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    A meeting of Brazilian Mennonites

    The Mennonites are a Protestant denomination who emerged from the Anabaptist movement in Central Europe during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Anabaptists were a fringe element of the wider Protestant movement who believed in the idea of adult baptism and who were considered part of the 'Radical' Reformation. They earned the enmity of both Roman Catholics and Lutheran Protestants alike and faced persecution from the earliest days of their movement. Nevertheless, congregations did survive, one of which was led by Menno Simons, a northern Dutch preacher. He founded the Mennonite movement which bears his name. Owing to continued oppression by political and religious authorities in Central Europe, many groups of Mennonites migrated to other parts of Europe and even the Americas in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A large number established themselves in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great there. A substantial proportion of these subsequently relocated again to Canada and other parts of the Americas in the nineteenth century. As such, the Mennonites have a wide-ranging diaspora and are found in many parts of the world today.[1]

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    Mennonites chronology of events

    The Siege of Munster

    The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses critiquing the Roman Catholic Church and its perceived corruption, epitomized in the sale of religious indulgences in Germany. What started as a moderate reform movement soon mushroomed into a more radical questioning of the entire edifice of the church and its theology.[2] During the 1520s a wide range of new ideas were put forward by religious leaders in Germany, Switzerland and the Low Countries. Some, for instance, queried why priests should not be allowed to marry. Others called into question the existence of Purgatory and the doctrinal basis thereof, while more still proposed a revision of the concept of the Trinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. As such, there wasn’t one Protestant Reformation, but several of them of varying sizes.[3]

    A woodcut of Menno Simons

    Amongst the more radical reform movements which emerged in the 1520s were the Anabaptists. These were individuals who proposed that adults should be re-baptized, the idea being that infants cannot freely consent to being baptized, rendering the ceremony meaningless from a religious perspective. These Anabaptists flourished for a time in the northwest of Germany and into parts of the Low Countries in the Friesland region of the Netherlands. They even took control of the city of Münster in 1534. However, their beliefs were considered such a breach of traditional Christian dogma that a combined army of Roman Catholics and Lutheran Protestants took a break from fighting each other to head to Münster and crush the Anabaptist movement there in 1535. Thereafter the Anabaptists would suffer persecution throughout Central Europe for decades to come.[4]

    The Mennonites were one congregation of the Anabaptists. Their leader was a former Catholic preacher from Friesland in the north of the Low Countries by the name of Menno Simons. His re-baptism occurred in 1536 and he soon gained a large following in Friesland. By the mid-1540s the term Mennonite was being used in written documents to describe his followers.[5] Beyond belief in adult baptism, the Mennonites came to believe in an ascetic and humble way of life, were inclined toward pacifism and questioned elements of Christ’s nature on earth. In some of these approaches they mirrored a number of other radical groups that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such as the Quakers, the English Baptists and the Moravians.[6]

    Extent of Mennonite migration

    While the Dutch Republic that emerged from the late 1560s onwards from under Spanish rule was one of the most religiously liberal states in early modern Europe, the Mennonites still faced a lot of impediments to worshipping in freedom there. Therefore, over time many Mennonite groups set off for other parts of Europe to find places where they could establish their ideal religious communities without government interference. In this they mirrored the English Puritans setting off to found the New England colonies in North America, the Quakers establishing the Pennsylvania colonies and various German groups like the Unitarians establishing themselves in the Balkans and other locations.[7]

    Catherine the Great of Russia

    The Mennonites migrated to many different places. For instance, one group was welcomed to Pennsylvania when William Penn, an English Quaker and the proprietor of the colony there, established it as a haven for fringe religious groups from England, the Low Countries and Germany in the 1680s. This initial movement continued into the eighteenth century until an estimated 2,500 Mennonites have relocated to the English colony by the time the United States was established in 1776.[8] More consequential still was the migration of a large community of Mennonites to the Baltic Sea region in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Later these same groups came under pressure from the Prussian government and accepted an offer from Catherine the Great, a German-born ruler of Russia, to settle in Russia along the course of the Volga River.[9]

    In the nineteenth century, the substantial German population in the Russian Empire faced more difficult circumstances within the Russian lands. A very substantial proportion, including the Mennonites began to leave Russia in the 1860s and 1870s, a migration that would continue down to the Russian Civil War and the advent of the Soviet Union.[10] Thousands headed for North America, settling in Canada as the Great Prairies were opened up to western settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly the Manitoba region.[11] Others joined the pre-existing Mennonite community in the United States, while a percentage of the Russian Mennonites headed for parts of Latin America, like Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Mexico. Surely the most unorthodox migration was the movement of a small number of Russian Mennonites to Central Asia under the leadership of a preacher named Claas Epp Jr., eventually settling in Kyrgyzstan in anticipation of the second coming of Christ.[12]

    Demographic impact of the Mennonites

    Russian Mennonites in Mexico

    This sweeping Mennonite migration has resulted in the emergence of Mennonite communities all over the world. There are nearly 200,000 Mennonites living in Canada, with a large concentration in Manitoba, particular the capital of the province, Winnipeg.[13] There are an estimated half a million Mennonites in the United States. Not all of these are descended from Mennonites who migrated to Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or from Russia in the nineteenth century. Many will be converts with different genealogical backgrounds. However, a substantial proportion are part of the great Mennonite migrations. The majority of American Mennonites are found in the states of Pennsylvania (126,000), Ohio (97,000) and Indiana (76,000).[14]

    There are extensive Mennonite communities in many Latin American countries. One of the foremost is in Bolivia, where there are some 150,000 Mennonites, over 1% of the total population.[15] Finally, there remains a community of Russian Mennonites within Russia itself, though it is much reduced after two centuries or different kinds of persecution by Tsarist and Soviet forces. There are over two million Mennonites worldwide in over 80 countries.

    See also

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    References

    1. ↑ Cornelius J. Dyck, An Introduction to Mennonite History (Harvey, North Dakota, 1993).
    2. ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/religion/reformation
    3. ↑ https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-radical-reformation/
    4. ↑ https://amnetwork.uk/resource/the-fall-of-munster/
    5. ↑ https://sites.duke.edu/project_refeurope/germania/menno-simons/
    6. ↑ https://www.mennoniteusa.org/who-are-mennonites/what-we-believe/confession-of-faith/baptism/
    7. ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism
    8. ↑ https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/mennonites/
    9. ↑ Roger Bartlett, ‘Foreign Settlement in Russia under Catherine II’, in New Zealand Slavonic Journal, No. 1 (1974), pp. 1–22.
    10. ↑ Fred R. Belk, ‘Migration of Russian Mennonites’, in Social Science, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Winter, 1975), pp. 17–21.
    11. ↑ https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/mennonites
    12. ↑ A. J. Dueck, ‘Claas Epp and the Great Trek Reconsidered’, in Journal of Mennonite Studies, Vol. 3 (1985), pp. 138–147.
    13. ↑ https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/mennonites
    14. ↑ https://www.thearda.com/us-religion/group-profiles/families?F=110
    15. ↑ https://news.mongabay.com/2023/04/expansion-of-mennonite-farmland-in-bolivia-encroaches-on-indigenous-land/


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