Book
Rodney James Sawatsky. History and Ideology: American Mennonite Identity Definition through History. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2005.
Reviewer
David R. Swartz, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
At base, Rodney J. Sawatsky’s argument is that during times of uncertainty and anxiety, Mennonites have circled the wagons by using history to define their identity. In the 18th century, American Mennonites, who had nearly surrendered their denominational self-consciousness to German ecumenism on the American continent, rallied with the publication of the Martyrs Mirror and the Ausbund hymnal. Both publications asserted that suffering was normative, a motif that served as an identity marker for Mennonites through the 18th and into the 19th centuries.
The suffering motif gradually lost potency in the face of American evangelicalism and its fundamentalist and modernist heirs. John Funk, converted at a Dwight Moody revival, introduced evangelical hymnody and revival techniques to his fellow Mennonites. Moreover, a coterie of talented Mennonite scholars was exposed to new ideas in graduate school, giving rise to a new sophistication in Mennonite historiography.
Mennonites diverged into two camps as they struggled to maintain an identity amidst the intellectual and social turmoil of the Gilded Age. One camp identified with Protestant fundamentalism. This camp’s most prominent proponent, German immigrant John Horsch, stressed ideological purity. Horsch maintained that the roots of Anabaptism were not in Munster, as many critics of the tradition maintained. Instead, they could be traced theologically (though not organically) through “old evangelical brotherhoods” such as the Waldensians all the way down the centuries to Christ himself. Attempts to burnish the evangelical credentials of the Anabaptists resulted in tracts such as Horsch’s “Menno Simons on the Authority of the Holy Scriptures,” a salvo in fundamentalist-modernist debates.
If Horsch was trying to identify Mennonites as fundamentalists, the other camp stressed less theologically restrictive impulses. C. Henry Smith and C.H. Wedel typically emphasized that Anabaptists were forerunners of Western liberal notions of individual freedom. Wedel, president of Bethel College, found the essence of Anabaptism less in dogma than in pious living in community with fellow believers. This definition was a direct shot at the “old” Mennonite “dictatorial emphasis on cultural minutiae and hierarchical structure which undermined congregational autonomy contrary to the tradition” (43). Wedel thus included Hans Denck in his list of authentic Anabaptists, while Horsch excised Denck and other theological aberrants such as chiliasts, humanists, and mystics.
The two camps fell roughly along “old” Mennonite Church–General Conference lines. In the historiographical battles, outlined in a fascinating chapter entitled “Two Denominations, Two Histories,” we see the roots of contemporary MC-GC tensions. Both camps wrote their history grinding ideological axes.
In the end, a consensus emerged that privileged the MC interpretation of pure Anabaptism as originating in Zurich in 1525 from a cadre of Swiss Brethren. They were, Harold S. Bender wrote in 1931, “consistent Biblicists, evangelical, soundly moderate and practical, free from fanaticism or doctrinal aberration ... in short, they were evangelical Anabaptists” (129). This interpretation prevailed largely because of the efforts of Bender, an organizational and scholarly cyclone in the 1930s and 1940s. He commandeered an enterprise that produced a mountain of historical works, a raft of dissertations, articles in the newly launched Mennonite Quarterly Review and Mennonite Encyclopedia, and Bender’s important “The Anabaptist Vision,” the pithiest statement of normative Anabaptism.
For those who have read Beulah Hostetler, the Mennonites in America series, or Albert Keim’s recent biography of Bender, little of this material is new. Sawatsky, however, does contribute scope and a helpful interpretive lens. The “Anabaptist Vision,” he argues, is as much a reflection of mid-20th century American Mennonitism as it is an interpretation of history.
Sawatsky is superb at outlining the contours of Mennonite identity, but less convincing in probing the relationship between identity and historical consciousness. Among questions needing further attention are these: To what extent did historical consciousness truly drive Mennonite identity, or did it merely rationalize fundamentalist, pietist, and modernist pressures? How did Mennonite historical consciousness compare to other denominations? Through what mechanisms did this Mennonite consensus filter to Mennonites in the pew? How actively did Amish Mennonites, less engaged in inter-Mennonite wars, define themselves through history or connect their history to contemporaneous ideological debates?
What makes this 2005 book particularly intriguing is its tardy publication date. Originally a 1977 dissertation, History and Ideology is a historical document itself. The story of its long-delayed publication, recounted in introductory notes by James Juhnke, positions the book as yet another round in the continuing contest over American Mennonite historiography. By historicizing the “Anabaptist Vision,” after all, Sawatsky fundamentally questions the normativity of the consensus. That his dissertation could not be published as late as the 1970s perhaps suggests the hegemony of the Benderian legacy, and demonstrates that the debate over Mennonite identity and Anabaptist origins continued with some vigor after the 1940s. Sadly it is a sequel that Sawatsky, who died in 2004 of a brain tumor, will never write.