinking, and instead theorize the complex mediations and entanglements between competing normative orders that structure our world.

JHN: In the acknowledgments section that opens the book, you note that you have been influenced by Travis Kroeker’s political theology, building on and from his approach which is “neither Catholic nor Protestant, neither Mennonite nor secularist, neither orthodox nor heterodox.” What does the pursuit of this kind of political theology look like to you?

MK: For a variety of reasons, I am fortunate that Travis Kroeker supervised my dissertation and guided me into political theology. Throughout my time at McMaster University between 2016 and 2021 my entire way of thinking was changed by both his seminars and published works. What I appreciate most about Travis’s work is his critique of possessive desire, and my appreciation for this way of thinking comes through most clearly in Postsecular History when I argue that the prefix ‘post’ cannot adequately fix upon the secular in a way that would allow us to move beyond it.

Travis’s work in Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics and his booklet Empire Erotics and Messianic Economies of Desire seems to be based on the idea that the desire to possess, control, and dominate things is a key theological problem, and I think it is just as much a problem for political theology as it is for religious studies. But where Travis tends to use Augustinian formulations to name this problem (the libido dominandi of the earthly city), I prefer Hartmut Rosa’s argument for the “uncontrollability [unverfügbarkeit] of the world.” However one puts it, the fact remains that it is not only a matter of ethics whether we are possessive and controlling in our scholarship. It is also a descriptive fact that such forms of possession do not work. One does not need theology or theory to know that the tighter and more anxiously we try to grasp things, the more we lose perspective.

Travis’s approach to political theology evades categorization and makes his work difficult to place in the discourse, but to me that is its benefit. His work inspires me to ask: must we be confined to the distinction between secular and theological approaches to political theology, where theologians confidently assert that we are ‘post-secular’ and secular scholars claim to have a better grasp on their object of study than those who believe in the doctrines they study? This is too simple. For me, political theology stands in a far more unique and generative relation with descriptive and normative approaches to the study of religion because it allows scholars to mediate between proximity and distance from what they study without either the fantasy of value-neutrality or the forcible imposition of normative categories.

Despite its flaws, I see the Anabaptist Mennonite tradition as one that can assist in this kind of critique of possessive desire in ways that have interdisciplinary consequences. Is it possible that a methodology based on the critique of violence could inform the works of scholars across the social sciences and humanities? I think so, and I explore this connection further in the introduction to a special issue of Political Theology that I edited earlier this year.

JHN: In what ways have your choice of topic and methodological approach been shaped by Anabaptist thought?

MK: Very deeply. My Mennonite background and Anabaptist sensibilities motivate my fundamental concern for how violence and other forms of force and coercion inhere in our ways of thinking, speaking, and knowing. This led me to write my dissertation on ontologies of violence in the works of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Mennonite political theologians, and feminist philosopher of religion Grace M. Jantzen. As I revise my dissertation for publication, I have been reflecting on its relationship with Postsecular History, and I think that underneath the topics and sources of both works is a fundamental concern for the place of peace and justice in a world where the distinction between secularity and religion is inadequate.

In Postsecular History I critique ways of thinking about the category of the postsecular that privilege certain problematic configurations of time and history. I want to reject approaches to the ‘postsecular’ that use the prefix ‘post’ to indicate possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality. Rather than possessing the secular so as to move beyond it, and rather than proclaiming a new time after the demise of the secular, and rather than thinking that we can free ourselves from secular or religious histories, and rather than using the prefix ‘post’ as a conceptual instrument to mold the secular into a rejectable image, I argue for less violent ways of thinking about the postsecular that account for the complex mediations and entanglements that the term tends to point toward.

My current postdoctoral project “Critique of Conspiracism” is also underpinned by the same underlying values and questions, specifically concerning how conspiratorial thinking periodizes time and history in theopolitical ways, and how such ways of thinking can lead to violence. It seems to me that conspiracy theories are connected with religions in ways that entangle secularity and religion, and this is nowhere more evident than in the rise of QAnon and its connections with American evangelicalism. Postsecular ways of mediating between religion and secularity are at the heart of conspiratorial thinking, especially if we follow Michael Barkun’s suggestion that conspiracy theories are based on the idea that: “nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.” My current work focuses on how this formulation serves as a theopolitical way of narrating the relationship between origins and ends, and does so in ways that allow for the justification of violence – for example, the events of January 6th 2021 in the American capitol. I think that the term ‘postsecular’ can helpfully name the confluence of religious and secular ways of thinking within conspiratorial thinking, and my next step in the project is to consider how conspiracy itself might be a secularized theological concept.

JHN: For the purposes of your argument, you settle on a definition of “postsecular” as “the confluence of Christianity, religion, and secularity with critiques of these terms that resist both religious and secular assertions of dominance.” What led you to this understanding?

MK: I conceive of the postsecular as a category that names the confluence of religious, secular, and Christian ways of thinking, but is also inseparable from the normative confrontations and contradictions that arise between these ways of thinking. My argument in Postsecular History is that we are better able to understand how religions and secularities become entangled and mutually critical of each other if we think about the postsecular without inscribing triumphalism into its prefix.

For example, I attempt to think about postsecular entanglements without Christian anxieties that motivate a return to foundations or a desire to assure final ends. Both the image of a return and the invocation of an end are simultaneously theological and political (‘theopolitical’). Messianic returns and teleological ends are theological concepts that also serve as politically usable means of persuasion. By pointing backward and forward in time simultaneously, a ‘return’ knits together tradition and novelty. So too with origins and ends, which are often mediated in persuasive ways by those who call for returns to a golden age or progress toward utopian or apocalyptic futures. All told, I see most ways of periodizing time (past, present, future) and history (ancient, medieval, modern, postmodern) as powerful persuasive techniques that ascribe value to certain terms and not others. Time and history are not given; they are made. What matters is how we engage in that act of making.

JHN: You discuss how “periodization serves as one kind of theopolitical justification narrative that is used within the logic of neoliberalism” and you suggest that “authoritative periodizations assist the neoliberal project in justifying and ordering the world.” The idea that neoliberal periodizations reorder our relationships with the past, present, and future reminds me of two texts on memory.

I am reminded first of Benedict Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) that “awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity …engenders the need for a narrative of identity” (265). How does the theopolitical control of defined historical periods interface with nation-building projects of communal memory? I also remember reading Jonathan Tran’s The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory (London: Blackwell, 2010); especially Tran’s discussion of the possibility of a Eucharistic time where the Lord’s Supper becomes the reordering power rather than authoritarianism.

MK: Yes, I do see the connections that you are pointing towards between the construction of memory, community identity, and national identity.

It makes sense to me that, by his own admission, Benedict Anderson was influenced by Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach. When I look at Imagined Communities, I see substantial connections between the imaginative construction of nationhood and the theopolitical periodization of time and history that I write about in Postsecular History. For Anderson, the nation is an “imagined political community” that is “both inherently limited and sovereign” (6), and this limitation is found in the borders that demarcate the nation and prevent others from gaining access to its spatial body. Anderson argues that even “the most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation,” by contrast with a Christian vision of universal membership (7). He also argues that the nation is imagined as sovereign because it arose during a time when “Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (7).

To me this shows how the nation – as a figure and bearer of identity – was born of legitimation crises where religious and secular ways of thinking confronted each other, and its hold on sovereignty is at least partly owed to how nation-building projects use theological and religious modes of persuasion to retain power. In answer to your question, I see theopolitical forms of periodization as usable strategies that nationalists tend to employ in order to keep the image of the nation stable. Although the former is extremely violent compared to the latter, both Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” use periodizing terms to build national identity. The words ‘back’ and ‘again’ serve to periodize time and history by reaching back into the past and bringing values into the present for the sake of a future. The figural mediations between these terms are powerful because religious visions of history endure in partly secularized forms of nationalism. In the final pages of Imagined Communities, Anderson is critical of narratives that forget the past and create identities out of this amnesia. For him, what cannot be remembered (bodily) “must be narrated,” and this narration occurs in “secular, serial time” that structures both individual life stories and the stories nations tell about themselves (204-205).

I am not as familiar with Jonathan Tran’s work, but when I look at The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory, I feel a great affinity with its diagnoses of the temporal problems of modernity (as in the section on “The Detemporalization of Time”), but I am not very sympathetic with how Tran positions the Christian Eucharist as a solution to such temporal problems. Again, I appreciate Tran’s diagnosis of the problem of forgetting in his book’s seventh chapter, but I do not think that the Eucharist is the best way of performing the important bodily rituals of remembrance that, for example, one would require in order to heal from trauma. Isn’t the communion table also a site of exclusion where identity is formed by often-violent boundaries between the baptized and unbaptized? Tran’s concept of Eucharistic memory seems somewhat idealized and disconnected from the deep power problems that lie within community identity formation. When thinking about how to remember and work through traumatic events I think that something like the Internal Family Systems model has more potential for promoting healing in our ‘postsecular’ and ‘postreligious’ world.

JHN: One of the challenges you grapple with early on in Postsecular History is that the “postsecular” does not have a readily accepted definition, and in its construction of both the “post” and the “secular” the term promotes problematic forms of periodization. This might be most clearly addressed in your discussion of the Dutch Collegiants in Chapter 3 where you note that “despite its proclamations of novelty and succession – the term ‘postsecular’ cannot make good on the claim of its prefix by placing itself beyond the secular, nor can it successfully exceed or free itself from either its secular or religious history.” Why is it that “postsecular” continues to be a powerful idea despite this problematic assertion?

MK: I think that the main problem with the category of the postsecular, as it is applied to a whole range of ideas and experiences, is that it implies that we can get past the past. The very notion that secular ways of thinking can be placed in the past using the prefix ‘post’ is contrary to what historians do all the time. My argument, in part, is that the postsecular is situated within a history that it attempts to overcome, but cannot overcome because the past remains in the present. And I fear that this contradiction is not the kind of contradiction that results in dialectical tensions that lead to creativity and life. Instead, the aspiration to overcome the secular leads to forms of forgetting and memory loss that prevent the making of living connections between past, present, and future.

JHN: I think your fourth chapter is perhaps the most fascinating. In it, you give a parallel reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick alongside a consideration of fanatical Anabaptism—as understood in relation to the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster. Where did the inspiration come from to make such a juxtaposition?

MK: Well, that’s another interesting accident of history. Initially, the fourth chapter of Postsecular History was supposed to be a revision of my 2019 article in Political Theology “Müntzer, Taubes, and the Anabaptists” where I trace Anabaptist connections within Jacob Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology. But due to copyright problems I was forced to remove it at the last minute. However, in the early months of 2020, before the pandemic began in force, I was also auditing two graduate seminars. The first was Travis Kroeker’s seminar on Augustine’s City of God and Melville’s Moby Dick, and the second was Mike Driedger’s seminar on fanaticism at Brock University. The material I wrote while sitting in on these seminars was influenced by my work on the Postsecular History manuscript, and I began asking questions about how fanaticism figures in Melville’s novel and relates to how literary works periodize their narrative unfolding. Luckily, when I had to remove the middle chapter of the book, I had material from both sets of my seminar notes that fit together and meshed with the book’s argument, while also serving as a letter of gratitude to my teachers.

JHN: In conclusion, what would you say the contribution of Postsecular History is for historians and scholars in political theology?

MK: Jakob Burckhardt writes in his Reflections on History that “the philosophy of history is a centaur, a contradiction in terms [contradictio in adjecto] for history co-ordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical.” Burckhardt argues that the problem with philosophy and history is that both are given to the idea that “our time is the consummation of all time” such that “the past may be regarded as fulfilled in us.” I suppose that my work in Postsecular History is focused on moving away from both coordination and subordination, toward richer and more textured ways of mediating between temporal and historical terms that do not abandon the desire for historical and temporal terms to facilitate movements from promise to fulfilment.

Part of this effort to find better ways of mediating between temporal and historical terms requires that we both understand the limitations of thinking in relation to origins and ends, and that we do not abandon the project of drawing promising and fulfilling connections between origins and ends. That is why I want to close with a quotation that followed me throughout the writing of this book but never fit well within its pages. In his book on Dostoevsky, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin writes that

nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.

In the case of postsecular life where religions and secularities intermingle and the past returns ceaselessly in the present, I think it is important to hold things open and resist finality wherever it is found. My attempt to provide an historically attentive approach to the concept of the postsecular is part of this effort, and I hope it will cause its readers to pause and question the periodizing divisions of this age. But this pause should be informed by the topic of the concluding chapter of Postsecular History, which is waiting. I think that one remedial strategy for the temporal crises of our time – both the acceleration of time and the decay of its measures – is to cultivate a form of waiting that is actively engaged in the undoing of violent forms of periodization. For this I turn to the amazing work of German feminist Christian theologian Dorothee Sölle, whose mantra in her essay on waiting is “this is not it.” That’s what I think is the contribution of the book. Simply to say, with Bakhtin that the final word on the world has not been spoken, and with Sölle that the present state of things is not yet as it should be, in so many ways.

Reevaluating the Relationship Between Anabaptism and Evangelicalism

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Regina Wenger

In Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, she argues that white evangelical support for Donald Trump was not an aberration, but the culmination of more than fifty years of evangelicalism’s increasing affinity for militant masculinity. The recent riot and invasion of the US Capitol by persons displaying Christian nationalist slogans adds a tragic concreteness to Du Mez’s claims.1 While Du Mez does not explicitly discuss Anabaptism in her narrative, she presents a definition of evangelicalism in America behind Trump’s ascendency that I believe needs to be wrestled with in historical discussions about Anabaptism’s relationship with evangelicalism after World War II.

Du Mez offers a cultural definition of white evangelicalism specifically tied to consumption. A white evangelical consumer culture exploded in the postwar period with books and resources (e.g. Focus on the Family, Mars Hill Church), Christian Contemporary Music (CCM), and films like the God’s Not Dead series. “Rather than seeking to distinguish between ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ evangelicals,” Du Mez contends, “…it is much more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption.”2

Du Mez’s definition of evangelicalism runs counter to those of a more theological and doctrinal nature offered by people such as David Bebbington and Thomas Kidd.3 The scholarly conversations about how to best to characterize modern evangelicalism open a Pandora’s Box too extensive to discuss here. Nonetheless, Du Mez’s conceptualization of evangelicalism as participation in a broadly shared Christian consumer culture represents a notable contribution to discussions on the topic.

One of the things that struck me in Du Mez’s description of the diffuse nature of evangelical consumer culture was her observation about its effect on her own Christian Reformed denomination. “My own upbringing in the Christian Reformed Church, a small denomination founded by Dutch immigrants, is a case in point,” she states. “For generations, members defined themselves against American Christianity, but due to the onslaught of evangelical popular culture, large swaths of the denomination are now functionally evangelical in terms of affinity and belief. Denominational boundaries are easily breached by the flow of religious merchandizing.”4

Du Mez’s observation mirrors my own experience as a pastor and lifelong member of various congregations within Mennonite Church USA. Out of both personal and scholarly experience, I think that the pervasiveness of evangelical consumer culture, and its abilities to transgress denominational boundaries, present an intriguing angle from which to evaluate the relationship between evangelicalism and Anabaptism.

Two books, written decades apart, display two distinct approaches for understanding the relationship between Anabaptism and evangelicalism. The first, Norman Kraus’ Evangelicalism and Anabaptism (1979), generally views the two traditions in tension rather than compatible.5 Conversely, Jared Burkholder and David Cramer’s The Activist Impulse: Essays on the Intersection of Evangelicalism and Anabaptism (2012) sees the traditions more as able conversation partners.6Additionally, as my Anabaptist Historians colleague Devin Manzullo-Thomas pointed out, there has been an “Anabaptist Turn in Recent American Evangelical Historiography.”7

What Du Mez’s definition of evangelicalism and her personal aside reveal is a new paradigm for historically interrogating the relationship between Anabaptism and evangelicalism. Have congregations and persons in the Anabaptist tradition become “functionally evangelical”? If so, how and when? For example, would a historical examination of purchasing patterns of Christian education materials in Anabaptist-related congregations shed light on this phenomenon?

One of the reasons I think this relationship needs reevaluation—utilizing Du Mez’s approach—is the extent to which she ties evangelicalism to militancy and Christian nationalism. Our post-2016 conversations about the relationship between Anabaptism and evangelicalism need to more readily grapple with Anabaptism’s positions on peace and nonviolence in conjunction with the rising militancy in postwar evangelicalism that Du Mez charts. The power and pervasiveness of evangelical consumer culture can overwhelm efforts from both the pulpit and denominational publishers.8

I expect new explorations of the relationship between Anabaptism and evangelicalism using Du Mez’s insights would not reveal a doctrinal declination of the former in its interactions with the latter; in that assessment I concur with Burkholder and Cramer.9 However, I also suspect, particularly related to examining matters of war and peace, that the incompatibility that Kraus sees between the two traditions will come to the fore as well.10 And it is because, as these and other texts illustrate, postwar evangelicalism has interacted with Anabaptism in various and complex ways that Du Mez’s culture of consumption definition of evangelicalism can offer insight into histories of contemporary Anabaptism. It is an exploration in which I invite the readers and contributors of Anabaptist Historians to join me in undertaking.

1. “…the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such…” Kristen Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), 3. For a recent and more thorough explanation of Christian nationalism, see: Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

2. Du Mez, 8.

3. Bebbington lays out his influential “quadrilateral” description of evangelicalism as characterized by belief in conversion, activism, cruci-centrism, and biblicism in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730 to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989). Kidd’s most recent and developed definition of evangelicalism may be found in Who Is an Evangelical?: A History of a Movement in Crisis (New Haven, Yale, 2019).

4. Du Mez, 7-8.

5. Norman Kraus, ed., Evangelicalism and Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1979), reprints are available from Wipf and Stock. In Kraus’ opening chapter, he described an early 1970s “shift in public opinion” regarding evangelicalism, “…heralded by the ‘Honor America’ celebration on July Fourth, 1970, when Billy Graham was featured as the star speaker along with Bob Hope and John Wayne…” Kraus, “What is Evangelicalism?” in Evangelicalism and Anabaptism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 16-17.

6. Jared S. Burkholder and David C. Cramer, “Introduction,” in Jared S. Burkholder and David C. Cramer, eds., The Activist Impulse: The Activist Impulse: Essays on the Intersection of Evangelicalism and Anabaptism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 5.

7. Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas, “The Not-So-Quiet in the Land: The Anabaptist Turn in Recent American Evangelical Historiography,” The Conrad Grebel Review, 33, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 359-71.

8. Du Mez, 8.

9. Burkholder and Cramer, 3.

10. In addition, to Kraus, Ted Grimsrud critiques what he sees as an assumption in Burkholder and Cramer that does not strongly consider “the problem of evangelical Christianity (and, actually, Christianity in general) actually tending to influence people to be more violent, not less violent.” Ted Grimsrud, “Anabaptist Evangelicalism?” Thinking Pacifism, blog, July 8, 2012. See also: Ted Grimsrud, “The Activist Impulse: Essays on the Intersection of Evangelicalism and Anabaptism,” The Conrad Grebel Review 31, no. 3 (Fall 2013).

Review of Richard Godbeer, World of Trouble: A Philadelphia Quaker Family’s Journey through the American Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

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In his most recent book, World of Trouble, Richard Godbeer tells the story of Elizabeth and Henry Drinker, a respectable, upwardly-mobile Quaker couple in Philadelphia’s merchant class whose lives were inextricably bound with the economic strife, social upheaval, political chaos, and violence of the American Revolution. Godbeer, a leading scholar of early American history and a Professor of History at the University of Kansas, “resists the familiar story of the American Revolution” by presenting it through the eyes of religious pacifists who remained neutral during the imperial crisis.1 This rich and striking narrative, intimately following the lives of Elizabeth (1735-1807) and Henry Drinker (1734-1809) for over fifty years, is reconstructed from dozens of Elizabeth’s diaries and thousands of letters that Elizabeth and Henry penned in their personal and professional lives. From such a unique vantage point, Godbeer lays bare a difficult reality of the American Revolution: its turbulence and violence were virtually inescapable, whether one wore a uniform or not. In this addition to recent scholarship on the violence of the American Revolution, Godbeer shows how Quakers experienced violence as Patriots suppressed dissent before, during, and after the war through threats, imprisonment, and even killings.2

Although the Drinkers were deeply affected by the decades of revolution, their lives were not entirely defined by it. Elizabeth and Henry lived before and after the Revolution—and even during the years of revolutionary upheaval, their day-to-day lives were not entirely halted. Reflecting this, Godbeer opens their story with the courtship and early married life of Henry Drinker and Elizabeth Sandwith. Married in 1761, the Drinkers’ first years together were marked by remarkable affection for each other and considerable anxiety about social, economic, and spiritual strictures. They wed at a time when the Society of Friends was becoming increasingly insular and sought to “reinvigorate their distinctive spiritual identity through a renewed stress on marriage within the faith.”3 Elizabeth knew the social and spiritual importance of marriage as well as Henry, but for her, as was the case for most women in her time, marriage also brought a significant loss of personal independence. Once married, Elizabeth spent the next twenty years becoming and being a mother—she was pregnant eleven times, but only five of her children reached adulthood. Henry, along with his business partner Abel James, spent the decades before the revolution building their transatlantic trading business and, like many Quaker merchants at midcentury, sought to “balance Quaker values with the practicalities and opportunities of international commerce,” which they achieved with mixed success.4 Henry and Elizabeth accumulated and displayed a great deal of material wealth, letting the religious scruples of outward simplicity fall away to demonstrate their upward mobility and gentility.

The conflicts between their Quaker conscience and the socio-political milieu became even more pronounced for the Drinkers beginning in the 1760s. Godbeer describes how their Quakerism influenced James and Drinker’s politics and business, which, as taxation and importation emerged as touchstones of revolution, were becoming increasingly entangled. The two Quaker merchants saw the royal government as the source of political salvation, rather than that of the crisis. Although they joined the boycott movement in opposition to new Parliamentary taxes, they hoped that such protests would lead to a peaceful resolution within the empire. However, their refusal to endorse heavy-handed threats and violence against royal officials, compounded with the widespread suspicion and resentment that many Pennsylvania Quakers faced, made James and Drinker visibly unpopular among Patriots. Patriotic hostility toward those who showed anything but unconditional support for revolution and independence reached a new height for Quakers in 1777 when Congress connected Quaker pacifism to loyalism and arrested Drinker and ten other leading Quakers, exiling them to Virginia. This move against these Friends was founded on decades of political conflict, accusations of hypocrisy, and suspicion toward Quakers as Pennsylvania became more religiously and ethnically diverse. It was these same pressures that factored into James and Drinkers’ decision to become tea consignees in the first place. Their year of exile was likely “monotonous and anxiety-ridden” for the Quakers. Although they were imprisoned far from home, Godbeer describes their time in captivity as “an extremely relaxed version of imprisonment, based on a gentlemen’s agreement that the exiles would not try to escape.”5 Meanwhile, Quakers and other perceived opponents to independence faced trials, prison, fines, forfeiture and destruction of property, and even execution during Philadelphia’s Continental occupation.

Elizabeth, too, was deeply affected by the throes of Revolution, but in different ways than her husband. From her copious diaries, Godbeer finds that Elizabeth’s wartime concerns lay primarily with “her husband’s situation, the safety of her own household, the fate of other Friends in and around the city, and the outrage at the cruelties inflicted by both sides in the conflict.”6 While Henry was in exile, Elizabeth was forced to quarter Continental and British soldiers in their home, deal with the supply shortages during the British occupation of Philadelphia (September 1777-June 1778), and cope with and protect her family from the persecution and violence that Continents exacted on Loyalist, neutral, and pacifistic Philadelphians once they regained control of the city. Godbeer argues that Elizabeth’s attention was not limited by any distinction of gendered spheres. Rather, he casts Elizabeth as a deeply politically-informed person who applied such knowledge to those affairs she was most familiar with and affected by. In fact, Elizabeth powerfully challenged Quaker sensibilities and American socio-political gender roles when she and three other Quaker women traveled to General George Washington’s headquarters in Valley Forge to parlay with Washington for her husband’s release from exile. In telling the Drinkers’ remarkable story, Godbeer keeps a constant eye on the Drinkers’ community of faith, declaring that the “distinct and deeply felt nationhood” of the Society of Friends that triggered so much outside resentment and hostility also brought a sense of “true freedom within themselves through trust in God” and “liberated from dependence on worldly comfort and security.”7

In his final chapters, Godbeer describes the Drinkers’ lives after the Revolution, which were unfortunately no less tumultuous than those before and during the war. Henry left his career as a merchant behind him in hopes of reinventing himself in order to, prove “his worth to the new republic and [show] that Quaker values could enrich the nation morally while also turning a handsome financial profit.”8 One such project was to invest in American maple sugar, which Drinker hoped would out-compete slave-produced sugar from the West Indies and undermine the entire slave trade. This and other ventures failed because, as Godbeer argues, Henry was a poor judge of character and far too trusting and forbearing with his investors and debtors, all qualities which left him ethically and financially spent.

Godbeer also traces Elizabeth’s difficulties in the new republic as a mistress and a matron. As in many households after the war, the domestic servants of the Drinker household were swept up in the liberating rhetoric of the revolution and began to expect different treatment—treatment which Elizabeth was reluctant to give. Her attitude toward her servants—Black or white, man or woman—“reflected a blend of maternal benevolence and distrustful condescension.”9 Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, while supporting abolition and free labor, Elizabeth held firm to her vision of society in which people knew their place and did not challenge their lot in life. Despite such tumult, Godbeer’s narrative emphasizes the centrality of spirituality, a strong faith community, and the persistence of the patterns of daily living in the Drinkers’ lives, even as they entered the final years of their life at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

World of Trouble forcefully and painfully confronts the fact that “however noble its official founding ideals, the United States was born in blood, its midwife a campaign of terror” (4). Moreover, as Godbeer elucidates, the writings of the Drinkers “remind us that the fraught political issues of their era had personal, spiritual, and emotional ramifications that played out in private as well as public spaces.”10 These powerfully important themes are woven into Godbeer’s wonderfully enjoyable narrative that sheds light on far more than the experiences of one Quaker family. A World of Trouble is not only a meaningful contribution to the scholarship of the American Revolution, but also offers a great deal to anyone interested in the contours of religious pacifism in early American life.

1 Richard Godbeer, World of Trouble: A Philadelphia Quaker Family’s Journey Through the American Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 8.

2 See, for example, T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2010) and Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2017).

3 Godbeer, World of Trouble, 43.

4 Ibid., 82.

5 Ibid., 150.

6 Ibid., 153.

7 Ibid., 169.

8 Ibid., 248.

9 Ibid., 261-62.

10 Ibid., 371.

Half of the Story, Honestly Told: Review of Benjamin Goossen’s “Chosen Nation”

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William Yoder, Ph.D.

Benjamin W. Gossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a German Era (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2017). ISBN: 978-0-691-17428-0. Cloth $49.50; eBook $34.99.

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The “invention” of a Mennonite nation is one outstanding theme in Benjamin Goossen’s dissertation, Chosen Nation. Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, published by Princeton University Press in June 2017. This Mennonite from Kansas with Russian-Ukrainian roots points to the fact that the theory of a Mennonite “nation” was based on the assumed existence of a Jewish one. In both cases, a religious-ethnic grouping present in many cultures was seen as part of a larger nation transcending traditional cultural and linguistic boundaries. In the fascist-controlled, post World War I-regions of Europe, Mennonites even of Dutch heritage had celebrated themselves as champions of “Germandom.” But for obviously opportunistic reasons, the concept of a transnational Mennonite “nation” kicked in after 1945. It was used as a crux for obtaining exist visas to the Americas in post-war, anti-fascist Europe.

The Mennonite icon Peter J. Dyck (1914-2010) was honest enough to admit in 1988 that the claim of being a nation had been “a temporary cloak woven from the wool of political expediency.” The refugees from Russia had “changed their identity when it suited them. They became chameleons” (199). Dyck himself had under Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) tutelage helped fashion this construct at the end of WW II. The claim was used to spare once-Nazi Mennonites who deserved retribution. But of course, Dyck’s motives were somehow humanitarian.

In the course of the past several centuries, Mennonites had insisted on privilege. Privilege—in taxation for example—was very much a part of their decision to move to Russia (now eastern Ukraine) in the 1780s. When it was convenient, Mennonites promoted their state of privilege either by citing their Germanness or their supranational nationhood. Goossen points out that the ethnic and racial criteria prevalent during the Nazi period survived into the post-war era. Agnostics and Catholics posed as Mennonites in hopes of obtaining equal privilege for emigrating to the Americas. The criteria remained cultural and racial. He asks on page 182: “What were MCC’s refugee operations, after all, but an elaborate exercise in ethnic nationalism?” It was the Cold War’s transition from anti-fascism to anti-communism which in 1951 finally opened Canada’s gates even for Mennonite members of the Waffen-SS (181).

A particularly strong point of this book is its descriptions of Nazi fascination for the Mennonite colonies of Eastern Europe, an appeal underscored by Heinrich Himmler’s landmark visit to the Molotschna colony in October 1942. Mennonites in the USSR were one of “Germandom’s” most impressive specimens and “groundbreakers for Germandom.” Though scattered across the globe, Mennonites’ “church discipline and religious racial defense system have protected (them) one-hundred-percent against the dilution of their blood through the infiltration of foreign elements. There is likely no other confession in the world that demonstrates such a racially uniform character as the Mennonites” (131, from Benjamin Unruh, approx. 1939). Supposedly the most Aryan of all, this characteristic made them prime targets for Nazi anthropologists and Eugenicists. According to the author, Mennonites “relished the attention” these researchers showered upon them.

Goossen is to be thanked for pointing to the questionable, racist character of genealogical research as practiced by ethnic Mennonites. Though it had been strongly propagated by fascist circles, Mennonite theologian Harold S. Bender (1897-1962) wrote in 1950: “It is encouraging to learn that a permanent interest in family history remains among the Mennonites in Germany, even after the Hitler regime has long since passed away” (201).

The book points to the direct linkage between pacifism and Mennonite quietism. The Mennonite understanding with Czarist authorities assumed that freedom from the draft would be conceded if the colonies did not proselytise. Numerical growth had to be restricted to procreation; to do otherwise would have exceeded the limits of Russian tolerance.

The pacifism issue was also a source of long-term tension between Mennonites in Germany and the diaspora. Germany had no Mennonite conscientious objectors after the 1870s, and in 1912 the Danzig “modernizer” Hermann Mannhardt (1855-1927) was very much opposed to the repatriation of Ukrainian Mennonites to Germany. After all, “Mannhardt and his associates had spent the last half-century ridding pacifism from their own congregations. At the very moment that charges of cowardice were finally dissipating, it would be madness to import 100,000 colonists” (102). At the turn of the twentieth century, the pacifists were rural and traditional, located primarily in Russia and North America. It was the urban Mennonite middle-class  in Germany and Holland that had by then opted to “modernize.”

It was also the rural and traditional who best resisted the enticements of Nazism. After a trip to Paraguay in the 1930’s, the pro-Nazi geographer Herbert Wilhelmy (1910-2003) complained that Mennonites there viewed the Third Reich as “too militarist and too worldly.” These “religious fanatics consider (pro-Nazi Mennonites) as being traitors to the Mennonite cause” (142). In North America, South German- and Swiss-rooted “Old Mennonites” and Amish expressed little admiration or interest in Hitler. Yet this is not the entire story: Pro-fascist sentiment among the low-German Mennonites of Manitoba in the 1930s also included the rural.

Goossen’s treatise includes tidbits of information worthy of further exploration. Numerous Mennonites were active in Germany’s liberal “Vormärz” revolution of 1848. Krefeld banker Hermann von Beckerath (1801-1870) served as the German Reich’s first minister of finance. Indeed, Krefeld’s industrialist Von der Leyen family had been active in German politics and finance since the 1650s. (The current German minister of defense, the Lutheran Ursula von der Leyen, is married to a member of this Mennonite family.)

A particularly unsavoury set of anecdotal clips refers to Mennonites caught up in the fascist war. Heinrich Wiens, a Molotschna native and member of an SS-Einsatzgruppe, was involved in the elimination of Jews with gas vans (159). Jakob Reimer from Halbstadt/Ukraine participated in a massacre near Lublin (apparently the “Aktion Erntefest” of November 1943—see 162).

No less questionable were persons mentioned by Goossen as the close allies of Mennonites. Adolf Ehrt (1902-1975), the head of the Nazi “Anti-Comintern,” wrote his dissertation on the Mennonites. Georg Leibbrandt (1891-1982), a “long-time scholar of Mennonitism” (163), participated in the “Wannsee Conference” of January 1942 and was co-responsible for the mass extermination of Jews. Leibbrandt also served as an advisor to German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955 (see German “Wikipedia”).

Erected in a region of dense Mennonite settlement near Danzig, Mennonite contractors were involved in the construction of the Stutthof concentration camp in 1939. Mennonites served there later as guards. A small consolation: Mennonite youth visiting from Germany helped rebuild Stutthof as a memorial in 1973-74 (193).

Conclusion

Mennonite encyclopedic or Wikipedia entries do not mention the pro-fascist dealings of Benjamin H. Unruh (1881-1959) or the militarism of Hermann Mannhardt. Ben Goossen can therefore be thanked for inching their biographies closer to reality. Along with Peter Dyck, Cornelius F. Klassen (1894-1954) was a second icon of mid-twentieth century Mennonitism. Yet Goossen quotes on page 143, that Klassen “aligned himself with Hitler’s Germany, railing against social-democratic rot, the Communist insanity, and the machinations of the Jews.” Apparently, a part of the essential story on C.F. Klassen remains untold.

My primary criticism of Goossen’s treatise pertains to the fact that he only tells half the Mennonite story. Though the book’s title refers to “Mennonites in Germany,” solely the low-German story is told. More seriously, the story is told from the perspective of the Mennonite émigré, not also from those who “remained behind.” Surely there were Mennonites who did not desert the Red Army. I—not a specialist in Mennonite history—have not heard their story. Goossen reports that after WW I a “subset” of Mennonites joined the Bolsheviks and attempted to foment class struggle (110). That is a story which, to my knowledge, has yet to be told.

Most importantly of all, the book does not tell the Mennonite story as perceived through the eyes of their Slavic neighbors. Why, in 1920, did the anarchists and Bolsheviks of eastern Ukraine react as they did? Bolsheviks included Mennonites among the most counter-revolutionary of Russia’s minorities.

The mass Soviet deportations eastward in August 1941 were motivated by the suspicion that ethnic Germans were potential turncoats. As it turned out, those suspicions were completely justified. The communist position was, among other things, also a reaction to the German and German-Mennonite position. (These words are no defense of Stalinist behavior; they are only an attempt to understand it.) Western Mennonites have produced hundreds of treatises describing communist guilt; it is now time to hear the other half. We must hear more than only how Mennonites have interpreted themselves.

Though untold here, Ben Goossen understands that another Slavic narrative exists. Indeed, he has taken initial steps. When Mennonite farmers moved into Russia or the American frontier, they ”seized the land.” No amalgamation with native forces took place—they were simply displaced (211). Slavs were welcome as field laborers, not as co-owners. Concerned little about the good of the whole, these colonists intended to remain an ark in a Slavic sea. (Of course, there were exceptions, and prejudice ran both ways.) The author relates: Christian farmers opposed heathen nomads. Mennonite writers portrayed their colonies as “blossoming islands in the middle of Russian barbarianism” (102). Yet by 1920, Russia’s Mennonite colonies had clearly entered the globe’s post-colonial age.

Goossen refers in several instances to the Mennonite narrative’s bias: refugees were “lost” until MCC located them. Mennonites were “rescued out” of Russia—an interpretation still far from dead. The author describes the “lost” Baltic homeland as “a place of mystic tragedy.” Mennonites and other Germans have “constructed an intricate memorial culture;” minute details of their former lives are “obsolete and therefore fascinating” (191). Sadly, as we can observe since 1990, this “outpouring of minutiae” has not automatically resulted in interest for the present and future well-being of these Slavic societies. Why have almost no Mennonite refugees from Eastern Europe and their offspring chosen to move back to the “homeland”?

A further problem involves the fact that this study harbors an ideological agenda not requisite to the story. The author rejects mission as a colonial enterprise and places the word “heathen” in quotation marks (33). Gender issues, hardly ever a part of the historic Mennonite narrative, crop up in several instances. According to him, the denunciation of a Jewish neighbor in Nazi-occupied Ukraine or the shaming of the “queer” in the USA are “at least as Mennonite as bonnets, buggies and pacifism” (211).

Due in part to my perusal of the current Russian political and theological scene, I remain wary of the libertarian, individualist, pro-abortion, gender-neutral, essentially secular agenda grafted into western Mennonitism during the past three decades. Its present ideology may well be a result of the old desire of the intellectual to “be modern,” to conform. They are interested in worldly fashion, in keeping up with the Joneses. The venerable Mennonite theologian Myron Augsburger expressed to me in early 2017 his concern that Mennonite thought is no longer non-conformist: “Mennonite thinking should be with Kingdom priorities and Christ-centered in distinction from the liberal, secular agenda.”

It was the educated who brought down pacifism in Germany and Holland in the nineteenth century. Mennonite involvement in the wars of German nationalism and fascism ensued. Had German Mennonites remained “old-fashioned,” they would not have been guarding the condemned at Stutthof. Pacifism keeps believers with pro-fascist leanings—or liberals currently supporting “humanitarian” wars in the Middle East—from involvement in greater mischief.

Non-pacifism means ethical anarchy in countries with an aggressive foreign policy. In the U.S. context it meant that Mennonites dropping pacifism in the late 1950s soon had their sons dropping Agent Orange on the hapless peasants of Southeast Asia. In the context of WW II, it was the world’s rural and under-educated Mennonites who ended up prophetic, who stood the best chance of not compromising the Anabaptist witness.

The pacifists are almost always the prophets. Mennonites and Protestants in general, once they haven “broken free” of pacifism, don’t have the political savvy or acumen (“politischer Durchblick”) required to stay out of particularly questionable wars. Perhaps only some Marxists and Quakers are capable of choosing their wars carefully.

Mennonites have proven prophetic by accident. Their state was a gift of heaven, not a result of cool analysis. Connected to the wisdom of tradition, country bumpkins have proven to be the actual prophets. In Sarasota, Florida, it’s the Amish steering their barely-kosher electric tricycles across baked asphalt parking malls that point to a saner and greener form of future transport. The world is a ball, and the Amish were so far behind the trend that they suddenly ended up out front. When the professors have lost their way, the stones will cry out (Luke 19:40).

We all so through a glass darkly. In hopes of learning from past mistakes, I encourage Ben Goossen and others to press onward with their diligent research.

Originally from Sarasota, Florida, William E. (Bill) Yoder (born 1950), has resided in Russia and Belarus since 2001. He received a Ph.D. in political science from West Berlin’s “Free University” in 1991. He can be reached at “kant50(at)web(dot)de”.

Mathilde Monge’s Des communautés mouvantes: Les «Sociétés des frères chrétiens» en Rhénanie du Nord: Juliers, Berg, Cologne vers 1530-1694: A Review

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In the historiography of early modern Anabaptism, the imperial city of Cologne and its surrounding areas have long been understudied. The multivolume Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer  series, a valuable repository of reprinted primary sources on sixteenth-century Anabaptist topics, contains no volumes on Cologne, and the 2007 Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700 included only four references to Cologne, slight attention compared to that paid to nearby Amsterdam or Strasbourg.1 Sigrun Haude’s In the Shadow of Savage Wolves contains a chapter on the Cologne authorities’ response to religious dissenters2  before and after the Anabaptist takeover of Münster, but much work remained to be done on the history of Anabaptist and Anabaptist-adjacent communities in Cologne.3 Mathilde Monge’s 2015 monograph Des communautés mouvantes: Les «Sociétés des frères chrétiens» en Rhénanie du Nord: Juliers, Berg, Cologne vers 1530-1694 (Community in Motion: The “Societies of Christian Brothers” in the Northern Rhineland: Julich, Berg, Cologne Circa 1530-1694), published in Geneva by Droz, goes a long way towards filling that lacuna.des-communautés-mouvantes

Monge’s book is wide in scope, both geographically and temporally. She looks not only at the city of Cologne and its territories, but also the adjacent duchies of Jülich (Juliers) and Berg, and her research covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than stopping in the mid to late 1500s. In fact, this wider geographical focus enables the longer time scale, since dissidents with Anabaptist leanings residing in Cologne proper had virtually disappeared by the beginning of the seventeenth century.4

The monograph is divided into eight chapters; Monge deals with accusations of heresy as a means of exclusion, the prosecution of heresy as a pastoral task, the practice of denunciation by heretics’ neighbors and associates, how the Christian Brothers fit into sixteenth-century Christianity, the local and international networks to which Anabaptist and Anabaptist-adjacent persons in the Northern Rhineland belonged, the rituals and practices they used in worship, the ways in which they were integrated into the broader social fabric, and finally the groups’ eventual dissolution by the end of the seventeenth century.

Monge grapples, as all historians of early modern Anabaptism must, with the complications inherent in studying a religious group (or rather, groups) whose label was not freely chosen, but was rather imposed on them by governing authorities. Even sixteenth-century Christians who received baptism as adults did not self-identify as Anabaptists—the subjects of Monge’s study simply referred to themselves as Christian brothers and sisters—and a far larger number of Christians questioned the practice of infant baptism, even if they did not go so far as to undergo believers’ baptism themselves, or even refuse to baptize their children. The question of identifying which sixteenth-century Christians were “truly Anabaptist” is thus fraught with difficulty, and Monge sidesteps it altogether. She treats Anabaptism in early modern Cologne not as a religious group with clearly defined boundaries and membership requirements, but rather as a relational phenomenon; those designated Anabaptist received their label as a result of their relationships with the governing authorities and with other heretics. 5

While Anabaptist and Anabaptist-adjacent groups in the early modern Northern Rhineland did not have a single uniform theology and practice, Monge nevertheless uncovers several recurring themes in inquisitorial records: refutation of infant baptism (this rejection, Monge argues, was of greater importance to the Cologne authorities than the act of re-baptism itself), rejection of Catholic sacraments (with the exception of modified forms of baptism and the Lord’s Supper), and belief in a Melchiorite celestial flesh Christology among them.6 Monge’s work on the Societies of Christian Brothers of the Northern Rhineland is an important addition to the historiography of sixteenth-century Anabaptisms and other non-Magisterial Protestantisms, and I can only hope that an English translation, which would make it accessible to a greater number of North American undergraduates, will be forthcoming.

Footnotes:

  1. John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (eds.), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), passim. ↩
  2.  In the Catholic imperial city, this was a label that encompassed not only Anabaptists but also Lutherans and Sacramentarians as well. ↩
  3. Sigrun Haude, In the Shadow of Savage Wolves: Anabaptist Münster and the German Reformation during the 1530s (Boston: Humanities Press, 2000), 39-69. ↩
  4. Mathilde Monge, Des communautés mouvantes: Les «Sociétés des frères chrétiens» en Rhénanie du Nord: Juliers, Berg, Cologne vers 1530-1694 (Geneva: Droz, 2015), 48; 223. ↩
  5. Monge, 7. Melchior Hoffman taught that Christ had not received his human flesh from Mary (since her flesh, like all human flesh, was corrupted by sin), but rather brought his own flesh from heaven. For more information on Melchiorite celestial flesh Christology, see Sjouke Voolstra, Het woord is vlees geworden : de Melchioritisch-Menniste incarnatieleer (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1982.) ↩
  6. Monge, 112; 115; 120. ↩

A Review of New (Swiss-German) Mennonite Historical Fiction

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My Loyalist Origins, by Herb Swartz. Victoria, B. C.: Friesen Press, 2015. 275 pp. Paperback. $15. ISBN: 978-1-4602-7458-3.

Both My Sons, by Ken Yoder Reed. Morgantown, Pa.: Masthof Press, 2016. 412 pp. Paperback. $19.95. ISBN: 978-1-60126-499-2.

Christian’s Hope, by Ervin R. Stutzman. Harrisonburg, Va.: Herald Press, 2016. 339 pp. (paper). $14.99. ISBN: 978-0-8361-9942-0.

In his excellent monograph on what it means to understand the past, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Sam Wineburg relates an experience from his 1996 study of how ordinary people understand themselves in relation to the past. In one interview, he spoke with a father who wanted his daughter to understand the Vietnam War experience. The father did not look to books of history, nor his coworker who fought in the war; instead he suggested, “We’ll have to get a copy of The Green Berets, you know, with John Wayne or something like that, so she’s a little bit more aware of what was going on. I don’t know how accurate all that is, but a least it would bring up some questions” (232). Fiction shapes how we see the past. Three historical fiction novels with the ability to shape how modern Anabaptists see the past were published in 2016: My Loyalist Origins, by Herb Swartz; Both My Sons, by Ken Reed; and Christian’s Hope, by Ervin Stutzman. 

My Loyalist OriginsHerb Swartz’s My Loyalist Origins is an attempt to work through his personal identity through historical fiction. He tells the story of the founding of America, from colonialism through the Revolutionary War, with some forays earlier back in time to discuss the origins of Anabaptism. Structured as a series of dreams with brief intervals of lucidity, Swartz gives a semi-historical account with a sometimes thin ribbon of story tying it all together. The book has six sections covering the discovery of America; the origins of Pennsylvania and Anabaptism; early wars, both colonial and the Revolution; the creation of the United States government; loyalist emigration to Canada, focusing on the Mennonite experience; and the settlement of Ebytown, now Kitchener, Ontario.

Swartz’s approach to understanding his personal origins in a very broad context is interesting, and he does attempt to create an approachable past throughout the book. He clearly understands that people operate in a broader milieu, and that understanding the world around them is key to gaining insight into how they understand themselves. So committed is he to helping readers understand the political environments of those colonial Americans that he includes the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the United States Constitution, and a list of failed amendments as appendices to his book.

However, the narrative framework—a secret-agent style television producer pays Swartz-as-narrator to research his origins as background for a “rest of the story” television show, a process that inspires a feverish series of dreams he has that show him the way back—are less compelling and require great suspension of disbelief. Swartz seems to be writing more for himself, and allowing us to accompany him on his journey to see what we might learn from it. There is value in this, but it is not presented neatly. It must be found.

Unfortunately, My Loyalist Origins falls apart with a flurry of small errors, some of which I will cover, often in short, offhand comments. Puerto Rico is not the island of Hispaniola, as he mentions on page 20; Hispaniola is modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He also gives a classic monogenesis of Anabaptism in Chapter 10, as opposed to the more accurate polygenesis account. He dreams of a Quaker member of parliament in 1739 objecting to the War of Jenkins Ear (79-80), but Friends were not allowed to serve in the British Parliament until the 1798 Act of Toleration allowed them to take seats without swearing oaths. Longbows were not invented by the Scottish and during the wars of Scottish independence (114) led by Robert the Bruce—longbows are generally considered to be Welsh, and were in use centuries earlier. Swartz could have used a better fact checker. None are major errors, but as they pile on, they cloud the truth that Swartz does include.

Both My Sons Front Cover, 6.9.16Both My Sons, by Ken Reed, is a story of leaving and belonging, reconciliation and redemption, capturing in broad strokes the experiences of early immigrants to what is now Lancaster County. Reed tells the story through Klaus Greenywalt, a composite of early immigrants. The story centers around Greenywalt’s relationship to his two sons, one of which is legitimate, and their mothers—one being his European Mennonite wife, the other his Scots-Irish mistress (taken while he thought his wife had died in Europe). We are carried along as Greenywalt converts in Europe while working for a Mennonite miller after the murder of his father, purchases land in the original Pequea settlement, is involved with colonial administration, helps foster further Mennonite immigration, loses his eldest son, and dies during the middle of the French and Indian war, all the while trying to maintain relationships with his children and peace between their mothers.

Reed does engage in interesting use of perspective in Both My Sons, with two middle sections being told from the perspectives of “the indentured girl,” Janey, with whom he has an affair, and “the wife.” This helps provide fuller insight into the colonial experience—not just the perspective of a white male Mennonite settler.

Where Both My Sons runs into trouble is the nature of truth when history and fiction collide, a problem exacerbated by his characterization through historical composite. There is one notable absence in the Pequea Settlement as portrayed by Reed: Martin Kendig. Greenywalt is clearly modeled heavily from Kendig: a major land dealer, returning to Europe to recruit immigrants, and even occupying the same tracts of land on the representation of the Pequea settlement. Kendig was, however, not an adulterer, and so did not share the engaging conflict that makes Greenywalt such a compelling character. When doing history, it is important to treat those who lived in the past with respect, and eliminating Kendig without comment is not treating his subject with due deference. Reed is writing fiction, and as such has great liberty to shape his story; perhaps that he does not let historical accuracy impede a good story is a testament to his imagination. But because he is writing historical fiction instead of creating a story from scratch, he is responsible for the past he presents.

Reed makes an attempt to address this in his disclaimer, “But is it true?.” He answers, “the central character, Greenywalt, is an invention of the author. . . . The scenes and conversations of his life are imaginary. However, the main events and people in Greenywalt’s world are real” (xi). This slipperiness between history and fiction, as best indicated by the curious case of Martin Kendig, while allowing for an enjoyable story, limits its historical usefulness in appreciating the lives of those who have gone before.

Christian's-Hope-Final-medium-webChristian’s Hope, like Both My Sons, is a novel of colonial Pennsylvania set just after the French and Indian War. The third and final installment in the Return To Northkill series picks up the story of Christian Hochstetler, the youngest son of Jacob Hochstetler. Christian, having lived with the Shawnee for eight years following his capture during the “Hochstetler Massacre,” is forced to return to his father and colonial Pennsylvania society due to the terms of the treaty ending the French and Indian War. Back on the farm, he struggles to reintegrate with his birth family and farm life, bound by a vow to remain true to the native way of life. He finds peace through an enticing relationship with Orpha Rupp and her Dunkard community.

Stutzman’s prose is clear and engaging, keeping the story moving at a steady clip. Though it is part of a series, it is not necessary to have read the prior novels, Jacob’s Choice and Joseph’s Dilemma, to appreciate Christian’s Hope. The details are filled in through a prologue and some flashbacks.

In contrast to Both My Sons, Christian’s Hope sets up an excellent author-reader contract. Stutzman is clear where he has taken liberties and what we do not know. In the preface before the novel, and the historical note after, Stutzman gives helpful historical context, clearly states what he changed for clarity, and admits what cannot be known.

As I was working on this review, I discussed it with a scholar friend of mine. He said, “I don’t have the time to read that sort of stuff, but I suppose somebody has to.” The issue of time is a real one, but he is missing out on some of the most important works on Mennonite history to come out in 2016 on two counts. First, fiction allows us to enter the past in a more intimate way, such as when we follow Greenywalt on the long road to his son’s funeral or enter the conviction of Christian’s conversion. Secondly, history is made of the stories we tell ourselves. This is the only way we understand the past, and on that account these works are important because stories of the past are being told, and being told in an accessible way. The importance of historical fiction, despite any errors individual works have, is that it gives us an accessible past that we can use. As the father muses in his interview with Wineberg, “at least it would bring up some questions.” Each of these books is worth picking up.

A condensed version of this review first appeared in Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage 40:1 (January 2017)

Shoofly Pie, Pennsylvania Dutch, and the Mennonites

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As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine1 by William Woys Weaver is many things: it is a detailed look at the foodways among the Pennsylvania Dutch, a commentary on modern culture, and a cookbook. It is scholarly and snarky. It purposely does not focus on Anabaptists, though it does deal extensively with the Amish in popular imagination. Weaver states in his introduction: “In terms of the larger culinary story, the Amish are mostly marginal anyway because the real centers of creative Pennsylvania Dutch cookery were in the towns and not to be found among the outlying Amish or Mennonite communities, even though today the Mennonites have attempted to preempt the Amish as their cultural public-relations handlers in their Amish and Mennonite cookbooks to press for ‘Christian’ culinary values—whatever that may mean” (7). He is also clear that one of his major criteria for the recipes he highlights in the book was to contrast against the “artificial portrait” created by Amish tourism (8).15094

What Weaver sets about doing in As American as Shoofly Pie is to take food as the avenue into Pennsylvania Dutch culture to discuss its identity markers—historic and current—as well as the class dynamics involved, portrayals in popular culture, and the commercially driven conflation of the Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch. He details cooking implements, the “cabbage wall” of sauerkraut defining the borders of Pennsylvania Dutch country, how the Amish imagery became normative for Pennsylvania Dutch tourism, and how the culture is renewing itself. It is an excellent read, both informative and engagingly written.2

I use here the term “Pennsylvania Dutch” instead of “Pennsylvania German” for two reasons: first, because that is the terminology of Weaver, and second, because the “Pennsylvania Dutch” have no connection to the nation-state of Germany, past or present. On the second point, I will offer a story from my wife’s family history:

When Pop-Pop Riegle was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II, the camp taught German to the POWs. The guards doubled over in laughter to hear the POWs from New York City try to pronounce words with a New York accent. My grandfather, from what I understand, could converse with the guards easily, because he spoke Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch. The German guards asked him why he was fighting for the wrong side. To them, speaking German meant loyalty to Deutschland. For my grandfather, speaking a German dialect was part of his American culture.

Furthermore, it seems this story is borne out in every ethnography of the Pennsylvania Dutch I have encountered. They all carry a variation of the following: A researcher walks up to some Pennsylvania Dutch women and asks them about how they describe themselves, only to be rebuffed with, “We’re not Pennsylvania Dutch, we’re American.” The Pennsylvania Dutch are an American cultural group consisting of a blend of German speakers, mostly Palatinate and Swiss, who settled together. The eponym “Dutch” has long roots going back into medieval Europe as a term for western German speakers. They can be divided into two broad categories, the Plain Dutch, such as the Amish and Mennonites, or the Gay (Fancy) Dutch, such as my wife’s Lutheran and Reformed forebears.

It is important for Mennonite scholars to remember that Mennonite fish were just one school swimming in Pennsylvania Dutch water. Even though they may have been marginal in shaping Pennsylvania Dutch culture, as Weaver notes, they were still shaped by it. Mennonites all across South Central Pennsylvania were surrounded by people who spoke, ate, and worked in the same ways they did—the majority of them Lutheran or Reformed, but also the Amish, Church of the Brethren, and other plain Anabaptists.[^3]  As Felipe Hinojosa has noted, place matters—both in space and time, as well as culturally. The Swiss-German strain of the Mennonite experience practiced their faith and promulgated their beliefs not in ethnic colonies but surrounded by a shared culture that itself was distinctive from broader America. Surely this has led to a different way of knowing and living as Mennonites. For this reason, scholars dealing with Mennonite identity must familiarize themselves with Pennsylvania Dutch culture. For its insistence on placing the Pennsylvania Dutch culture within the broader national culture, and his disgust at the conflation of the Amish with the Pennsylvania Dutch, Weaver’s As American as Shoofly Pie is an excellent place to start.

  1. William Woys Weaver, As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). ↩
  2. This is not to say there are no points where I disagree with Weaver.  For example, his repetition of Rufus Jones’ claim that the Amish adapted bonnets from Quakers as “common knowledge” (135) is uncritical at best.
    [^3] Moravians are one of the German groups that maintained a markedly different culture than that of the Pennsylvania Dutch. ↩

‘Selling the Amish’: Amish Country as Consumerist Self-help or Retrograde Utopia?

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I’ve just moved from Wisconsin back to Southeastern Pennsylvania, and one of the things I’d completely forgotten about was the use of a horse-and-buggy logo for regional shorthand. The silhouette, with or without a prominent wide-brimmed hat sticking out, seems like it’s everywhere. And just at the moment when I noticed it, Susan L. Trollinger’s Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia was dropped into my hands.1

Trollinger opens with a short chapter for those readers unfamiliar with the religious and cultural history of the Amish, then moves on to frame her argument in Chapter 2. Drawing on precedents in cultural studies (such as Dean McCannell’s The Tourist) and those specifically about the phenomenon of Amish tourism (such as Thomas J. Meyers’ essay “Amish Tourism” in Mennonite Quarterly Review), Trollinger explains that places such as Shipshewana, Indiana and Intercourse, Pennsylvania become mediated spaces at which mainstream Americans (most of them middle-aged, middle-class, and white) can encounter the idea of the Amish.Selling the Amish

It is in three such liminal places in Ohio that Trollinger explores in her next three chapters. In each town, she identifies a few larger themes of Amish tourism in general to focus on.

In Walnut Creek, the majority of tourist buildings embrace a Victorian aesthetic outside and in. In Berlin, the architecture is split between the old(e) frontier and the 1950s. Sugarcreek, Ohio, is known for its Swiss Cheese and its annual Swiss Festival in addition to its proximity to a large Amish population. Each of these themes offer an intermediary setting, a stylistic mid-point between the tourists who come and the Amish they come to see. The technology in the tea room in Walnut Creek and for sale in Berlin is not that different from that which the Amish utilize. Mainstream America sees the Amish as trapped in time and it takes entering simulacra of past mainstream Americas for tourists to not be too discomfited by the life of the Amish.

The irony is that it is just that life that they are coming to see in many cases. Trollinger suggests that Middle Americans facing a “time famine” are entranced by the slower pace of agrarian Amish life and that the retrograde gender roles of the Amish are comforting in a time of gender revolution. Tourists who have just been given iPads by their children find comfort in seeing an old apple peeler like the one they used in their youth.

On the whole, Trollinger succeeds in raising interesting questions about the commodification of members of the Amish church by tourism entrepreneurs. For instance, she complicates the idea that this practice is necessarily exploitative. Trollinger cites Roy C. Buck’s argument that Amish-themed tourism insulates the Amish community from mainstream society by directing tourists to a commercialized version of Amish life rather than the homesteads, farms, and schools in which the Amish actually live.

Furthermore, Trollinger opens and closes the book with a conversation she had with several New Order Amish men in Holmes County, Ohio. The men suggested that they pitied the tourists who toured their community because of the awful rushed lives they led. The men relished the opportunity they had to perform a witness to the tourists, to show them that life need not be lived in a frenzy. Thus while the Amish lifestyle is turned into a marketable brand, it also preserves its practitioners’ everyday activities and provides a stage on which they can share their truth with the mainstream.

Yet I wonder how much witness the tourists receive. Retail is at the forefront of Walnut Creek and Berlin, and Trollinger suggests that a large part of the appeal of these places is that visitors can take tools (cookbooks, décor, hand-planers) back to their mainstream lives to capture a little of the slow and simple life and work toward “fixing” their modern problems.

While I find this argument persuasive, I wish that Trollinger had applied the same visual close-reading to some more Amish-adjacent tourist attractions (buggy rides, barn tours, etc.) that she does to the Thomas Kinkade portraits and American-flag bunting on sale next to “hand-dipped” candles and other kitsch. Perhaps in these more “authentic” experiences (even though they are simulacra) there is more opportunity for witness?

As Trollinger described the appeal of the Amish: the slower pace, clear-cut gender-roles, and simple technology, I found myself waiting for her to get to the darker side of such a time-traveling yen. When she talks about the 1950s as evoking an “innocent” time, I think Trollinger soft-pedals a bit. It seems to me that the appeal of the 1950s (and Victorian America, and Ethnic Swiss pride) for middle-aged, middle-class, and white tourists is not “innocence” but “purity.” As in racial purity. Trollinger doesn’t fail to cite statistics that only 3% of tourists to Shipshewana, Indiana are non-white, but I think she fails to acknowledge that the appeal of an agrarian, patriarchal, Luddite existence on the frontier is inextricably tied up with racial homogeneity and a winding back of the clock past the civil rights movements. In the face of changing demographics, racial anxiety is surely just as prevalent in the minds of Middle Americans as any of the other lizard-brain impulses that drive them to Amish country.

Selling the Amish is certainly a contribution to a growing field of semiotic analysis of how the Amish are portrayed. I am confident that this volume will join David Weaver-Zercher’s The Amish in the American Imagination, Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s The Thrill of the Chaste (still the best title ever), and The Amish & the Media (which Trollinger contributed to as Susan Biesecker) as a foundational text.

  1. Susan L. Trollinger, Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia, Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). ↩