Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood
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As the Quiet in the Land, Mennonites have been viewed--by themselves and others--as a largely apolitical people. Mennonites, Politics and Peoplehood challenges this view, examining Mennonite reaction to and involvement in political affairs from sixteenth-century Prussia to twentieth-century Manitoba. While the Mennonite's founders often rejected the authority and power of earthly rulers, their later communities had to come to terms with governments, legal systems, and various political forces in order to survive. Concentrating on the Dutch/Prussian Russian Mennonite experience in Europe and in Manitoba, Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood deals with this reconciliation with political realities, examining a number of key issues, including how political contact and engagement was dealt with in confessions of faith and catechisms, how Prussian emigrants struggled to maintain special rights and a separate identity amid a totalitarian Soviet regime, and how Mennonites attempted to balance their principles of non-resistance and rejection of earthly authority with the realities of survival in political domains often hostile to their continued existence, even going so far as to run as candidates in Canadian provincial elections.
