Mennonites and Amish

Mennonites and Amish, religious bodies that originated in the Anabaptist wing of the sixteenth‐century Protestant Reformation and were forced by persecution into sectarian isolation.The name “Mennonite” derives from Menno Simons, an early Dutch leader. In 1683, upon William Penn's invitation, Mennonites from Krefeld, Germany, settled near Philadelphia. Others followed, coming from Germany, Switzerland, and Holland. Among the migrants were Amish, followers of Jacob Amman who had split from the main body of Mennonites over issues of religious practice in the 1690s.

Gradually Mennonites and Amish spread to Ontario, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, and the West Coast. The 1870s brought a wave of ethnic German Mennonite immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe to the Great Plains, where they constituted a branch known as the Mennonite Brethren. The 1870s migration included Hutterites, an Anabaptist group that had originated in Moravia and later migrated to Russia to escape persecution. Settling in South Dakota and later Montana, the Hutterites lived in rural communities and held all property in common. When a community grew to about 150 members, it divided to start a new colony. To avoid military conscription during World War I, some Hutterites moved to Canada.

The central tenets of all Anabaptist groups included adult baptism on confession of faith, the authority of the Bible, rejection of military service, and a church of mutual accountability. During America's wars, their peace doctrine led to conflicts with federal authorities and local communities. Prominent Mennonite leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have included Christian Burkholder, John F. Funk, Edmund G. Kaufman, and Harold S. Bender.

While sharing core values, the various Mennonite and Amish groups made different choices in accommodating to American society. Traditionalist groups such as the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites resisted new technologies, an educated ministry, and denominational institutions. Typically they avoided jewelry, “worldly” fashions, and—in the case of the Amish—electrification and the automobile. Conservative evangelical Mennonites in all groups, especially the Mennonite Brethren, stressed evangelism, personal conversion, prescriptive creeds, and the literal authority of scripture. The progressives, by contrast, promoted a socially relevant gospel, educated leadership, ecumenical association, and openness to new ideas. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the progressives, especially in the (Old) Mennonite church and the General Conference Mennonite church, the two largest groups, created an array of denominational institutions for education, publication, mutual aid, health care, and missions. A strong sense of history, as well as the continuing growth of the Old Order groups, kept all Mennonite groups generally conservative.

In the 1990s, the various Mennonite, Amish, and Hutterite groups of the United States included about 266,000 baptized members. The strongest Mennonite population and institutional centers were in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Indiana, and Kansas. Mennonites have exerted an influence beyond their numbers on American society, however, especially in their refusal of military service (together with the Society of Friends and Church of the Brethren). Their quest for alternatives to war and violence has led to creative programs of benevolent service, including the Mennonite Central Committee (1920), Mennonite Disaster Service, and the Victim‐Offender Reconciliation program. In the late twentieth century, Mennonite theology enjoyed a belated flowering, with theologians John Howard Yoder and Gordon Kaufman representing different strands of Mennonite thought.
See also Conscientious Objection; German Americans; Immigration; Pacifism; Peace Movements; Protestantism; Religion.

Bibliography

Cornelius J. Dyck , An Introduction to Mennonite History, 3d ed., 1993.
Richard K. MacMaster, Theron Schlabach, James C. Juhnke, and Paul Toews, eds., The Mennonite Experience in America, 4 vols., 1985‐1996.
Donald B. Kraybill , Who Are the Anabaptists? Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites, 2004.

James C. Juhnke