Religion: Plain People

True, believing Christians are as sheep in the midst of wolves. . . .

So, in 1524, wrote Conrad Grebel, leader of the earnest little band of Swiss Bible students who later became known as Mennonites. Today their descendants—the plain-dressing, plainspeaking, plain-thinking Mennonites of the U.S. and Canada—are still conscious of Leader Grebel’s warning. Last week they were doing their best to get some of their brother sheep to safer pastures.

To 10,000 displaced Mennonites in the U.S. and British zones of Germany, they are sending a chartered ship. The D.P.s, mostly of Dutch extraction, will be carried (2,000 at a time) to Paraguay. There they will find two flourishing colonies settled in the late ’20s by Mennonite refugees from Russia and Canada. They will be supplied by the Mennonite Central Committee with farmland, tools and seed with which to take up again their simple, religious lives.

Sheep’s Clothing. Being Displaced Persons is nothing new to the Mennonites. In their 422-year-old history, they have also become accustomed to martyrdom.

White-bearded Menno Simons, who gave the group its name, was a Catholic priest of 44 when he left his church in 1536 to join Grebel’s movement. Then the group were called Anabaptists because of their belief in the necessity of adult baptism. Like the Quakers 150-odd years later, they eschewed a paid priesthood and the use of force, did their best to follow literally the precepts of Jesus, patterned their lives on those of the early Christians. In those days, even more than now, such behavior was not only unconventional but dangerous.

During the Mennonites’ first ten years, more than 5,000 of them were killed off. Hounded from country to country and plagued by internal divisions, they persisted in Europe, doing their stubborn best to obey God and get along with man. They annoyed, baffled and roused the suspicions of their fellow Christians. Wrote Catholic Author Christoph Andreas Fischer in 1603:

“Among all the heresies and sects . . . to the destruction of the Catholic church, not a one has a better appearance and greater external holiness than the Anabaptists. . . . They call each other brothers and sisters; they use no profanity nor unkind language; they use no weapons of defense. They are temperate in eating and drinking, they use no vain display of clothes. . . . They do not go to law before judicial courts, but bear everything patiently, as they say, in the Holy Spirit. Who would suppose that under this sheep’s clothing only ravening wolves are hidden?”

Wolves’ World. In 1683 a group of Dutch-descended Mennonites came to Quaker William Penn’s new colony in America and settled at Germantown. For a time, they found tolerance and peace. By 1776 the Pennsylvania Mennonites numbered nearly 7,500; today there are approximately 200,000 on the North American continent. They too, “plain people” as they call themselves, have not escaped the disease of sectarianism and schism. U.S. Mennonites are currently divided into 16 groups, including the black-clothed, buttonless, bearded Amish of southeastern Pennsylvania. Some of them still practice such ancient customs as the “holy kiss” (see cut). All of them, however, remain plain and pacifist.*

For most U.S. Mennonites, the center of the U.S. is the tiny (pop. 877) town of Akron, Pa. The home town of greying, spectacled Orie O. Miller, secretary-treasurer of the Mennonite Central Committee, Akron is automatically headquarters of the Committee itself, which traditionally follows its secretary. There, in five white houses, the 50-odd men & women of the Committee staff administer a foreign corps of 260 workers in 16 countries. The foreign corps carries on relief projects and looks after Mennonite conscientious objectors in all parts of the world. Some of the male staff members wear the black or snuff-colored dress of “lay preachers”; some of the women still affect traditional white “prayer caps”; all work for mere subsistence wages.

Last year the Central Committee spent $3,000,000—an average Mennonite contribution of $15. This year’s resettlement of D.P.s will cost an estimated $2,500,000. Most Mennonites have come to regard such assessments as one inescapable price of sheeplike living in a wolves’ world.

* Mennonites constituted 40% of the conscientious objectors in Civilian Public Service camps during World War II.