Breaking With “The Quiet-in-the-Land” Stereotype of Mennonites-Becketwood Midweek Gathering Talk by Steve Clemens, 1/31/24
People who followed a former Roman Catholic priest, Menno Simons, and were part of the movement referred to as the Radical Reformation were called Mennonites. In the early 1500s as Martin Luther and John Calvin and others were breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church, a group of mostly young “radicals” felt the Protestant Reformation did not go far enough in several ways: these groups often called for a separation of church and state, embraced nonviolence rather than using the sword to coerce religious “conversion”, stressed communal living or shared resources, often called for more Biblical literacy, rejected separateness of priests/clergy by stressing the “priesthood of all believers”, and often encouraged personal piety and sober living. A group of these radicals were called a slur- “Anabaptist” meaning re-baptizer - since they rejected infant baptism, insisting that only as an adult could one make a confession of faith. They were routinely persecuted as heretics by both Catholic and Protestant leaders and governments. Infant baptism was the way one became a member of that “state”. These small movements were identified by nicknames - often after so-called “leaders” of the groups Mennonites after Menno Simons; Amish after Jacob Ammon; Hutterites after Jacob Hutter; Schwenkfelders after Caspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig; Swedenborgians after Emmanuel Swedenborg; Moravians after the area of Europe from which they fled. Because they were considered by church and governmental leaders to be heretics, they often could not own land and were subjected to persecution and torture; many, in fact, were martyred for their faith.
Some of these groups found a new home in the early 1700s in the colony given to William Penn by the King of England as a reward for Penn’s father, an Admiral who saved the king’s life and his throne. Admiral Penn’s son, a convert to the Quaker movement in England, was determined to populate his colony with others who embraced a separation of church and state and did not want to “use the sword” nor pay taxes for the purpose of supporting an army or armed militia. Mennonites and others of these small movements were offered land and religious freedom in Penn’s colony. We can discuss later how this movement gradually and then more rapidly displaced the Lenape/Delaware indigenous peoples from their homelands – mostly through purchases of land but also by deceit rather than armed force.
Mennonites are considered one of three “Peace churches” along with the Quakers and the Church of the Brethren because traditionally their members refused military service and were recognized as conscientious objectors. Mennonites stressed that they were “citizens of the Kingdom of God” rather than claiming to be citizens of whatever governing state they lived in. They often said the state “rules by the sword” and it made no sense to them to vote because the President was also the “commander-in-chief” and, as pacifists, they would not weigh in on who might be a better leader of the military. Because of their refusal to carry weapons and their abstaining from voting and, instead, sticking to farming or other “useful” trades, they were often known as “the-Quiet-in-the-Land”. Some governments, including Catherine The Great, and Canada in the late 1800s, sought out Mennonites to settle there because they were good farmers and would not rise up in arms against the government.
My ancestors were recruited by William Penn to come to his colony and arrived in 1709, settling 30 miles north of Philadelphia. The Clemens families have remained on this land within 10 miles of that original homestead. My parents were raised in the Franconia Conference, one of the more conservative of several Mennonite conferences in eastern Pennsylvania. Despite his upbringing, my father went into the Army during WWII rather than declaring to be a conscientious objector. My parents had been “liberalized” by the Sunday School movement – rebelling against Mennonite traits such as hair coverings for women, no jewelry, no musical instruments in worship - but also insisting that they should proselytize others rather than just keeping their faith as a private matter between themselves, their church, and God. They helped found a new congregation which was called Mennonite but never affiliated with any of the Mennonite conferences. I was baptized a Mennonite at age 12 but most of my Christian formation was in the form of evangelical theology.
I went to a Christian college prep school where I was exposed to other “Christians” – some were even Democrats! At the height of the US War on Vietnam, I entered Wheaton College in 1968 and I was enrolled in mandatory Army ROTC. A month and a half later, I turned 18 and registered for the draft as a Conscientious Objector. The next year I started participating in Draft Board demonstrations led by Maryknoll priest from the Catholic seminary in Glen Ellyn, IL, the town next to Wheaton.
While at Wheaton I learned about the Anabaptists in a Church History course- a history mostly ignored in my childhood.
After graduating from Wheaton, I learned that a farmer-neighbor was now head of the Mennonite Central Committee’s Peace Section during the Vietnam era. I had been reading John Howard Yoder, Art Gish, William Stringfellow, and the Post-American which later became Sojourners Magazine and decided after a year of Grad School to embark on a year or two of “voluntary service” since my lottery number was too high to be drafted. Walton Hackman, that former neighbor, recommended that I consider spending a summer in rural Mississippi. Living in a poor Black neighborhood in the rural Mississippi Delta was an eye-opening, formative experience! Then I followed that with a year placement in Washington, DC at the Mennonite office on Capitol Hill.
In the fall 1974, enroute to my Washington, DC assignment, I met a man named Ladon Sheats at our Voluntary Service orientation. He showed a multimedia Values Presentation – contrasting values of God’s Kingdom vs US Culture. Using photos of current and historical events, advertising, music, and text like “I Am a Rock, I Am an Island” by Simon and Garfield and songs by the Moody Blues and Cat Stevens - he contrasted the values of interdependence vs independence; community and cooperation vs competition; brotherhood/sisterhood vs racial separation; simple living vs materialism; nonviolence vs militarism. (I clearly remember hearing the refrain of Cat Stevens’ song, Father and Son: “It’s not time to make a change, just relax and take it easy; You’re still young, that’s your fault, there’s so much you have to know …”). This presentation told us we must “CHOOSE which values you will live by.” It was a clear call for me to live out the values of my faith rather than being co-opted by the culture.
My voluntary service assignment in DC was at the Mennonite Central Committee’s Peace Section Washington Office. It was designed to inform and educate Mennonite congregations around the country about national and foreign policy issues from a perspective of Christian discipleship. We focused on world hunger, the Vietnam War, the death penalty, food stamps and supplemental programs for the poor, criminal justice, US relations with other nations, civil and human rights, nuclear weapons, … It was a small 3-person office, but we networked and worked with other Protestant and Catholic church agencies; and Quaker, and Jewish advocacy groups as well. I attended many Congressional hearings, read legislative briefs, and attended meetings and conferences where these issues were discussed. We took Mennonite students on tours of the Pentagon, the CIA, and Congress.
That year also saw me joining a weekly Bible Study group with former Catholic priest, Philip Berrigan and former nun, Liz McAlister where we discussed Biblical scripture in the context of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Prophets. Discussions with that study group led me to my first arrest - at the White House – in the last major demonstration against Vietnam War in March 1975, a month before the Saigon government fell. 61 of us were arrested including Dick Gregory, Jim Peck, Dan Berrigan, Liz McAlister. During the six hours in jail awaiting processing, I was meeting Ladon Sheats again -this time behind bars. He told me more about the intentional community he was part of in southwest Georgia and suggested I consider moving there after this year of service. I applied to become a volunteer there starting in September 1975, just before I turned 25.
Koinonia, the name of that intentional Christian Community, was founded in 1942 to be a “demonstration plot”- a group trying to live out the ideas of Jesus and the values of the Kingdom of God. One of the four adult founders was a Southern Baptist farmer who went to seminary and became a Greek scholar, Clarence Jordan. He became well-known for his “CottonPatch” translations of the Christian New Testament and as a powerful, yet humorous, preacher.
To become a member of that community, one was expected to embrace 5 values : Nonviolence, racial reconciliation, service to others, simple/compassionate living, and economic sharing - all under the umbrella of following the Way of Jesus. The community was ecumenical, lay-led, with people working and worshipping together. An active farm (raising pecans, peanuts, grapes, peaches, soybeans, and corn), an organic garden, an early childhood nursery and education center, and an affordable housing ministry were areas where we worked. A mail order business selling pecans, fruitcake, and candy was a significant source of revenue for the community as well as a source of jobs for local residents. Because of its embrace of racial reconciliation – with Blacks and whites working side-by-side, it became a target for the Klu Klux Klan and many other racist southern whites at least until the late 1970s.
Koinonia was the birthplace of the Habitat For Humanity movement which was modeled after the community’s housing ministry. A School of Radical Discipleship formed basis of Volunteer Program where people came for 3-4 months of work, study, and reflection. After completing those initial sessions and volunteering for at least a year, one could apply for Resident Partnership - the term used for members of the community. As a Partner, one was to practice divesture -you could not own your own house or car and were expected to live off a small monthly living and food allowance. The community provided housing, shared transportation, and a common noon meal. Our practice was one of a “common purse”. The joke was said that “we hold all things in common except our spouses!” The membership commitment was into the indefinite future – until one felt called elsewhere or died. The Partnership varied between 20 and 35 adult members plus 8-20 volunteers at any given time while I lived there from 1975-1990. Especially in the 1950s through the early 1970s, many Mennonite young men came there to do “alternative service” as conscientious objectors.
With nonviolence as a central tenant of Koinonia’s values, and with the War on Vietnam abruptly ending several months before, the community wrestled with creative ways to express our peacemaking values in the broader society. One area of major concern was the proliferation and threatened use of nuclear weapons. Even though our neighbor, Jimmy Carter, recently became the President, a group of us from the community drove 20 hours north to Groton, CT to protest the christening by Rosalynn Carter of the USS Georgia, a new US Trident ballistic missile nuclear submarine.
In March of 1980 we heard word of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s assassination while saying mass in San Salvador; later in December of that year, 4 US Catholic nuns were raped and murdered there as well. A few years later we learned that the soldiers involved in these atrocities were trained at the notorious School of the Americas run by the US Army.
In 1981 Ladon Sheats invited me to join him as part of a non-violent prayer pilgrimage to Pantex, the final assembly plant for all US nuclear weapons located outside Amarillo, TX. Our intent was to go to a place of great spiritual darkness with an act of public prayer to shine a light on the evil we perceived there. That style of witness was foreshadowed by Fredrick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King who said they were “praying with our feet”. It was there I met Fr. Larry Rosebaugh, an Oblate priest from Wisconsin as one of the 6 of us who scaled the 12’ fence surrounding the nuclear weapons plant. After spending six months in jail and federal prison for that witness, I returned to Koinonia.
In 1983 we learned that the US Army was training soldiers from El Salvador at Ft. Benning, GA – an hour and ½ west of Koinonia. Groups from Atlanta scheduled a march and protest, but it quickly turned into an “us vs them” style of chanting: “2,4,6,8, it’s the junta that we hate”; “Alexander Haig, how many nuns did you kill today?” Some of us from Koinonia didn’t feel the chants were an appropriate way to protest so we started a Quaker-style candlelight prayer vigil on Thursday nights which we held weekly for the next 5 or so years before it became a monthly vigil.
In August 1983, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, and Fr. Larry Rosebaugh came to Koinonia to share with us their plans to nonviolently protest the training of Salvadoran troops at the base. We invited them to join our weekly vigil. After having been arrested 4 times earlier in the week for various protests on the base and being removed from the base after arrest and given a “Ban-and-bar” letter, Roy and Larry invited our vigil group to join them in what became their final protest before they were hauled off to jail. We planted a cross on the Base Commander’s front lawn. I joined them with 3 others from our weekly vigil group and then was held under arrest for 6 hours before being released with a lifetime Ban and Bar letter. Roy ended up getting 18 months in prison, Larry got 1 year in prison.
After our family moved to MN in 1990 for a sabbatical year, Father Roy founded the School Of the Americas Watch which began an annual vigil in November held for more than 25 years at the main gate to Ft. Benning. It started as a prayerful fast outside the main gates with a handful of Veterans For Peace. The annual vigil grew in size every year, from 8 to more than 20,000. Actor Martin Sheen, singer Pete Seeger, and other “celebrities” came to protest this “school” which trained Central and South American soldiers in what was euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”, “counter-insurgency”, and assassination. Especially after the revelations of the torture conducted by US troops at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, large crowds started to “connect-the-dots” to what the SOA had been teaching for many years. So, in 2005, I decided it was time again to risk arrest and prison with another prayerful protest. I expected a 6-month prison sentence but ended up with only 3 months due to a technicality. But those stories can wait for another time.
My parents had warned me about Roman Catholics as I was growing up – “Don’t ever date a Catholic because you might fall in love and the Bible says, ‘Do not be unequally yoked with an unbeliever’.” How ironic that many of my closest friends (and fellow convicts) are Catholic nuns, priests, and former priests who married nuns! I’ve also learned that being “quiet” in the face of violence and injustice can be easily construed as being complicit or acquiescing. As Dr. ML King said, “Never allow it to be said that you are silent overlookers, detached spectators, but that you are involved participants in the struggle to make justice a reality.” Being “The-Quiet-In -The -Land” was no longer a virtue despite that rich, Mennonite heritage.
