Nonconforming
On the Background to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish and Brethren. By Donald B. Kraybill and Carl F. Bowman. Johns Hopkins University Press, 362 pp., $29.95.
I've always been a bit taken aback when, upon learning that I'm a Quaker, a new acquaintance asks, "So do you still ride in a horse and buggy?" I guess that plainly dressed man on the Quaker Oats box confuses people. Since I've spent so much time explaining the difference between Quakers and the Amish, and am a student of American religious history, I was sure that I knew the differences. But just how little I really did know became apparent when I read Donald Kraybill and Carl Bowman's new book. While far from light reading, this look at the history, similarities and differences between four groups of Old Order faithful in North America--Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish and Brethren--is fascinating.
Kraybill and Bowman begin with an in-depth look at the history and social structure of the Old Orders, which helps us to understand that their resistance to modernism does not mean that they are cantankerous kooks, "relics of the colonial era" or "modern-day Luddites." Rather they are spiritual and cultural nonconformists--and always have been. From their beginnings in the 16th century, the Anabaptists took a radical reformationist stand which made them enemies of both the Catholics and Protestants who were their contemporaries. They were mercilessly persecuted and found their physical salvation in community and separation. The memory of those years, embedded in their collective DNA, calls them to be a part of God's kingdom and apart from the world. As the book says, "The stories of their martyrs, retold again and again in sermons, remain fresh in the collective memory," and "non-conformity is grounded in the idea that persons who are baptized into the Christian faith become members of a redemptive community that stands apart from the larger society."
