Introduction

Framing the Question

Look around the East Petersburg Mennonite Church parking lot at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning and you will see a variety of late-model vehicles. Listen to the discussions going on during Sunday school or to the singing and preaching taking place in the building and you will hear joyful proclamations of God’s love and grace, many references to Jesus’ example, and calls for the Spirit to comfort and guide. Follow the congregation’s members home for lunch and one notes that almost to a family they live in relatively large, well-built single-family dwellings.

East Petersburg’s members are generous and caring. God’s economic blessings are evident in their lives. They contribute money, energy, and time to causes they find compelling. They meet together in various smaller groupings throughout the week to support each other in the walk of faith. Rarely, however, is a public word spoken about the details of making specific economic decisions or requests for advice concerning one’s finances.

During members meetings, those gathered review the year’s expected offerings and church spending plan and are careful not to move forward on major projects without assurance that financial support will be forthcoming from the congregation. Investment in new ministries is bathed in prayer and congregational counsel. When it comes to the many large and smaller economic lifestyle decisions individual members make, however, suddenly it’s all a very private business. Each person or family unit appears to make her, his, or their own decisions about things from housing and health care to entertainment and groceries.

Of course stewardship is an occasional theme and people are happy to talk about the general topic of wise money management, especially when their situations of plenty testify to their own apparent ability to manage funds. But asking someone whether his or her recent purchase truly reflects the attitudes and example of Jesus to material things or suggesting that one’s small group could provide a great forum for individuals and families to present their income, expense budgets, and lifestyle goals would likely be considered offensive. Rodney Clapp, Christian sociologist, notes that in current North American life "any authority the faith has in regard to our economic behavior is entirely privatized." Obviously the culture of secrecy related to lifestyle and economics encompasses more than just my home congregation at East Petersburg or even the Mennonite Church.

I wondered what we might gain by considering a time within the Mennonite Church when one’s lifestyle was considered to be very specific evidence of one’s walk of faith. Immediately I thought of the doctrine of nonconformity, which asked Mennonites to be different from the world around them in many ways. Far from being an entirely private matter, one’s lifestyle visibly conveyed that one was living in obedience to the community of believers’ standards and not those of the world.

This thesis endeavors to understand the theological shape of the doctrine of nonconformity in the Mennonite Church of the 1930s through the 1950s, how it was taught, practiced, and whether the church’s lifestyle requirements specifically guided members to think critically about their economic activities. I began with the working assumption that they did.

My research included work with living resources as well as written texts: since the Lancaster Conference of the Mennonite Church strongly emphasized the nonconformed lifestyle, I interviewed thirty people whose formative years involved attending Lancaster Conference churches during the period of this study. John Ruth’s narrative Lancaster Conference history identified several influential bishops around 1940: Amos Horst, Henry Lutz, Noah Risser, and Noah Mack. I targeted persons raised in congregations under the oversight of these leaders and also under bishop J. Paul Graybill, a strong proponent of nonconformity.

Through my research I hoped to identify how nonconformity was taught and with what content, how church members understood it and practiced it, and whether nonconformity supplied means of evaluating economic lifestyle decisions. I was surprised by the extent to which the Mennonite Church in Lancaster was in fact a relatively isolated social entity and the extent to which it and the broader Mennonite Church, while focusing on separation from the "world," was also significantly influenced by this very same world.

The Swiss Anabaptist Two-Kingdom World View

The Schleitheim Articles drew a stark line between the "obedient children of God" and the rest of society, called "the world." The document, likely written by the former monk and prior Michael Sattler, confidently states: "Now there is nothing else in the world and all creation than good or evil, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who are [come] out of the world, God’s temple and idols, Christ and Belial, and none will have part with the other." Leaders of the Swiss Brethren, an early Anabaptist group, convened at Schleitheim near the border between Germany and Switzerland during 1527. They emerged from this meeting with the Schleitheim Articles, a short formal statement of their consensus concerning how to live as the body of Christ on earth. Rather than producing a comprehensive confession, the group highlighted areas of theological and ethical divergence from other Reformers, including, on some points, Anabaptists in the South German/Austrian stream.

As implied above, the confession produced at Schleitheim did not speak for all Anabaptists or Anabaptist leaders concerning the perceived chasm between the Kingdom of God, a living reality among the body of believers, and the kingdom of this world. Whatever their theological stance, however, Anabaptists of all stripes were being hunted and severely persecuted, even killed, by the government and established church authorities. The realities of persecution grouped Anabaptists together and relegated them to the margins of societies where the difficulties of daily existence reminded them that they were different, a separate people.

Many members of the Mennonite Church, the group which is the subject of this study, are direct descendants of those Anabaptists most affected by the Schleitheim Confession. Their forebears came directly from Germany and Switzerland to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the early 1700s, to what was then the western frontier in William Penn’s portion of the "New World."

Penn, a Quaker, promised freedom to practice one’s faith undeterred. As these wearied sojourners established homes and congregations in Pennsylvania and spread westward across the continent and northward to Canada they met with environments that did not militate against their faith and folkways but rather welcomed them, or at least acknowledged their equal right to exist.

In this new North American context, Mennonites needed to rethink their relationships with those outside their fellowship. Living a life not conformed to the world was less complicated when the world pushed them away. When the world wanted to embrace them, however, nonconformity, a doctrinal corollary to the idea of separation, became a central issue.

Mennonites throughout the centuries had striven in a multitude of ways to follow Jesus rather than the whims of the day. And while a scholarly debate surrounds what sort of continuing legacy the Schleitheim Articles may have had, the impulse to identify true Christian faith with an obviously differentiated lifestyle ran like a thread through four centuries of Swiss Anabaptist and then Mennonite Church (MC) Mennonite life. The Mennonite church doctrine of nonconformity as taught and practiced during the three decades encompassed by 1930 through 1959 asked Mennonites to be separate from the world around them in highly formalized and specific ways. The church’s doctrine not only specified what kind of clothing a Christian person should wear but also designated appropriate social activities, speech, and recreation, among other things.

Broader North American Cultural, Economic, and Political Dynamics

Change was rampant in mid- to late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century North American life. The United States emerged from its mostly traditional, rural-based society to embrace headlong an urban-directed, rational, and more broadly capitalistic mindset. Even as early as the 1840s persons living in eastern Pennsylvania experienced noticeable shifts. Nathan E. Yoder says, "Mechanical inventions, especially in agriculture, and an economy increasingly oriented to inter-regional markets broke down local solidarity and isolation." Additionally, he notes that public discourse frequently centered on the ideas of efficiency and progress.

Women found a new voice and were loudly requesting the right to vote. The invention of the moving assembly line bumped factories to a new level of production. And common ideas about how the natural world worked gave way to the assertions of new science. If this seems like a chaotic mix, it was. Beulah Stauffer Hostetler, in her work American Mennonites and Protestant Movements, draws on the insights of American cultural historian Robert H. Wiebe in discussing this period. She highlights Wiebe’s notion that "by contrast to the personal, informal ways of the community, the new scheme was derived from the regulative, hierarchical needs of the urban-directed life. Through rules with impersonal sanctions, it sought continuity and predictability in a world of endless change."

This "new scheme" for life and its attendant coping mechanisms for dealing with change found practical expression in an emphasis on formal organization and careful written documentation. "For the rules of a society to exist simply in the folkways of a people and in the decisions of their elders [was no longer] enough," writes Theron Schlabach. Thus, the Oberholtzer division fracturing Franconia Conference Mennonites in 1847 was a sign of times. It revolved in large part around minister John Oberholtzer’s insistence at the spring conference meeting that minutes be kept of conference proceedings as a matter of course and that his proffered written constitution receive at least a hearing, if not full acceptance by the conference body. Ultimately the conflict surrounding the proposed constitution became the main dividing issue. Leaders arrived at the fall conference meeting with hardened views. Those supporting Oberholtzer and his constitution sat together as a group and shortly after the meeting commenced they walked out. The New Mennonites, as Oberholtzer’s group was called, welcomed the progressive spirit stirring.

Although the seceding group likely didn’t recognize it as such, many of the changes they so eagerly accepted were paving the way for the emergence of a new, driven middle class. Nathan Yoder observes that one of the items at issue was the very basic institution of language. "New Mennonites’ use of language—learned sermons, constitutions, official minutes—all bore the marks of an emerging American middle-class consciousness in which written words replaced face-to-face contact as an ideal for communication.," Yoder says.

And Mennonites who valued humility and simplicity had reason to be nervous. Yoder quotes from Burton J. Bledstein’s definition of a middle class person, which conveys clearly, albeit strongly, the types of values that were proclaimed. He says the middle class person "was competitive, active, bold, brave, and even reckless." He or she "mercilessly combated those who hated innovation" and beyond mere self-reliance, she or he "was absorbed in [her or] his own egotism." Finally, such a person was "the world’s organizer: punctual, industrious, mathematical, and impersonal," one who "sharpened his [or her] mind into an analytical knife."

The march of the middle class was largely halted as the great stock market crash of 1929 plunged the country into the depths of an economic depression. The massive shake-up forced persons who had recently struck out on paths of self-reliance to once again turn to communities and institutions for their very sustenance in some cases. Several persons I interviewed made comments to the effect that during the Depression years questions about how a family spent its funds were basically a non-issue: the funds went for necessities. This difficult financial experience had a lasting impact on some folks I spoke with from the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area who were children at the time, and even more so apparently on the generation caring for them during this period. Although interviewees frequently commented, "I didn’t know we were poor," these folks learned thrift by observing their parents. Even if the children didn’t realize it, likely a main reason for their elders’ very careful spending habits was that their family was just getting by financially.

Overwhelmingly, the Mennonites I spoke with grew most of the food they needed in large gardens. Farm families also frequently raised animals for butchering. So while times were tight, the Depression’s impact on Mennonite daily life was greatly reduced as compared to families without access to the land. When Elizabeth Martin married her husband Daniel in 1930, he remained working for the same farmer he’d been helping for the previous seven years and they moved into a house on the man’s farm. Daniel’s employer was slow to reduce Daniel’s salary "now that he had a wife to keep," and he continued to receive his pre-Depression wage of $3 a day during their first year of marriage. Subsequently the farmer reduced Daniel’s wage to a Depression-appropriate $1.50 per day. This story highlights the world of economic difference between the 1930s and the latter part of the twentieth century and beyond. Additionally, when Elizabeth was asked whether the Depression had had a significant impact on her family she readily responded that no, it hadn’t. She conveyed several ways in which they had to "make do" with what they had, but in general they had all they needed. Apparently she referred to both her family of origin and the new family she formed with Daniel at the height of the Depression.

Both World War I and World War II had significant impacts on how North Americans understood themselves, the world beyond their borders, the human capacity for good or evil, and how to deal with evil when it emerged en force. World War II especially changed social and economic dynamics in the United States. The country cranked up production for the war effort and with many of the men, who traditionally made up the work force, serving in the military, women went to work in record numbers. After the conflict was over, the technological and production capacities developed for war were switched to manufacture products for the civilian public.

Limited access highway development, pioneered with the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1940, and the incredible proliferation of vehicles introduced the country to a new mobility. On the one hand long-distance ties could be strengthened in both the social and business realms since the ease and speed of highway travel made visits and interstate commerce over greater distances increasing feasible. On the other hand, these same factors served to destabilize communities and reduce time for local relationships as people began to drive further for daily work, take long-distance vacations, and move more readily.

As early as the latter 1800s, according to Rodney Clapp, national leaders recognized that production-oriented capitalism was too successful—ordinary citizens simply didn’t need all the products being produced. In order to sustain a strong economy, each person should become a ready spender, one who frequently bought unneeded things. Thus a shift from production- to consumer-oriented capitalism began. Following World War II, greatly expanded production capacity and a larger work force—since many women chose not to exit the work force after the war—combined to require more consumption than ever before. The rise of modern marketing and its catalyst, the television, which became readily available to the public about 1948, attempted to work North Americans into a permanent buying frenzy.

According to some thinkers, the rise of modern science also contributed to this trend towards building one’s life around the acquisition, use, and disposition of things. According to Craig M. Gay, modern science suggests there is no such thing as a moral order. Therefore "we have become mere consumers because there is really nothing else left for us to become." Gay also points to Lesek Kolakowski’s assertion that we have "submit[ted] ourselves to the logic of science for the sake of trying to achieve more effective control over our circumstances" and that "the shallow quality of contemporary consumer behavior . . . suggest[s] that our need to find meaning in the universe, by and large, has been eclipsed by our desire for creature comforts." In other words, modern science helps explain a complex world and gives people tools for evaluating ever-changing circumstances. At the same time it figures God, or any higher goal in life, out of the equation, and thus folks are left with pursuing their own interests, comfort, and pleasure as the highest good. Admittedly, Gay’s discussion focuses on the consumer phenomenon’s late 20^th century expression. But this consumerism evolved from much earlier trends, heated up by the post-World U.S. economy and its incessant urgings to acquire and consume.

Broader U.S. Religious Dynamics

Protestant revivalism constituted a prominent feature of the U.S. religious landscape during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the words of Mark Noll, American religious historian,

According to Noll, the First Great Awakening, preached by George Whitefield and others, marked "the passing of Puritanism and the rise of evangelicalism as the dominant Protestant expression in America." Revivalists preached a "vibrant religion of the heart" which was "much more attuned to the expanding, market-oriented societies of the eighteenth century than to the ideals of stable church establishments from Europe."

If the initial Great Awakening introduced American Christians to inner-directed religion, the Second Great Awakening, beginning about 1790, motivated them to organize for societal reform. Reformism, urging people to voluntarily change their behavior, became the democratic way to achieve social stability. Voluntary associations sprang up to affect this reform. Theron Schlabach enumerates some of the many changes the Second Great Awakening introduced to the Mennonite Church: Sunday schools, revival meetings, church publishing, a Mennonite college, mission boards, homes for the elderly, and orphanages.

By the latter years of the nineteenth century the modern mission movement had electrified Protestants and many Catholics as well. Mennonites also caught the mission fervor and readily took cues from Protestant patterns of doing missions. The Protestant movement stressed giving oneself in Christian obedience to the great missions cause. Mennonite mission enthusiasts challenged the formerly highly regarded virtue of humility and urged persons to set forth as "aggressive workers" in the missionary cause. Schlabach highlights an 1885 article in the Herald of Truth, forerunner of the Gospel Herald, in which associate editor and Mennonite evangelist John S. Coffman "articulated what Coffman and others were putting forward as a new Mennonite code: In the work of God, be not self-effacing but assertive; be self-reliant, or at least bold in reliance on God." Within the older Mennonite approach to the Christian life, "obedience had been less about giving oneself to a cause than a pattern and quality of ordinary life . . . . of everyday behavior and relationships in one’s community, among one’s people," continues Schlabach. He notes that the extent to which such notions degenerated into in-groupness, there left a vacuum which this new concept of obedience to a cause readily filled.

Lay persons in the Lancaster Conference found the missionary movement both appealing and invigorating. According to John L. Ruth, the fact that the first eastern old Mennonite foray into regular journalism, the Missionary Messenger, was organized around mission themes indicates the growing importance of this topic to the group’s identity. During the interviews I conducted, Paul Gingrich, born in 1929, commented that as he was growing up he clearly received the message that "the thing to do was be a missionary; there was no doubt about that." He and his spouse, Ann, served in Ethiopia from 1953 until 1969 as missionaries and Paul went on to lead the Mennonite Board of Missions, based in Elkhart, from 1980 until 1994. Contacts established through the missionary enterprise raised new and urgent questions for Mennonite nonconformity. While this study cannot significantly address the intersection between missions and nonconformity, it is certainly an interesting and important topic, both for historic self-understanding and for consideration as Mennonites participate in missions today.

Mennonites’ interaction with Protestant teaching shaped the message they ventured to share in the mission setting. Mennonites traded their ideas about gospel and soteriology for a ready-made "plan of salvation" American Protestant model. Schlabach speaks to this shift:

Viewing missions as primarily an activity that introduced the plan of salvation, instead of a whole group’s modeling Christ’s kingdom living on earth, allowed Mennonites to participate in the burgeoning Protestant missions phenomenon.

Christian Fundamentalism arose as a direct response to what its leaders perceived as the infiltration of modernity into Christianity. To be sure, by the late 1800s many Christians looked for ways to reconcile the revelations of modern science and rational scholastic inquiry with their faith. Fundamentalists reacted by going on the offensive and arguing forcefully for the continued legitimacy of the basics of the faith, or fundamentals, which they considered to be threatened by emerging modernist discussions.

Central to this argument was a set of twelve books, essay compilations, called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. Two anonymous "Christian laymen" published the books between 1910 and 1915 and sent them out as grand-scale unsolicited gifts to church leaders, missionaries, seminary professors and students, YMCA and YWCA secretaries, Sunday school superintendents, editors of religious publications, and others. Unlike classical confessional statements that begin with God and then move on to discussion of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, The Fundamentals open with the statement, "It is well known that the last ten or twenty years have been marked by a determined assault upon the truth of the Virgin birth of Christ." The volumes continue in eclectic fashion addressing a wide variety of topics in no discernible order. Modernists tended to construct more careful theological arguments while Fundamentalists primarily used what Noll calls "populist counterattack." Noll again: "They [Fundamentalists] mostly favored vigorous preaching, stem-winding debate, and popular writing aimed at moving the heart more than swaying the mind."

Theologically, Fundamentalists stressed a particular way of viewing Scripture and God’s work in the world. They held that the Bible was both divinely inspired and infallible. An insistence on premillenial dispensationalism added its own distinct flavor to the movement. Dispensationalism suggests that history is divided into clear time segments within which God achieves God’s always-consistent will through markedly different means. Prophecy, particularly of the end-times variety, is central to a dispensational understanding of the world. Premillenial dispensationalism, according to Mark Noll’s summary, interprets Scripture to mean that "Christ [will] return before establishing a thousand-year reign of peace and righteousness called the millennium (hence a ‘premillenial’ return)."

Advancing "correct doctrine" was a consuming central focus of the Fundamentalist movement. Fundamentalists worked feverishly to defend specific traditional Christian doctrines from the skeptical questions of modernity. They released venomous diatribes, especially against those Biblical scholars who utilized the techniques of "higher criticism" which examined the biblical text in ways similar to the study of other literature. Beyond publications such as The Fundamentals, the movement spread via Bible conferences—popular meetings that expanded on its main themes, usually over a several day period. Despite its somewhat less scholarly approach, Fundamentalism gained significant sway in several major educational institutions and also in many smaller Bible colleges across the United States.

"While fundamentalists argued that the acceptance or rejection of unchanging truth was at issue," writes George Marsden, authority on American Fundamentalism, "the modernists insisted that the perception of truth was inevitably shaped by cultural circumstances." In the words of Paul Toews, "while fundamentalism was certainly a defense of the faith, it was also part of the larger search for the relationship between culture and Christianity within the American context." Essentially then, while Fundamentalists perceived themselves to be solely defending the "true faith," they were negotiating with a changing American culture just as surely as were the Modernists.

The Mennonite Church Around the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Primary use of the German language in North American Mennonite life and worship, common prior to the mid-nineteenth century, greatly assisted community cohesion and boundary maintenance. While Mennonites sometimes fellowshipped rather closely with German-speakers of other Christian confessions, particularly in the strong Pennsylvania German area of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, they knew immediately to be wary of non-German-speakers since such persons were obviously from the outside. Beginning about 1850 Mennonites slowly adopted English, and with a new language came many more opportunities for contact with "the world." As Mennonites chose to not only speak English but also read it, a whole new array of literature attracted their attention, especially the literature of Protestant revivalist groups.

As alluded to previously, North American Mennonite practice and piety had revolved around living humbly obedient lives based on the guidance of Scripture as interpreted largely by the Anabaptist tradition. Mennonite preachers rarely employed the technical language of theology in encouraging the flock to faithful living. Education was held in low esteem, even scorned, in many Mennonite communities. So with a primarily lived and largely unarticulated faith and lacking the education or skills to evaluate nuanced theological arguments in even their native German, Mennonites entered the English-speaking world.

It should not be surprising then that the code words and theological perspectives in American Protestant religious discussions produced confusion among well-meaning Mennonites. As Schlabach highlights, Protestant appeals to Scripture seemed to fit with Mennonite Biblicism, the Calvinistic view of human depravity could easily be confused with Mennonite emphases on lowliness and humility, and the Pietism and holiness language flowing from revivalist pulpits sounded to some Mennonites like the familiar themes of discipleship and obedience. With the shift to English, Mennonites experienced a comprehensive cultural transition which included a muddled initiation into the religious vocabulary of American Protestant revivalism and ultimately Fundamentalism.

English-speaking Mennonites, according to Robert Hardwick, generally moved in directions that reduced the group’s isolation, adopting clothing styles and other patterns from the broader American scene between 1850 and 1900. The nonconformity movement, he says, began to take shape around the turn of the century and launched a full-fledged "Traditional Period" in 1940 which "reversed the trend toward exposure and resulted in a return to isolation." While exact dates for these sorts of movements tend to be fluid, many of today’s Mennonites have duly noted the "fancy" fashions their great-grandparents sported in their nineteenth-century wedding pictures and the contrasting plainness with which their grandparents and parents dressed for similar occasions in the twentieth century. Beulah Stauffer Hostetler maintains that "from the beginning of the American settlements, Mennonites continuously attempted to maintain a simple life and stressed separation from the world, but practice was not uniform . . . . Around the turn of the century structures changed significantly. Leadership became centralized, and practice was codified." She traces this process in the Franconia Conference but asserts that "parallels were occurring throughout the Mennonite Church.

Changing Church Leadership Structure

Centralization of Authority: Illustrated in the Lancaster Conference

Bishops in the Lancaster Conference began by the late 1920s to make decisions with noticeably less congregational input than in the past. In an undated pamphlet most likely published in 1957 Lloy Kniss lays out his, and presumably the Conference leadership’s, understanding of the lines of authority within the church. He states,

Those directions that came from "conference" proceeded from the bishop board which consisted of all the bishops in the conference. In 1940 thirteen bishops sat on the board. The bishop board minutes, spanning the decades between the beginning of clear centralization of leadership and this 1950s articulation of authority structure, flesh out the changes that took place.

Already in 1929 the board obviously held much power, evidenced by its ruling that "comments on the discipline may be made when [it is] being read in the churches." The content of the ruling permits congregational leaders to provide commentary on the guidance of the conference Rules and Discipline, a power sharing move, but the very fact that such permission was necessary points to the bishop board as that body from which flowed virtually all authority in the Lancaster Conference. Consistently the board removed decision-making responsibility from the individual church member. For example, in 1930 the board asserted that money collected in Sunday school offerings that exceeded administrative expenses could only be distributed with the counsel and consent of the ministry, meaning the congregation’s ordained leadership. Several years later, "having definite knowledge" that some members had invited speakers who did not agree doctrinally with an official conference position, the bishops ruled that "therefore, no member shall be permitted to make any appointments for any such minister, missionary, or public speaker, whether in their own homes or elsewhere. Any members doing so forfeit their membership." In addition, church polity required a unanimous favorable vote by the bishop board in order for any issue to be brought before the conference for action.

In the midst of so much change in the broader society, leaders moved to centralize church leadership, enhancing the efficiency of keeping order within the Mennonite Church community. Church members in Lancaster frequently referred to the role of the ministry and the deacons as that of "housekeeping." At a 1950 meeting the Lancaster bishops discussed the case of one brother who "has spoken disrespectful (sic) of sincere efforts to maintain order in the church by applying discipline as interpreted by our Conference." Those who persistently and vocally resisted the detailed directions of leadership received bishop board attention and possibly censure or excommunication.

An extension of this order-keeping function involved a level of control which had seemed unnecessary in less exuberant times. The Lancaster Conference bishops, for example, remained closely engaged in guiding the development of the recently established local mission board. The records of a 1931 bishop board meeting notes the following: "Decided, that all matters that shall be presented to the Mission Board by the Executive Committee of the Mission Board, for discussion or for ratification or for the purpose of passing a resolution, shall first be presented to the Board of Bishops for approval or otherwise." And just in case the mission board had simmering hopes for a somewhat autonomous agenda at any particular meeting, the bishops specified that "the Board of Bishops shall meet at the same time and place with the Executive Committee of the Mission Board previous to Mission Board meetings."

Codification of Practice

Nonconformity as it emerged during this period essentially used the construct of doctrine to codify practice. The doctrine of nonconformity spelled out exactly how Mennonites should live differently from the world and it was implied that if one was living the "nonconformed life" one was also automatically in step with God’s purposes. A common method for conveying the detailed expectations related to nonconformity involved a booklet produced on a regional conference-by-conference basis called the Rules and Discipline and often simply referred to as "the discipline." In many congregations the discipline, either in part or the whole, was read during one of the preparatory services prior to the semi-annual spring and fall communion. During the 1930s through the 50s, these booklets typically expanded as they became filled with increasing detail. During an interview conducted by John Ruth, one Franconia Conference bishop noted that

Although the reader cannot tell exactly what this man meant by "we went over the cliff," it might have something to do with the attendant difficulties produced by the codification process. The written rules sometimes tied the hands of those very leaders whom the discipline was designed to assist. Bishop Amos Kolb, also of Franconia, highlighted that

Uniform practice, including attention to minute details such as men and women being required to wear black stockings, engaged a "do as you please" world with a consistent witness, according to nonconformity’s proponents. Lloy Kniss, in his pamphlet on "Christian Separation," argued that Christians "should all speak the same thing." He held up the example of the Jerusalem Conference in Acts and how it united the thinking and witness of the early church. He concludes that "the fantastic theory of agreeing to disagree on points of doctrine or practice is farcical" and that the Mennonite Church position on separation is most secure when "we maintain clear cut lines on issues." He blames members’ varying understanding and practice on the church’s failure to "spell it out." For illustration he adds, "Do we all know what we mean when we say ‘modest apparel,’ or ‘worldly amusements,’ or ‘honest business,’ or ‘simple weddings,’ etc., etc.?" Thus the regulations on hosiery.

Mennonite Church Intersection with Protestant Fundamentalism

Paul Toews points to the Protestant Fundamentalist movement to explain the shape of the Mennonite Church’s codification of doctrine, centralization of church authority, and rigid cultural nonconformity during the first half of the twentieth century. Nathan Yoder organized his doctoral dissertation around the thesis that the Mennonite church was not only influenced, but was in fact dominated, by Fundamentalism, albeit a Fundamentalism of a distinctly Mennonite variety. This Mennonite Fundamentalism, he says, was an extension of the broader Fundamentalist movement and a check to it at some points, a mixture of both confidence and reaction. Yoder suggests that Mennonite Fundamentalists adopted a Protestant Fundamentalist doctrinal structure but used it to "accentuate certain impulses from sixteenth-century Anabaptism . . . [including] . . . the preference for literal interpretation of Scripture, the priority of disciplined congregations, and the mandate for demarcation from the world."

Mennonites influenced by Fundamentalism drank deeply at the Protestant Fundamentalist well even as they appropriated certain of its methods to bolster their own emphases. Interviewee John Shenk remembered that church leaders "used to make the point of the twin doctrines of nonconformity and nonresistance as being two pillars of our Mennonite understanding," and it was precisely on these two foundational understandings that Mennonites kicked against the Fundamentalist tide. While both survived the period of study, each was somewhat subverted by Mennonite acceptance of the Protestant compartmentalization of faith and obedience. In the words of Beulah Hostetler, "because these tenets were not a part of Fundamentalist theology, they tended to be appended to the Mennonite doctrinal structure that was developed at the time." She particularly notes that nonresistance, rather than being central to one’s formative understanding of faith, "was taught after one had accepted the gospel."

Separation from the world and nonresistance also suffered in another sense. Theron Schlabach summarizes it well: "Where earlier nonresistance, plainness, and other marks of separation were rooted in a gospel of peace, humility, and self-effacement, now such beliefs often seemed to be points of orthodoxy to defend militantly against the onslaughts of ‘liberalism’ and ‘modernism’ in the fighting spirit of Protestant Fundamentalism." Whether such influence should be attributed primarily to Fundamentalism or also to a rapidly expanding militarization of the political scene, much Mennonite literature of the mid-twentieth century is peppered with military language and imagery.

Several examples of military language emerge from papers presented at the Mennonite Church Nonconformity Conference held in Kitchener, Ontario August 26 and 27, 1935. The church published the papers given at the conference in booklet form for distribution and at least some of the addresses appeared in the "Christian Doctrine" quarterly supplement to the 1936 Gospel Herald. Moses M. Brubacher of St. Jacobs, Ontario, in addressing the need for a united effort concerning the doctrine of separation, or nonconformity, includes an entire subsection entitled "The Church Militant." He says, "The Church militant is experiencing a perpetual conflict: a crafty adversary on one side (Satan), an alluring, threatening foe on the other (the world)." He speaks of having "the machinery for battering down the strongholds of sin" but that the church also needs "men and women on fire for God, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of duty" and who "stand for the plain and simple doctrines." D.A. Yoder’s treatment of "Living the Separated Life" suggests that "as soldiers we go to the conflict following our leader" and that loyalty is utmost. Yoder hailed from Elkhart, Indiana.

In 1948, as the Mennonite Church General Problems Committee, whose stated mission was to "acquaint ourselves with all the vital problems in the church, to make a prayerful and diligent study as to ways and means of bringing about their proper solution," detailed the need for another nonconformity conference, this one focusing on dress, it hoped that such a meeting would "set in operation a militant crusade for the purpose of stemming the tide of world conformity to attire and returning to Biblical standards." Additionally, as I scanned the 1930s Mennonite Church periodical Gospel Herald for references to nonconformity I noted several pieces that urged distinctive attire for Mennonites by stressing the benefits of a uniform in military culture. One article noted how the uniform immediately identifies the wearer as part of a certain group and is generally worn with pride.

As noted previously, Mennonites appropriated Protestant Fundamentalism in various ways, but most of them also rejected it on important points. While Lancaster bishops advised members against using the Sunday school lessons of Dr. James H. Snowden, "a rank and self-confessed modernist," they also "warn[ed] against the dangers connected with the use of the notes and comments of the Scofield Bible," a mainstay of the Protestant Fundamentalist movement. Lancaster Conference leadership required each missionary to complete a doctrinal questionnaire, submit to an oral as well as a written exam, and sign a statement indicating loyalty to the faith and opposition to "Modernism and Liberalism." At the same time they charged members with avoiding "’Inter-denominational Bible Conferences,’ ‘Teacher’s Meetings,’ . . . ‘Lancaster School of the Bible,’ as well as all similar meetings, held by those who do not uphold and practice the Non-Resistant Doctrine of the Gospel." Lancaster School of the Bible was a Fundamentalist institution and Bible conferences were popular vehicles for spreading Fundamentalist teaching. Additionally, John Ruth notes in his Lancaster Mennonite Conference history that the bishops took decisive action to affirm the older amillenial view of the end times over against Protestant Fundamentalism’s overwhelming preference for premillenial dispensationalism.

Persons associated with Goshen College resisted Fundamentalism more avidly than did members in many other parts of the church such that the place and its staff were quickly labeled modernist and liberal. A power struggle for control of the institution raged for a decade, beginning in 1913, between those identifying more closely with a Fundamentalist vision and those vocally against it. The conflict culminated in 1923-24 when the school was closed for an entire academic year, during which time "liberal" faculty and administrators were replaced with more conservative and Fundamentalist-leaning ones. Overall, then, Mennonites accepted and at the same time rejected Protestant Fundamentalism along a spectrum.

"Fundamentalism, in its Mennonite forms, is really something more akin to denominational conservatism than American Fundamentalism," states Paul Toews. He cites the purposive activities and more clearly articulated theology designed to unite the group as evidence of the denomination-building process rather than representing a wholesale acceptance of Fundamentalism. Nathan Yoder calls Mennonite fundamentalism primarily "a restatement of Anabaptist-rooted themes with the inevitable transformation which occurs when a tradition is translated for a contemporary context." Notably, Yoder’s explanation does not address why Mennonite faith was "inevitably" restated along Fundamentalist lines instead of in modernist terms, also part of the contemporary context. Despite these evaluative explanations, one must recognize the decades-long interaction between Mennonites and Protestant Fundamentalism during at least the first half of the twentieth century.

Daniel Kauffman and Bible Doctrine

In 1914, Daniel Kauffman, powerful Mennonite leader and indefatigable church worker, edited Bible Doctrine, a book that greatly influenced Mennonite theology in ensuing decades. In Bible Doctrine Kauffman laid out the gospel and the Christian life in language and categories heretofore foreign to the Mennonite community. According to Leonard Gross, historian and retired Mennonite Church archivist, Kauffman’s work represents a significant shift from "descriptive theology," prevalent before 1898, to a primarily "definitional theology" approach. The former perceived Christianity as a combination of faith and history—faith and faithfulness as only can be described out of the historical context. The latter, says Gross, employed categories in a Calvinist, propositional methodology.

Gross illustrates the pre-Daniel Kauffman approach to theology in the Lancaster area via study of several early nineteenth century documents produced there. He concludes based on these works that

Additionally, notes Gross, "The intellectual context within which Eby [one of the authors] chose to couch his ideas is not so much doctrinal (although teaching remains central), as it is historical, whereby Eby chooses to describe Christianity as faith and history and not as prescriptive belief." Contrast Gross’s observations about nineteenth century Lancaster with this line from September 1941 Lancaster Bishop Board meeting minutes: "we ask our members to cooperate with their leaders . . . in order that the church be kept doctrinally pure." I also encountered a clear reference to the Calvinist methodology of which Gross speaks. Although I was not able to locate the text of the address, the first presentation slated for a 1955 nonconformity conference held in Lancaster for "ordained men and their wives" was entitled "Relationship of the teaching of Calvinism to the practical aspects of life."

Kauffman titled a major subsection of Bible Doctrine "The Plan of Salvation," conveying the soteriological shift spoken to previously. Kauffman also expanded the traditional two Mennonite "ordinances," baptism and communion, to seven, adding "feet" washing, the devotional covering for women, Christian salutation, anointing with oil, and marriage, in that order. At the behest of other church leaders Kauffman revised and republished the book several times, renaming the popular 1928 version Doctrines of the Bible.

A major thrust of the work in all its similar forms involved teaching on Christian nonconformity to the world. The following questions and answers from the 1928 book illustrate both Kauffman’s emphasis on nonconformity and his appropriation of Fundamentalist concerns:

Kauffman, a Mennonite bishop’s son, accepted Christ at one of John S. Coffman’s revival meetings and served the church the rest of his life. He emerged as one of the few turn-of-the-century Mennonite leaders with a strong command of the English language, both oral and written. This provided leadership opportunities for him that otherwise might not have been available. Kauffman edited the Gospel Herald for 39 years (1908-1943), chaired the General Problems Committee for a time in the 1930s, and served on the Industrial Relations Committee (later the Committee on Economic and Social Relations) from its inception. According to his daughter-biographer, in fact, he was at one time a member of twenty-two different committees and boards of the Mennonite Church. H.S. Bender, speaking mid-century asserted that Kauffman "made an impact on the church not even approached by any other person." As such, when Daniel Kauffman spoke, people paid attention. How could they not? His voice was practically everywhere in early twentieth century Mennonite literature so that some call 1900-1940 "the Daniel Kauffman era." For illustrative purposes: The Lancaster Conference bishop board recorded the questions it used in examining a minister in 1950. Among other things they inquired "Do you believe in the literal observance of seven ordinances?" These were surely the seven ordinances set out by Kauffman. Additionally, Norman Shenk noted during an interview that Kauffman’s Doctrines of the Bible was taught chapter by chapter at Lancaster Mennonite High School in the early 1950s when he attended.

The Mennonite Church Doctrine of Nonconformity: 1930-1959

Biblical and Historical Underpinnings

At the scholarly level, Mennonites advocated nonconformity as an extension of God’s separation principle evident in Scripture and throughout history. At the 1935 Nonconformity Conference in Kitchener, Ontario, various presenters traced God’s apparent will that God’s people disassociate themselves on some level from those who refuse to follow God. J.L. Stauffer of Harrisonburg, VA detailed "The Biblical Background for Separation in the Old Testament" starting with creation when God separated light from darkness. He cites examples of the "separation principle," ways in which God physically separated good from evil, throughout the Old Testament, such as Cain being forced away from his family after murdering Abel or Noah’s family being set apart and saved from the flood. He notes God’s wrath when God’s people violated this separation principle, especially with relation to Israel’s intermarriage among and alliances with foreigners, which God had expressly prohibited.

Edward Yoder of Goshen in "The Principle of Separation Through History" lucidly states, "One purpose of the Old Testament history is to tell the story of a special people, a unique nation, a nation whom the Lord Jehovah called out and separated from all other peoples of the world." He also duly notes that Israel’s separation was "for the purpose of preparing it for a unique and blessed mission to all the nations of the world." Not all leaders or scholars agreed on the purpose of this separation, however. J.A. Heiser, from Fisher, Illinois and presenting at the same conference, asserted alternatively that "the great purpose of the principle of separation is to draw out a people from among the unsaved world to set them apart, sanctify, and prepare them for the greatest event of all time, the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Edward Yoder traces the sojourn of God’s "true" called-apart people from the New Testament, where separation happens in a spiritual and moral sense, not in the physical sense of the nation of Israel, through the early church in its sect form to the monastic orders of the medieval Catholic Church. He also references "dissenting and non-conformist sects" able to survive in secluded places and that did not acknowledge the authority of the dominant church but relied "directly upon the Holy Spirit for their own life" and "upon the Word of God as their guide in service and worship" and as such "faithfully maintained a testimony for pure Christianity." Although those in power destroyed the records of these groups and misrepresented them in written history, Yoder sees these dissenting sects as carriers of the embers that ignited into flame during the sixteenth century Reformations. He maintains that as major Reformation churches allied themselves with state institutions the minority sects consistently answered "yes" to the question "whether Christians can, and should, continue to carry out the New Testament teaching and example as to the ordering of the churches." He cites the Anabaptists, Mennonites, Stundists, and "others innumerable" including some Baptists and Independents and Brethren, as groups that carry on this important tradition.

The Old Testament and history since the time of Christ, as interpreted by Mennonite leaders and scholars, provided solid arguments for Christian separation from the world; but most of the texts cited in support of nonconformity came from the New Testament. Romans 12:1-2, which states "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God" (KJV), was by far the most-used reference in mid-twentieth century Mennonite calls for church members to live nonconformed lives. Other often-cited texts included 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, I John 2:15, James 4:4, and James 1:27. Writers and preachers employed these texts and others to address nonconformity either broadly or in some specific sense. Advocacy for certain issues included within the doctrine, such as attire, involved complete subsets of additional Scripture references. See Appendix 1, which contains a sample listing of New Testament texts referenced in support of nonconformity. Nonconformity texts came primarily from the epistles and James, with less use of the Gospels and Acts. Overall, however, the New Testament texts interpreted in support of the Mennonite Church approach to nonconformity span most of the New Testament books.

Persons advocating a Biblical basis for the doctrine of nonconformity used Scripture variously: with complete integrity (with obvious connection to the subject at hand), with less soundness (tenuous connection), or in outright misuse. The often-quoted Romans 12:2 specifically directs God’s people to "be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed," thus its relevancy needs no defense. Of course the issue then revolves around how one interprets this text for the contemporary context. Whether Romans 12:2 speaks to nonconformity, however, is not in question.

Many Scriptural citations listed in written defense of nonconformity spoke less obviously to the issue at hand. For example, the "Declaration of Commitment in Respect to Christian Separation and Nonconformity to the World," adopted by the Mennonite General Conference, the biennial meeting of the Mennonite Church denominational body, on August 26, 1955 lists Galatians 6:15 "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature" as one of the five Biblical passages a believer should consider in relation to "Dress and External Appearance." Its connection to the foregoing paragraphs which urge men and women to "avoid the fashions and dictates of a sensuous and sensate culture" is not readily apparent; it would require some explanation.

Finally, and more rarely the case, persons arguing for the nonconformed life took Scripture so seriously out of context or twisted it such that one must label it misuse. George Hostetler, author of an article appearing in the April 18, 1935 Gospel Herald, quoted I Samuel 16:7 which reads in part "for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart." According to Hostetler, "while this text applies to all of our life, yet it applies more especially to our outward appearance, and God sees and cares about it."

Scripture citations throughout this thesis come from the King James Version of the Bible because it was the overwhelming, if not exclusive, textual choice for Mennonites throughout much of the twentieth century. Its stately language and convoluted sentence structure likely assisted church members in accepting a formal, complex doctrinal approach to faithful, nonconformed living. God spoke, at least in English, in majestic and often oblique language. It was not a far stretch, then, to trust that leaders in the church, having clearly established their authority to interpret God’s commands, knew what they were talking about even when their directives may have seemed somewhat muddled or contradictory.

In an address on nonconformity by Lloyd L. Ramseyer, president of Bluffton College, printed in the Mennonite Quarterly Review, he noted his affinity with the Phillips Bible translation of Romans 12:2 "which says, ‘Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold.’" One cannot say what sort of changes the use of various Biblical versions or translations might have produced in the Mennonite Church approach to nonconformity, but the words of the Phillips translation send one’s mind in a slightly different trajectory than those of the King James Version. Notably, the General Conference Mennonites, of which Ramseyer was an important leader, located discernment concerning "nonconformed" attitudes and practice largely at the level of individual responsibility with accountability to the congregation. This highly congregational polity "allowed considerable difference in culture and religious practice." Such an approach contrasted sharply with the Mennonite Church use of centralized authority and control to produce specific outward cultural indicators "proving" its members’ nonconformity to the world.

The Specifics: The Mennonite Church Doctrine of Nonconformity

as Taught 1930-1959

Far from being a nebulous reminder to consider the formative influences on one’s thought patterns and thus lifestyle, the Mennonite Church doctrine of nonconformity, as articulated during the 1930s through the 1950s, spelled out concretely those practices church members should avoid and sometimes, conversely, which ones they should follow in order to live lives as unfettered by the world’s destructive pull as possible. In addition to concern for the maintenance of "the doctrinal tenets of faith, and standards of Christian living" the carefully articulated doctrine sought to establish the strength of a unified witness. The 1933 General Problems Committee report to the Mennonite General Conference expressed the desire

The General Problems Committee, according to Paul Toews, was "the chief body dealing with matters of change" in the Mennonite Church during the 1930s and 1940s. From its inception in 1929 until the mid 1940s, the committee "gave its main energies to drawing lines of separation. Its work was consolidation and conservation, not adaptation or change." This is not surprising since Daniel Kauffman, along with several other "staunchly conservative" men, provided leadership to the committee. Note in the quote from the 1933 report above not only the goal of uniformity, but that context appears to be a non-issue. In theory all Mennonites were called to precisely the same standards, their social or geographical locations and church leadership roles or lack thereof notwithstanding.

In the introduction to the "Nonconformity to the World" chapter of Doctrines of the Bible, Daniel Kauffman says "With this subject we begin the study of a number of scriptural teachings commonly known as ‘restrictions’. . . . but they may more properly be called Gospel Principles for those whose lives are governed by the Word of God." By this statement he admits that aspects of nonconformity were commonly identified as restrictions, a negative term, and he attempts to provide a positive label in "gospel principles." Despite his assurance that the positive term "more properly" fits the discussion of nonconformity, Kauffman’s chapter structurally negates this claim by listing "The Marks of Worldliness" before the characteristics of "The Unspotted Life." The very prefix of the word nonconformity speaks to negation, so it should not be surprising that much of the doctrine’s content involved turning away from something offered by the world. In a few cases, such as in attire, church leaders asked Mennonites to turn towards particular practices as positive alternatives to what they shunned. In the case of dress they were asked to wear certain types of "plain" clothing instead of following the ever-changing demands of fashion.

The doctrine of nonconformity covered a wide range of topics. Nonresistance sometimes appeared as a subject within the doctrine but also frequently carried a discussion of its own, without direct reference to nonconformity. As noted by Norman Shenk, J.C. Wenger’s Separated Unto God moved Mennonites away "from a fixation on dress to include being separate in some of the other disciplines of life," one of those involved "being separate from the world in your attitude—[rejecting society’s] having to ‘take care of number one first’ attitude." While most statements on nonconformity throughout the period addressed proper inner attitudes as well as the appropriate outward forms signifying those inner realities, in practice these directives were often co-opted by emphasis on externals.

Wenger mentioned that his topic "is commonly called nonconformity to the world, but . . . I have preferred to entitle [it] separation unto God." He attempted to broaden this type of Christian witness such that "the entire life, social, economic, and every other aspect, be one of utter simplicity . . . in short, the seeking first of His kingdom and His righteousness." Wenger addressed Mennonite relationships to the government and issues related to vocational, social, and family life, among other topics. He raised economic questions and arguments throughout, whether he was dealing with the questions of tobacco or television use, or discussing the imminent changes resulting from increasing industrialization. The Mennonite Church General Conference statement "Declaration of Commitment in Respect to Christian Separation and Nonconformity to the World" also indicated this widening. It opened with an article titled "Christian Love" in which the writers committed the church "to do all in our power to show love to the helpless and suffering" in addition to living a life of nonresistance. The statement also introduced "Attitude Toward Possessions," "Courtship and Marriage," "The Clean Life" (urging members to abstain from alcohol and tobacco use), and "Recreation" into the discussion of nonconformity.

When I inquired of the interviewees from Lancaster in what ways besides dress they were asked to be nonconformed to the world, their answers frequently began with reference to social activities. According to one woman, "we talked about things you should attend and things you should not attend." The Lancaster Conference Rules and Discipline, dated 1881 and revised in 1943, forbids members to attend "worldly amusements" including

Interestingly enough, the above quote comes from Article VI "Restrictions" which is entirely separate from Article IV "Nonconformity." As Daniel Kauffman’s comments noted, however, the two concepts were bound up together. Interviewees mentioned movies, plays, sports events, community roller skating and ice skating, and playing pool or cards as some of the activities they were instructed to avoid.

The doctrine of nonconformity guided Mennonites in consciously setting aside Sunday as a day for rest and worship. J.C. Wenger wrote that "the separated Christian will give testimony against the secularism and materialism of this age by faithfully keeping the Lord’s day." In addition to attending worship services, families often visited relatives or other Mennonite friends on Sunday afternoons and evenings.

Church leaders asked Mennonites to avoid swearing oaths of any kind and urged them to speak honestly in all things. The 1955 church statement on nonconformity urged Christians to also avoid speaking flattery, gossip, or "minced oaths" which "are but substitutes for holy names and words."

The oaths required at initiation, the secrecy involved, and the "unequal yoking" with unbelievers that characterized membership in secret fraternal orders, lodges, or societies, led the church to condemn participation in such groups. Business partnerships between Mennonites and non-Mennonites and membership in trade or professional associations also received the church’s censure as manifestations of the unequal yoke mentioned in 2 Corinthians 6:14. Other ways Mennonites might be unequally yoked included through participation in intercollegiate debates and oratorical contests, by inviting commencement addresses by persons "of other communions who only partially stand for the faith of the church," and by attending musical programs sponsored by other churches.

The doctrine of nonconformity specified certain items concerning ministerial leadership and the place and conduct of worship as well. Mennonites could only accept the ministry of those persons from among their own group who performed such Christian services for free. According to Nathan Yoder, "’The salaried ministry’ was a code word which would evoke censure as ‘a hireling ministry,’ a Biblical reference to a hired hand who cared little for the sheep." Church leaders urged simplicity of worship. In 1931 an important issue involved "special music" and the possibility that such performance-centered styles of music involving only a few persons might displace congregational singing, encouraging a spirit of entertainment instead of a spirit of worship. The 1955 nonconformity statement asked congregations to take steps to maintain "a plain meetinghouse rather than . . . a costly and ornate edifice of worship" and to have "a quiet type of piety in our worship services rather than a demonstrative meeting." According to the document, a cappella hymns encouraged this quiet piety while the use of an organ or piano in worship constituted demonstration.

Conference and denominational leaders encouraged Mennonite Church members to shun ownership or use of two major twentieth century communications technology developments: the radio and the television. Each represented the risk of direct contact with a world unconcerned with following the ways of God. Additionally, and in the case of the radio especially, Mennonite leaders feared the theological impact that radio Bible teachers from other traditions might have on members who listened to such programs in private without the benefit of conversation with those with more education or discerning ears that could pick up the nuanced theological differences presented. Charles E. Good, born in 1917 and eventual minister and bishop in the Willow Street/Strasburg district of the Lancaster Conference, related the comments of a minister with whom he was close as a boy: "He said he’s not nearly as much concerned about Amos and Andy on the radio as he is on the Bible teaching." According to Ann Gingrich, church leaders proactively addressed the issue of television even before it was introduced widely to the American public. She said, "I think they . . . thought they would have it under control because they made this rule long ahead about the television. I used to think, ‘watch television, what’s that?’ It was almost before they had even seen it."

The doctrine of nonconformity specified that Mennonites not buy insurance of any kind. Purchasing insurance, especially life insurance, was considered an affront to God’s promises of care for God’s people. The 1931 General Problems Committee report noted other problems with insurance: it cultivates a sense of false security and "on an average only about half the money paid in premiums ever gets back to the policy-holders," thus, by implication, the insurance company profits handily. The committee also recognized that choices in property insurance, accident insurance, auto insurance, and workers compensation had arrived, complicating the basic prohibition against life insurance. The General Problems Committee seemed to realize that a simple blanket statement could not adequately deal with the complexity of the insurance issue, thus it recommended that church leaders carefully study "the whole insurance problem."

For those who know the history of the mid-twentieth century Mennonite Church and seemingly, based on the interviews, for many of those who experienced it, the doctrine of nonconformity is practically equated with the church’s dress regulations. The 1931 General Problems Committee statement refers to "the dress question" as "perhaps the most widely discussed problem before us."It enjoins members to dress modestly, reject fashion, and observe sex distinction in apparel. They should reject "forms of clothing suggesting sex appeal," wear no jewelry, and "avoid bodily ornamentation, vain display, and costly array in apparel" as well. Instead the document recommends "plain clothing."

"Plain clothing" was more than simple or modest clothing—it was a label for attire with certain characteristics. The definition varied only slightly from area to area, with greater variation in how strictly members were required to adhere to the standards. Each conference’s Rules and Discipline delineated its attire requirements, which assured visual nonconformity to the world.

Mennonite communities required women to wear dresses of a particular cut and length, usually including an attached "cape," an additional piece of fabric connected at the shoulders and the waist which covered the woman’s bosom and sometimes her back as well. The 1943 Lancaster Conference Rules and Discipline specified that the dress "be full to the neck, have sleeves to the wrist, and be in size and length modest in every way." Women had to keep their hair long and wear it under a devotional covering which also followed a particular pattern. Both men and women wore black stockings and shoes. Women church members were required to dress plainly on a daily basis whether at home, interacting with the general public, or attending church.

Men were requested to wear "the regulation coat" which had buttons from the neck to the waist and no collar. Interviewees frequently mentioned the "plain hat, without dents or creases" specified by the Lancaster Conference. Men also were asked to shun "long and flashy neckties of any kind." Adherence to plain dress standards was noticeably more relaxed among men. According to Owen Hess, of the approximately thirty young men in his Lancaster Conference congregation during the mid-fifties only a handful wore the plain suit. He commented that a person wore a plain suit only if they "really wanted to tow the line of the church."

Ministers, their spouses, and families carried important modeling responsibility with regard to nonconformed attire and were often held to a separate standard. Newly-ordained ministers could wear their regulation plain suit coats until they wore out, then they had to purchase a frock coat. This suit coat was slightly longer than the regulation coat and had a higher slit in the back. Ministers’ wives were frequently required to sew "aprons" to the front of their dresses. An apron consisted of a separate piece of fabric, of the same material as the dress, that attached at the waist in the front. The ministers’ children also felt the pressure to maintain a higher standard. Ann Gingrich, whose father was ordained in the late 1930s when she was about 7 years old, noted that after his ordination she could no longer wear anklet socks. And while "most of the other preacher kids wore long stockings summer and winter" her parents allowed her to wear knee socks to church. Although non-ordained men generally only wore a plain suit to church, ministers had to wear the plain garb at all times.

Other congregational leaders also had modelling responsibilities but were held to the "lay" standards. One interviewee reported, "When I was elected Sunday school chorister I realized ‘now I have to walk the chalk line’" with regard to dress and other areas of nonconformity. See Appendix 2 for photographs illustrating the Mennonite Church’s dress standards.

Accepting Christ, joining the church, and "going plain" were related concepts in Lancaster around mid-century. Mennonites had borrowed the methods of revival preaching and conducted revival services in tent meetings or church meetinghouses. These services followed a similar formula; Mary Elizabeth Gingrich explained it as follows:

After one made a choice to follow Christ, she or he was expected to join the church and follow its standards. Part of the reason for the group courage-building exercise she describes was that making the switch to plain dress fulfilled one of those standards. Mary Elizabeth noted that "some didn’t want to dress plain" and she perceived that quite a few of her peers "didn’t join the church for that reason."

As I perused meeting minutes and other primary documents from the three decades under study I noticed many references to issues of nonconformity in dress. The General Problems Committee recorded that they spent much of their October 28, 1935 meeting on "the dress question." The 1944 "Resolutions on Christian Nonconformity" adopted by a special session of Mennonite General Conference discussed various topics, including dress, and then resolved "that we . . . go on record as believing in these Biblical and historical principles on attire and that we determine by the grace of God to stand faithfully upon them and endeavor to regain lost ground in all sections of the church." Apparently church leaders considered nonconformity in dress to be a significant key to addressing other nonconformity issues, since the broader earlier focus of the statement quickly narrowed to attire. In October 1948 the General Problems Committee sponsored a two-day conference on "Nonconformity in Dress" which convened in Chicago. During September 17 and 18, 1955 the same committee, along with the Mennonite Commission for Christian Education, orchestrated simultaneous nonconformity conferences that followed the same program in communities throughout the nation. Part of that program involved a "Nonconformity Applied" panel discussion in which the first item listed for consideration was "attire."

Likely there are multiple reasons that dress was a central topic, but one of them revolved around frequent Bible teaching that stressed it, especially in connection with Romans 12:1-2. Charles Good explained that in his youth J.B. Smith, a Mennonite "Greek student" and "an educated man," came to Lancaster and taught that the apostle Paul is discussing the way one dresses in the first two verses of Romans twelve. Good perceived that "Lancaster Conference people based their doctrine pretty much on the way J. B. Smith explained the Scriptures. And many of us were not educated enough to know the things that J.B. Smith taught."Another interviewee wondered what I thought Romans 12: 1-2 was about since in her growing up years it had always been directly connected with one’s attire.

Kauffman’s Doctrines of the Bible makes the claim more broadly. His first point in the section about nonconformity in dress states, "All Bible teaching against worldly conformity is divine testimony against conforming to the fashions of the world in dress." While many Mennonites followed the dress guidelines with conviction, some also balked against the "restrictions." A slightly exasperated-sounding Lancaster bishop board recorded the following in the minutes of a 1933 meeting:

The 1950s especially saw a flurry of academic and theological activity around the doctrine of nonconformity. The Mennonite Publishing House published Wenger’s Separated Unto God in 1951. General Conference approved the "Declaration of Commitment in Respect to Christian Separation and Nonconformity to the World," referenced previously, in 1955. Following this statement, various Mennonite Church agencies sponsored no less than forty-four nonconformity conferences in the remaining years of the decade.

Communicating the Doctrine of Nonconformity

How were the specifics of the doctrine of nonconformity communicated? From whom did children and adults learn the standards to which God and the church called them? Glen Sell, born in 1933, promptly responded to the second question: "From everybody! That was the popular topic in my day." Interviewees in the Lancaster area commonly cited their parents, Sunday school teachers, and church leaders—bishops and ministers—as important bearers of nonconformity’s message. Most interviewees stressed their parents’ respect for the church’s authority and broad agreement with its nonconformity teachings, thus the home proved to be a vital learning environment for the specific applications of nonconformity. Bishops largely made the "rules" related to nonconformed living and ministers instructed the congregation from the pulpit regarding these guidelines. Sunday school teachers also played important roles in conveying the behavioral expectations of nonconformity to young minds. In several cases interviewees also mentioned their peers as persons who urged them toward faithfulness with regard to the doctrine.

Some interviewees, on the other hand, remembered hearing very little spoken about nonconformity as they grew up. They learned the practical requirements of the doctrine well, but did so primarily by observing those around them. Jay Oberholtzer commented that his parents probably spoke with him about nonconformity, but his first recollection of unmistakable teaching on the subject dates to his pre-teen and teenage experiences at summer and winter Bible school sessions. Thus, whether nonconformity was clearly taught from the pulpit, in the home, or elsewhere, all persons raised in the Mennonite community understood its practical applications.

The church provided a variety of print resources which conveyed its nonconformity teachings. Lancaster Conference made its Rules and Discipline available in three-by-five inch booklet form. As noted previously, in at least in the Lancaster Conference, the congregation not only had the opportunity to read the requirements, it listened to the reading of these rules before celebrating communion. Church leaders revised the Lancaster Conference Rules and Discipline multiple times throughout the period of study. The first discipline was written in 1881. During my research I encountered booklets with revisions dated 1943 and 1954 and reference to a 1935 revision. The conference reprinted the 1954 version in 1962, indicating no additional changes during the latter 1950s. The revisions primarily expounded on the articles set out in the original discipline, providing more detail rather than introducing new topics. The 1943 and 1954 booklet versions were bound with a "Statement of Christian Doctrine" indicating Fundamentalist concerns. Article one of this statement addresses the "Word of God" and begins "We believe in the plenary and verbal inspiration of the Bible as the Word of God." Article two covers the "Existence and Nature of God," and article three asserts "We believe that the Genesis account of the Creation is an historic fact and literally true."

Two major book-length treatments of nonconformity significantly influenced the church during the period under study: Daniel Kauffman’s Doctrines of the Bible and J.C. Wenger’s Separated Unto God. Church periodicals frequently addressed the topic, Gospel Herald and Mennonite Community being two examples. The former usually included theological reflections while the latter tended towards a practical approach in urging Mennonites to press on in the nonconformed life.

Conferences, used here to indicate several-day meetings, also provided a popular mode of discussion or instruction related to nonconformity. Mennonite General Conference, the church’s governing body, frequently took up the topic of nonconformity in its biennial meetings. The statements, reports, and proceedings from these meetings were made available to all via Gospel Herald. Several academic study conferences convened during the period of study. Some met solely for discussion of nonconformity, such as the Nonconformity Conference held at Kitchener, Ontario in 1935, while some treated it amidst other agenda, such as was done at the annual Conference on Mennonite Cultural Problems. Academic conferences also frequently published their proceedings and the scholarly papers presented, but such booklets rarely received popular distribution. Finally, local church gatherings provided a forum for nonconformity teaching. The Lancaster Conference’s Nonconformity Committee sponsored multiple nonconformity conferences held in conference congregations. The Committee on Economic and Social Relations, a denominational level body, also organized local nonconformity conferences in various regions of the church.

The tone of communication in nonconformity teaching and discussion was often that of urgency and alarm. Leaders felt the church was drifting worldward, that it was unaware of the danger it faced. Noah Mack, a bishop and strong proponent of nonconformity in Lancaster, spoke of "the church in which and for which we have fears and wish well to our church that she keep in the Lord." Lloy Kniss sounded the alarm in his pamphlet entitled in part "Christian Separation: An urgent plea." His strong language conveys the anxiety of one deeply concerned for the church and the pressing need for vigilance and intentional living. He says,

Frequent sea imagery used the ancient idea of the church as a ship, but this ship was drifting, being buffeted by tides it needed to cut against rather than ride. The General Problems Committee, in a different sea allusion, hoped to see "every conference taking some definite steps to stem the tide of worldliness." This language might lead Mennonites to visualize themselves as persons living on land, about to be flooded with the ways of the world.

Sermons, literature, and other teaching conveyed that living out the specific applications of the doctrine of nonconformity was a very serious thing. Nonconformity’s requirements were in no way peripheral to the Christian life. One’s outward visible obedience revealed a humble inner state oriented toward the purposes of God. Several of the Lancaster interviewees commented that as they were growing up it seemed those who did not live the nonconformed life in the precise way that Mennonites described it could not count on salvation. Of course this made sense since those who knew Jesus would certainly follow him and the church had designated that such following took the shape of the doctrine of nonconformity.

Although many written nonconformity teachings explained that outward forms could only flow out of a relationship with Jesus, that part of the message was apparently skipped or became muddled at times. Several persons I spoke with perceived that some Mennonites seemed to believe the nonconformed practices themselves provided salvation rather than simply being the testimony to it. J.A. Heiser’s address to the 1935 Nonconformity Conference, for example, might lead one to miss this distinction. In referring to Jesus’s intercessory prayer in John 17 Heiser states, "[Jesus] makes it clear to us that sanctification and separation from the world, or nonconformity, is one and the same." Although he later explains that to be "sanctified" is simply to be set apart for God, its soteriological use in other traditions, especially in the holiness movement, might have contributed to confusion concerning nonconformity’s relationship with salvation. In any case, nonconformity and salvation frequently occupied the same discussion and thus the former was often treated with utmost seriousness.

The discipline prescribed for those who refused to comply with the church’s nonconformity standards also lent an air of earnest importance. Persons not submitting to the church’s lifestyle requests could ultimately be excommunicated, losing their membership. A more common approach to discipline involved people being "set back" from communion. A person who had been "set back" could still participate in the church’s life but was prevented from taking communion with the rest of the congregation. Although the types of discipline were relatively standard, instances in which they were applied varied greatly from congregation to congregation.

Mennonites, Economics, and Nonconformity

Mennonites, a sect type in Troeltschian parlance, through the doctrine of nonconformity, rejected this society organized primarily on division of labor and economic concerns and sought to live an alternative society based on following after God and caring for the other, whether or not these tasks proved to be lucrative or "productive" in an economic sense. At the same time the Mennonite community recognized economic activity to be an essential part of its life together and a unique point of contact between it and that "other society." In fact, it represented a potentially dangerous connection, for as Mennnonite sociologist J. Howard Kauffman observed in 1949 "the assimilation of a distinctive cultural group into a dominant cultural pattern proceeds most rapidly in the economic sphere. Mennonites have come to be most like the world about them in the matter of making a living."

If Kauffman’s second statement was true, it was not for lack of church discussion of economic issues, either under the rubric of nonconformity or otherwise, that Mennonites were beginning to resemble the world outside their communities. Melvin Gingerich’s sample of "a rather complex index on resolutions passed by (Old) Mennonite conferences, districts and general" between 1875 and 1950 illustrated something of this emphasis. The table below indicates the number of resolutions passed on each topic:

44 Mutual aid

30 Farm organizations

30 Nonconformity in possessions other than dress

21 Property insurance

11 Materialism

1. Interest rates

Although the period of these pronouncements begins well before 1930 and ends two decades into this three-decade study, the data indicates the long-term pervasiveness of nonconformity themes. Note that each of these items, if not argued on an economic basis directly, at least held economic implications in practice. Economic issues pervaded Mennonite life.

Work and Recreation

In his essay "Mennonites, Work and Economics," Calvin Redekop suggests that

Abner Yoder, addressing "Nonconformity in Business Life" in 1940, commented in a similar vein. "May our earthly callings . . . be the means of providing for ourselves and for our own, of extending the borders of the Kingdom, and of honoring our Lord whose we are and whom we serve," he wrote. Carl Kreider’s assertion just five years later, on the other hand, that the most important question Mennonites could ask themselves related to economics was "How well do these activities prepare the personality for Christian service?" implied that there was a distinct difference between an average day’s work and Christian service. Such a distinction may reflect the evangelism/cause-oriented influence of the Protestant mission movement. At any rate, work—hard work—enjoyed a long tradition among Mennonites. This work ethic was partly the legacy of centuries of persecution and the resulting group movement that entailed a recurring need to start over in new places.

Children learned early that hard work was a central part of life. Many times, especially during the Depression years, the family’s survival depended on each member pitching in economically. Miriam Lefever, born in 1921, described being essentially self-supporting after the age of 13. She took cleaning jobs, did dog sitting at a kennel, and did all her own sewing. Her spouse, Lloyd, born in 1917, completed a three a.m. milk route before going to school each day. Rhoda Oberholtzer, whose family ran a fruit and produce market said that she and her eight siblings simply didn’t have the luxury of fighting with each other or "running around and doing things that other kids did." As soon as she was able to count she served customers in the family business. Her father, a caring person and an excellent mentor, conveyed among other things that "you work because there’s work to do, not because you like it—that’s not a part of your choice."

Appropriate occupations for nonconformed Christians, in one view, included only those that provided necessary items and services, either directly or indirectly. Since food, shelter, and clothing are the basic necessities of life, reasoned Abner Yoder, Mennonite occupations should be related to farming, building, or weaving. He references Titus 3:14 which exhorts Christians to "maintain good works for necessary uses, that they be not unfruitful." Yoder readily notes, then, that "the production and distribution of liquor and tobacco, etc., does not have a necessary use, [and] therefore is unscriptural."

The "tobacco question" was a source of acrimony between Lancaster County Mennonites and those in other parts of the country, especially the midwest. Mennonite sociologist J. Winfield Fretz, in his address to the seventh annual Conference on Mennonite Cultural Problems entitled "The Growth and Use of Tobacco Among Mennonites," offered data confirming Lancaster’s main role in tobacco production. The 1940 agricultural census showed Lancaster producing more than ninety percent of the tobacco grown in Pennsylvania and the 54,133,300 pounds expected to be produced in 1947 would have placed it ahead of all other counties in the nation. Fretz further commented that "most of this was grown on the relatively fertile limestone lands in the northern part of the county, on which most of the Amish and Mennonite farmers are located."

Visiting ministers from the "west" spoke strongly against Lancaster’s tobacco farming and its tacit approval of tobacco use. George R. Brunk from Virginia, whose tent revival meetings frequented the area, vocally opposed the Lancaster Bishops for allowing these practices. Fretz also released this diatribe in his 1949 address:

Tobacco was a luxury item not falling within the parameters of necessity, and therefore its growth was technically outside the realm of acceptable Mennonite vocations. One Lancaster minister, however, asserted to Fretz "that the growth of [tobacco] is no different in character than the growth of grapes for wine nor grain and surplus potatoes used for making liquor." Of course tobacco is a luxury item, the minister said, but "even turkeys raised by Iowa Mennonites and peppermint raised by northern Indiana Mennonites would come in the same category." Lancaster Mennonites particularly resented those "western preachers" who roundly condemned the growth of tobacco in one breath and asked for money to support educational institutions such as Goshen College or Hesston College in the next. Charles Good remembered that "different people would tell them, ‘Well, all I have is tobacco money.’"

Lancaster Mennonites argued that they needed to raise tobacco in order to afford the rising cost of land in the county. Tobacco produced a profit per acre far above that of other crops grown locally. A brochure entitled "Lancaster County Agriculture" from the mid 1960s declares, "Tobacco is the king of cash crops in Lancaster County." The brochure contains information from 1964 that indicates the county produced 27,800 acres of tobacco valued at $13,100,000. Corn production brought the next highest value that year at $7,040,000, but was grown on 86,300 acres of land. Thus, corn growing on more than three times the acreage of tobacco produced half the value of tobacco. Assuming average growth in agricultural commodities for the several decades before, a similar spread in value likely existed during the period of study proper.

Land prices steadily escalated throughout the period of study. At most points between 1930 and 1950 average per acre land prices in Lancaster County were approximately twice that of prices in Elkhart County, Indiana, the home of some of these "western preachers," as indicated by the following U.S. agricultural census data:

Average value of land and buildings per acre, in dollars

Elkhart County Lancaster County

1930 105 169

1935 67 115

1940 77 142

1945 108 190

1950 150 324

Though raising tobacco proved lucrative, it was not an easy process. The crop required intensive labor input which turned out to be some of its appeal. Fretz again:

Lancaster interviewees spoke of a growing conviction on a family-by-family basis that raising tobacco was morally wrong. Although this conviction only became something akin to a widespread feeling in the later part of the twentieth century, not a few families worked hard to nurture alternative crops that provided necessary food sustenance rather than raising tobacco. Fretz was aware of this developing sensitive conscience towards tobacco but noted that in 1949 about 75 percent of Mennonites in the northern county tobacco-producing area still grew the crop. As early as 1940 the Lancaster Bishop Board recorded, "We . . . vigorously protest against . . . the use of tobacco in any form. Further, we rejoice to know that there is a growing conviction among our brethren against the production of tobacco." This line appeared in the 1943 Rules and Discipline: "We protest against the use and distribution of tobacco by our members." The 1954 discipline urged members to "abstain from the use, distribution, and production of tobacco."

Unlike the unified voice on many other lifestyle issues, however, bishops and ministers held widely differing views on the propriety of raising tobacco and thus discipline was never applied to those who grew it. Most church members firmly lived out their convictions, whether for or against tobacco, and allowed their brothers and sisters in Christ to do the same. Occasionally differing opinions on the issue created family problems, such as when a child and parent in farming partnership maintained strongly opposite convictions. The only conference discipline case I encountered related to tobacco involved one man who continually agitated against its growth and use despite the bishops’ urges to patiently wait for changes.

Granted, mid-century Mennonites did not have access to the medical information now available that proves tobacco’s harmful effects on human health, but judging by the number of Mennonites outside Lancaster County that roundly condemned it, there were still compelling theological and practical reasons to avoid raising or using the substance. Lancaster Mennonites argued that they needed to grow tobacco for economic and social reasons that intertwined. Although I didn’t see or hear any reference to Kauffman in my research, it may have been precisely this "need" that got them off the hook. Daniel Kauffman maintained in Doctrines of the Bible that as long as necessity and service dictate what can or shall be used, a Christian can participate in the same practices as the world. "But," he says, "the moment that pride, lust, vanity, egotism, etc., enter to influence decisions, you reach a line that separates the worldling who walks after the flesh from the Christian who walks after the Spirit." Lancaster County Mennonites may have reasoned that they were simply paying off their farms and helping keep the faith community together, services necessitating the growth of profitable tobacco.

Even though Mennonites increasingly diversified into non-farming professions, farming remained a popular occupation. A study of 14,253 Mennonite income earners conducted by the Mennonite Research Foundation in 1950 reported that the largest single occupation, employing 39.8 percent of Mennonites, was farming. Building trades took a distant second place, representing 6.29 percent of Mennonite workers. Beginning in the 1930s, says Redekop, Mennonite entrepreneurs, especially in Pennsylvania and Ontario, created businesses that serviced or directly benefited from the agricultural process, including feed mills, creameries, farm deliveries, farm machinery repairs, sales, and the like.

In the Franconia Conference, Mennonites experienced the first and strongest move away from agriculture to the industrial sector of the economy. The report noted above details that in 1950 21.5 percent of Franconia Mennonites farmed and 16.5 percent worked in factories. Two world wars, labor demands, and a developing land shortage spurred by urban sprawl invading the countryside contributed to this change which would affect most other areas of the church in the ensuing decades. A move away from the farm did not necessarily guarantee a more lucrative financial position. A sampling of non-farm Mennonite income earners in 1951 produced a median income of $3,112 while Mennonite farmers drew a median income of $3,305 in the same year.

J.C. Wenger, in Separated Unto God, urged Christians to contribute to the economic well-being of all humanity through production. Christians can evidence an unselfish spirit, he suggested, by earning more money than needed and using the extra to assist the poor and support the church. Such teaching, he said, "is directly contrary to the spirit of the world, whereas the masses aim at the selfish accumulation of wealth for the enhancement of their own ease, security, and power." He notes the New Testament’s encouragement that Christians "live quiet and industrious lives" and quotes multiple Scriptures for illustration. Abner Yoder also cites various scriptures in both Old and New Testaments to remind nonconformed Christians that they are "responsible to keep whatever capital [they] have working for a Scriptural increase to the glory of God."

Mennonites’ productivity, whether the result of farming or other occupations, was affected by their reticent embrace of recreation. Recreation was big business in the broader society where Americans believed leisure was not only valuable but a necessity. In 1930, according to Melvin Gingrich, Americans spent four and a half billion dollars on vacation travel, two billion for commercial amusements, and one and a half billion on pleasure use of autos. Gas rationing during World War II abated the emerging wanderlust for a time. But obviously the itch to travel remained since as gas became available after the war Lizzie Hess’s tourist business in Lancaster boomed. She reportedly took in more than 1,100 guests for each of two years in a row; one might note also that at this time very few hotels existed. While, Gingerich says, the American public "has almost completely given up its earlier prejudices against recreation," a questionnaire sent to Civilian Public Service camps and answered by men from more than 220 Mennonite communities indicated that in almost one in five of their home communities the majority believed that it was wrong for those older than children to engage in play or recreation.

Lancaster interviewees reported few vacation-like recreational outings in their families of origin. Since most grew up on farms, the regular daily nature of the work provided few opportunities for overnight trips. Even so, day trips seemed to be very occasional events. Several persons mentioned family trips to see the new Pennsylvania Turnpike, called by one the "dream highway," since the first finished section came within about twenty miles of the Lancaster County line.

Frequently the person I spoke with spontaneously affirmed that they had adequate breaks from work. As Reba Miller said, "Oh there was extra time, but we just spent it differently [than now]. It was mostly with our church friends and with our neighbors and family. We’d go visiting." Her brother Howard Witmer noted,

Overall, recreation seems to have consisted of visiting, for adults, and socializing, for youth, among friends and family members in a home setting.

The vacation mentality and the commercialization of recreation began appearing among Mennonites in the 1950s. The June 1952 issue of Mennonite Community featured a poem asking God’s blessing on vacation days. The 1955 nonconformity statement featured recreation as one of its ten articles. It began,

The statement urges Mennonites to "seek refreshment of body and mind" via clean games, good reading and music, enjoying nature and other wholesome activities "which do not spoil one’s taste for God’s Word and prayer, and which truly build people up rather than weaken them."

Wealth, Materialism, and a Christian Standard of Living

Mennonites worked hard and took relatively few vacations, and as the economy heated up after the Second World War their incomes began to rise. The nonconformity discussion expanded to take on the new challenges associated with increasing wealth and the temptations of materialism. In 1945 John R. Mumaw delineated materialism’s threat to those striving to live the nonconformed life. Materialism, at base, he said, is a philosophy connected to Darwinism that suggests life is an end in itself. Therefore, those who affirm this approach believe enjoying life to be paramount. Since a person needs money in order to enjoy life, the materialist’s reasoning goes, economic practice becomes focused entirely on making money. Mennonites who follow this route will ultimately lay aside nonresistance and many other principles focused on living Christ-like lives in community, concludes Mumaw.

Several authors also recognized that when some members of the community obviously have significant wealth and others do not, it creates internal divisions. J.C. Clemens observed, "those with money are tempted to reason that the high-priced, fine garments are more lasting, forgetting that they put a barrier between themselves and their poorer brethren and friends. Our homes and our automobiles put us to the same test." A document related to a 1951 study conference on Christian community relations noted that "inequality . . . causes conflicts—people’s different ways of living [are] what cause divisions and disruptions." The committee that authored the document asks, "Is the question as much one of inequality as it is one of stewardship?" Melvin Gingerich searched the 1950 Gospel Herald to determine how much attention was given to Mennonite attitudes towards wealth or the awareness of the destructive capacity of income disparity within the church. He found thirteen articles filling twenty columns of text that dealt with stewardship of wealth. These columns represented one half of one percent of the year’s 3,840 columns. Only one of the thirteen articles specifically mentioned the dangers of riches.

Abner Yoder urged Mennonites to "shun luxury and extravagance, and . . . be content with such comforts as we can afford." It’s a foggy distinction, however, between affordable comforts and luxury for persons with significant monetary resources. Melvin Gingerich argues that Christians who buy luxury items help create a demand for such things. Producers create more products to fill this demand, diverting capital and resources from the production of necessities. Elizabeth Hershberger Bauman authored a two-part article which appeared in Mennonite Community magazine called "Witness to the Simple Life in Your Home." In the second installment she recognizes the material blessing Mennonites are experiencing during the 1950s. Bauman also details the slippery slope that begins with accumulating "the good things of this world" and the attendant "temptation to use them for ourselves." "The result," Bauman says, "is too often—get more, enjoy me and my own, keep up with the Yoders—and where is the glory of God? Gone is the simple life. When the getting fever enters, spirituality leaves and there is no room for the things of God."

Bauman was not the only one commenting on the apparent disconnect between material abundance and spirituality. Emma Sommers, several years earlier and in the same publication related the following:

Indeed J. C. Clemens affirmed that "many who submit to the plain cut of the uniform conform to the world in using expensive and showy goods." Melvin Gingerich’s 1948 article "Towards a Christian Standard of Living" suggests, "As a church we need to examine honestly our standard of living to see whether we are observing the form but losing the spirit of humility, simplicity, and nonconformity." He regrets the church’s strong emphasis on nonconformity in attire to the neglect of many other areas of life. For example, he asserts that Mennonites may sin along the lines of pride most grievously in the area of cooking and elaborate meals. "Pride, display, ostentation and intemperance characterize many a Mennonite Sunday dinner," Gingerich says. But even in the area of attire, he wonders "whether our testimony has been only against the latest styles or whether it has also been as Menno Simons wrote against ‘silk, velvet, and costly finery.’" Note that here Gingerich is using "testimony" in the sense of the message proclaimed by one’s living, not necessarily through words.

By 1953, just five years after this article, Melvin Gingerich was convinced that "Mennonites will not return to the farm it may be safe to assume" and furthermore, "it is doubtful if Twentieth Century Mennonites will adopt even functional poverty as a way of life in spite of our centuries’ old emphasis upon the simple life." He suggests two ways to "save ourselves from disintegration": first, maintain strict discipline in all stages of the standard of living, and secondly, develop an effective teaching program on stewardship to "convince the man of wealth that his possessions must be used for the cause of the kingdom and dare not be expended upon himself for luxurious living." The church turned its attention toward stewardship education but it never strictly enforced any particular standard of living.

Mennonite Community magazine, which printed several of the articles noted above on the seduction of wealth and similar themes, was the periodical publication of a movement by the same name. The Mennonite Community Association, formed at an October 1945 meeting in Chicago, gave shape to the movement. Such visible church leaders as Guy Hershberger and Harold S. Bender served on the Association’s board of directors. Although not technically a "back to the farm" movement, the Mennonite Community movement sought to strengthen existing Mennonite rural communities, and start new ones, helping them to be financially, socially, and spiritually vibrant places where Mennonite youth would desire to stay rather than leaving for urban centers. The first issue of the magazine, printed in January 1947, noted that its contents would emphasize "rural life, its meaning and values. . . . The paper will oppose and not promote materialism." Paul Erb’s article in the inaugural issue projected that the magazine would deal with "some of the more secular interests of life, which at the same time need not be estranged from the Christian principles of righteousness, simplicity, and separateness which are the expressions of our faith." The magazine highlighted Mennonite communities all over North America and sometimes beyond and spoke to the practical issues of home, community, and church life.

Mennonite Community carried frequent advertisements, some of which seemed questionable in light of its emphasis on simple living. David S. Brilhart, owner of a business in Scottdale, PA, ran an ad for a GE "Automatic Blanket" which shows an attractive woman asleep under one of the blankets. The copy reads, "Bedside control adjusts sleeping temperature automatically. Pre-warms your bed. Keeps you cozy all night no matter how the weather changes." Another Brilhart ad: "Go modern . . . get a GE water heater. Say goodbye to this wanting [hot water] and waiting [for it]." Apparently David Brilhart considered patience, "doing without," and the simple comfort of a few handmade quilts to be out-of-date values. Hager Department Store in Lancaster, PA which often advertised its "Plain Clothing Department" in Mennonite Community subtly introduced the joys of shopping, rather than emphasizing the legitimate needs it met, by using the tag line "Where Plain Folks Like to Shop."

The Mennonite Community approach to separation from the world did not draw the following the Association had hoped to attract, notes Toews. J. Lawrence Burkholder, persistently critical of the movement, saw in it a "romantic tendency" and "the danger of identifying the Kingdom of God with a particular cultural expression." The Mennonite Community magazine struggled to stay afloat, was taken over by the Mennonite Publishing House in 1949, and ultimately merged with the Christian Monitor publication to form the new Christian Living. Christian Living gave attention to some Mennonite Community concerns, but its main focus was the Christian family. Toews observes: "That change surely suggested that a transformation was at work in American Mennonite life. With increasing diffusion, the family—not the community—became the focus for carrying the values of the past into the future." Christian Living ceased publication in 2002, indicating a more recent shift in Mennonites’ communal concerns.

Business Methods

The methods employed by businesspeople in carrying on their vocations was a less-frequent but consistent topic in nonconformity messages throughout the 30s and 40s. A cloth banner, hand lettered by Elias L. Frey (or one of his family) to be hung over the front of the pulpit during a sermon on nonconformity lists "business" as the first of ten "worldly spots." Sanford C. Yoder’s address to the 1935 Nonconformity Conference at Kitchener warned that we "are more and more incorporating the ways of the world in our business practices." Since the average non-Christian businessperson, according to Yoder, "resorts to boycotts, strikes, legal proceedings, violence and any other measure at his command to protect his interest and carry his point" such a person cannot be the pattern after which Mennonites model their businesses. Abner Yoder’s 1940 "Nonconformity in Business Life" stated that "high-powered salesmanship is born of the love of self." In addition, persuading someone to buy a car they can’t afford or don’t need violates the guidance of Phil. 2:4 which urges Christians to look not only to their own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Although an anonymous article in the January 1947 Mennonite Community does not use the word "nonconformity" it notes that there is too little difference between the business methods of Mennonites and those of businesspeople who make no Christian profession. The author particularly cites the areas of "motives" (probably a reference to profit motive), employer-employee relations, and "sense of obligation to those who helped build the business." Rather than letting this negative word linger, the author references an interview with an owner of Moyer and Son, a flour, feed, and fuel business of Souderton, Pennsylvania that shows the particular steps this person takes to carry on business in a Christ-like way. The owner asserts that in Christian business profits should be moderate, not resulting from charging "all the traffic will bear," and should be distributed so as not to create a higher standard of living for management than for other workers. Moyer and Son employees got paid weekly, despite sickness and in one case retirement—a man who had worked there sixty-three years continued to get a weekly salary in retirement.

While business methods still received some attention during the 1950s, as in other areas of nonconformity, the discussion broadened significantly. It took on a wider range of economic questions that applied to business and personal economic decisions. Rather than handing down a ready-made list of dos and don’ts, church leaders began offering average Mennonites the opportunity and responsibility of critically engaging the issues. During 1958 the Committee on Economic and Social Relations and the Commission for Christian Education cooperated in a joint emphasis on "The Christian and His Economic Life." They commissioned a paper by Paul Peachey to be printed in booklet form called "The Modern Economic Order: A Tentative Critique" in which he enjoins Mennonites to not just be more conscientious within the system, but to participate only in those parts of the economic system that are right in light of God’s truth. The two bodies produced a brochure, "How to Plan and Carry Through a Study of ‘Following Christ in Our Work’ . . . Plans for the Local Congregation during 1958" which listed resources and teaching suggestions. They wrote adult and youth Sunday school curriculum on the theme for the July through September quarter of that year and provided 101 ethical questions for Christians to consider as they followed Christ in their work.

The Committee on Economic and Social Relations, begun in 1939 as the Committee on Industrial Relations and led by Guy Hershberger, worked on a range of issues related to business, economics, and Mennonite life. It focused in the early years on securing alternative arrangements for Mennonites who would potentially be facing forced membership in labor unions at their workplaces. Later the committee’s role expanded to take on questions of urbanization’s effect on Mennonite communities and other social and economic questions. Out of concern for mutual assistance, it helped found Mennonite Mutual Aid in 1945. Though the CESR had much to say on nonconformed Mennonite life and economics, mutual aid, and Christian ethics, these topics were rarely labeled "nonconformity."

Despite all the foregoing economic discussion woven into the doctrine of nonconformity, only one of the thirty interviewees from Lancaster directly associated nonconformity with the economic realm. Wayne Hottenstein’s first response concerning how Mennonites were called to be nonconformed in areas other than dress spoke to being "absolutely honest in business dealings." To a person, however, those involved with business did not think the doctrine of nonconformity gave them guidance, at least not directly, as to how to conduct those businesses. Jay Oberholtzer, who helped expand his spouse Rhoda’s family’s fruit stand into a 900-employee retail grocery store, noted that he gauged his working relationships by "Christian principles," not by anything he associated with nonconformity. John Shenk’s family operated a market stand and he articulates well the rather nebulous, indirect way in which nonconformity affected their business:

Dale Weaver, born in 1938, worked in and then managed the poultry business his parents Victor and Edith Weaver started as a small operation on their farm. Weaver Chicken grew into a major employer in and around New Holland, Pennsylvania, especially after World War II. The Weavers demonstrated a strong commitment to their employees: being one of the first local companies to hire permanent Latino workers and also pursuing a policy that sought alternatives to laying off or firing employees. Lester Hoover, who worked for the Weavers part-time noted that "Victor Weaver especially . . . had some very established ways with his employees that [were] really outstanding. He was different. He gave them good wages and helped them." This "difference" however did not grow directly out of any nonconformity-informed consciousness, according to Dale Weaver. The "integrity, . . . quality, fairness, [and] hard work" for which many Mennonite businesspeople became known developed in spite of the doctrine. Nonconformity, as he understood it, was primarily negative. It did more to reinforce separation, which was non-conducive to the business environment, than to "build character or to build trust."

Code words, those words and phrases that repeatedly appear with relation to a particular topic, provide insight into the central ideas propelling the doctrine of nonconformity. Several of these important identifiers consistently entered discussions about the doctrine, whether those discussions were happening in the 30s, 40s, or 50s. "Indoctrinate," and its variations, appeared frequently and consistently: in the goals of various denominational committees, in exhortations to those with teaching functions, such as ministers and parents, and in literature addressing nonconformity or other church "problems." A report of the Committee on Industrial Relations, later the Committee on Economic and Social Relations, lists the first of its three functions as "indoctrination and education." Indoctrination, of course, was a type of education—education in the doctrines of the church. The breadth of its use and the frequency with which church leaders appealed to the need for indoctrination of church members highlights the centralized, authoritarian-type power structure the Mennonite Church employed during these years.

Doctrines are issued from above; they are generally not produced at a popular level. Church leaders did not entrust congregations with the difficult issues or the complexities of church/world relations and urge them to struggle and discern the way through, possibly due to the intense dangers they perceived on all sides. Rather, the discerning authority was closely-held and exercised by a few on behalf of all. The resulting indoctrination might be likened to an inoculation in the sense that leaders intended to "inject" truth into cooperative but passive recipient church members to save them from the disease of worldliness. Often a medical patient, especially in mid-century but less so today, assumes that the doctor, with her or his technical knowledge, knows what is best for the patient, and thus accepts the recommended treatment without comment. Similarly, most Mennonites accepted this indoctrination as showing the way to faithful Christian living, although their confidence rested in the view that God speaks through church leadership and not on those leaders’ technical training—of which they frequently had none.

The phrase "like precious faith" also appeared in nonconformity discussions and teaching materials during the thirties through the fifties. Both the 1933 General Problems Committee Report to General Conference and the 1955 nonconformity statement adopted by General Conference make reference to those of "like precious faith." Lancaster Bishop Board minutes also use the term. It appeared written material across genre.

Those of "like precious faith" usually referred to other MC Mennonites although it might have included other nonresistant and nonconformed groups such as the Brethren in Christ. MC Mennonites distrusted members of the General Conference Mennonite Church (or GCs), a separate denomination made up primarily of Mennonites of Dutch/Prussian/Russian backgrounds, and probably would not have counted them as those of "like precious faith." Thus, the term conveyed affection, respect, and the preservation-worthiness of their own unique understanding and practice of the gospel. Writers often spoke of this faith containing "peculiar" doctrines and practices, a word that links it to Jesus’ work in Titus 2:14 where he is "[purifying] unto himself a peculiar people" and the I Peter 2:9 reference to "a chosen generation . . . a peculiar people." "Worldliness," another persistent code word, was the resulting state of those who rejected the particulars of this precious faith.

Persons and committees writing in the 1930s and 40s were more likely to use the adjective "scriptural" than were those addressing nonconformity in the 1950s. For example, the 1931 General Problems Committee report to General Conference includes a section entitled "Scriptural Discipline" and within its section "The Dress Question" mentions "scriptural standards, scriptural uniformity, and scriptural holiness." The 1944 "Resolution on Christian Nonconformity" urged ministers to embark on teaching programs "on the Scriptural basis for the principles and practices of nonconformity." Discussions of nonconformity during the 1950s continued to appeal to Scripture, however they were more likely to use the adjective "Christian," such as in "a Christian standard of living" or "the Christian doctrine of nonconformity to the world."

The Mennonite Church of the 1930s appears to have been operating in a strongly defensive mode. As mentioned previously in discussing the tone of communication of nonconformity, church leaders saw danger all around and many ways for persons, especially young people, to slip into sin and worldliness. Carefully-articulated guidelines related to nonconformity and the visual separation maintained by distinctive garb were designed as resources for holiness, practices that helped people avoid certain temptations. Comments from a General Problems Committee meeting express "[eagerness] to see the rising generation fully indoctrinated in the whole-Gospel faith, that the Church may be in safe hands after we are gone." The push for nonconformity seemed very much based on the idea of church preservation, of keeping the dangers of the world at bay, even as it was also based on following Jesus. Although encouragement to live the nonconformed life often spoke of being a witness for God or an example of integrity for others to emulate, Mennonites didn’t much expect others to be drawn to their church because of their distinct lifestyles.

The 1940s presented two major new developments, one that shored up a Mennonite identity, shifting some of this burden from nonconformity, and one that challenged it. Harold S. Bender’s 1943 address to the American Society of Church History, "The Anabaptist Vision," was published in the April 1944 edition of the Mennonite Quarterly Review and later enjoyed church-wide circulation in pamphlet form. For a people largely unfamiliar with the origins of their spiritual heritage, Bender provided the outline of a noble and compelling past. He interpreted the events of the sixteenth century Radical Reformation such that the Anabaptists carried the true light of church reform "and set out to achieve it in actual experience" while other more mainline reformers settled for less. Bender distilled three "new" emphases in this "Anabaptist Vision" for church life: (1) discipleship (following after Jesus) is the essence of Christianity, (2) church membership is voluntary, and (3) Christians live according to an ethic of love and nonresistance. His well-received work energized the Mennonite Church. Whereas in recent decades the church had depended increasingly on a negation of the "world" to carve out a space for itself and maintain its identity, now members could also say confidently who they were and what they affirmed, instead of primarily stating what they did not do.

With the publication of the "Anabaptist Vision," says John Roth, "’radical discipleship’ became the new ideal of Christian life, replacing the more traditional language of ‘humility’ and ‘nonconformity.’" While the "Vision" began to move Mennonites beyond a doctrinal nonconformity approach to church/world relations, it introduced significant ambiguity concerning any improved options. Steve Nolt notes that while Bender’s Anabaptists set forth a program for a new Christian society, they counselled withdrawal from the world. The "Anabaptist Vision" was not conceived as a blueprint for all of human society, yet some early Anabaptists hoped to set up the kingdom of God on earth. According to Nolt, such inherent ambiguity has shaped generations nurtured on the "Anabaptist Vision" and since its publication Mennonites "have struggled to formulate a model for relating church and society."

The 1940s also introduced the world to the horrors of World War II. Mennonites could no longer disregard a world that demanded support for the war effort in the form of their sons, fathers, and cousins. Whereas World War I largely treated conscientious objectors (COs) to prison terms and popular abuse, Mennonites and other peace churches negotiated World War II alternative service that took the shape of a program called Civilian Public Service (CPS). Mennonite men, declaring their refusal to contribute to the cycle of institutional violence, lived at designated "camps" with COs from other backgrounds and participated in forestry work, caring for the mentally ill, and other types of public service. Sometimes women joined their spouses, serving in whatever way they could. According to Miriam and Lloyd Levefer, the CPS experience produced a turning point in nonconformity issues, both for them personally and for the church. They cited "mingling" with people from other backgrounds and traditions as one of the catalysts for this change. Beulah Stauffer Hostetler states, "As their young men served in Civilian Public Service as conscientious objectors in World War II, Mennonites refocused their understanding of both nonresistance and separation, strengthening the former and gradually revising the latter."

In the 1950s, Mennonite Church leaders were reconceptualizing and hoping to revitalize nonconformity, says Paul Toews. He points to Wenger’s Separated Unto God and the 1955 Mennonite Church General Conference statement which broadened nonconformity beyond dress with emphasis on "restraints, responsibility, simplicity, and separation." After Wenger, he says, "nonconformity . . . covered courtship and marriage, organizational affiliation, recreational patterns, speech, worship patterns, commercial connections, mutual aid, and relationship to the state."

J. Richard Burkholder and Daniel Hertzler, both college students at Eastern Mennonite College, wrote papers in 1950 hoping to contribute to this reconceptualization. Burkholder, future Goshen College professor and Mennonite scholar, argued that nonconformity traditionally understood was a negative and incomplete approach to life. Its separation had turned into isolationism at odds with the great commission, and its particulars had degenerated into legalism, a state with little regenerative power. Additionally, he decried nonconformity’s narrowing such that Mennonites only applied it to certain areas of life. Daniel Hertzler, eventual editor of Gospel Herald, also spoke out against the confines of nonconformity, viewing the doctrine primarily as isolationist. In the words of Toews,

Certain particulars, long a part of the doctrine of nonconformity, were being redefined, reinterpreting Scriptural injunctions in some cases and also taking into account the complexities of life in the world. Carl Kreider, for example, in a paper printed and distributed as source material for the Committee on Economic and Social Relations’ 1958 teaching emphasis on Christians and economic life, argues that life insurance might meet a real need in some cases that "burial aid," a type of mutual aid, cannot. Further, he suggests, "it is not honest to fail to recognize these differing needs and to insist that all of the demand for life insurance beyond simple burial aid comes from the evil one." Earlier in the decade J.C. Wenger suggested that MMA expand into life insurance, for which its charter had provided, because the need for additional financial "security" was legitimate. If Mennonites do not have the option to buy from a Christian organization, he argues, they "will turn to worldly companies with all their sub-Christian methods."

Wenger also adjusted some formerly resolutely-held interpretations of Scripture. Whereas the 2 Corinthians 6:14 command against being unequally yoked with unbelievers prevented Mennonites in the past from joining professional associations, Wenger maintained that joining such societies "is not only legitimate and desirable, but a professional necessity." Such activity, he says, does not count as being unequally yoked with unbelievers because these associations are not for religious purposes. "The unequal yoke which is prohibited in the Bible is such an intimate association with unbelievers as to involve the Christian in religious associations or practices in ethics which are unbecoming for a Christian," he writes.

One may ask what factors informed this relatively sudden reinterpretation of Scripture. J. Lawrence Burkholder suggests it may have been the result of economic necessity rather than Biblical study. He remarks, "Some of us are old enough to have been disciplined for having life insurance, but later when life insurance was required by banks as collateral for loans, life insurance was no longer considered a violation of ‘filial trust in God.’" Furthermore, says Burkholder,

Mennonites in the 1950s began to call for broader vision and a wider inclusion and awareness of issues integral to living the Christian life. A "Statement of Concerns" resulting from a 1951 study conference on Christian community relations confesses "unsocial conduct" to be sin. While it finds the "social gospel" movement, to the extent that its message is "divorced from the evangelizing purpose," to be in error, it suggests that "the Church should acquire a better understanding of the principles of social justice contained in the Gospel of Christ."

Guy F. Hershberger’s 1958 book The Way of the Cross in Human Relations introduced Mennonites to a host of social issues and to tools for analysis and response in a nonresistant Christian perspective. Largely emerging from Hershberger’s work with the Committee on Economic and Social Relations, the book included a major section on Christian economic life. Nonconformity appeared near the end in a short section titled "Distorted Nonconformity." "The one who takes the way of the cross must of necessity be a nonconformist to many of the practices of the general social order," affirmed Hershberger, but at the same time the "deeply rooted, self-giving love" from which nonconformity initially sprang could easily "lose its vitality while the outward nonconformity continues as a tradition." Such an empty tradition, he warned, can and often does produce extremism in which the nonconformist believes his or her perspective to be always right and "everything else is wrong." Oddly, Hershberger drew on Quaker examples to discuss nonconformity and its potential pitfalls, making no reference to the Mennonite Church’s doctrine or recent preoccupation with the idea.

Calvin Redekop called the church to improved understanding of the purposes behind its doctrines. In speaking of the struggle to avoid assimilation and secularization he stated,

In fact, agreed Paul Mininger, too often Mennonites had depended on social conditioning to perpetuate nonconformity’s outward forms instead of "giving insight and understanding with the purpose of securing voluntary acceptance."

With increased awareness and discussion of social and economic issues (the two terms appeared together often in the 50s), the word "stewardship" began appearing. This word, though not usually directly related to nonconformity, helped introduce the idea of personal responsibility beyond the "rules" of nonconformity. The 1958 "Following Christ in our Work" brochure, as mentioned previously, provided interesting and complex questions for critical thought. Denominational bodies, in this case the Committee on Economic and Social Relations and the Commission for Christian Education, while still very much interested in nonconformity, began encouraging Mennonites to carefully consider appropriate responses to complex life choices at the level of principle rather than simply following the letter of the "law," assuming one was in place to address the area at hand.

Dennis Riefer, a student at Goshen College, noted a related responsibility shift in the 1958-60 college catalog statement "regarding the whole area of the Christian’s relationship to the world." As compared with the 1957-58 college catalog, he said, the basic approach of the college has changed such that it "[expects] students to accept responsibility in upholding the college standards. The administration is not a policeman, but a guide." His particular topic was movie attendance and he noted that while "the old policy was ‘no commercialized movies at theaters,’" the "present policy allows the student to attend the ‘best movies.’ The selection of the movie is left up to the student."

Finally, as Beulah Stauffer Hostetler highlights, "the nature and structure of authority was receiving widespread attention in the Mennonite Church in the second half of the fifties. . . . Like codified cultural identity symbols and limits on structural associations, centralized authority was being widely questioned." Not only was centralized authority being questioned, but church leaders appeared to be recognizing that a less top-down approach might produce more positive results. Proceedings from a "Plain Coat Study Conference" presented to the Indiana-Michigan ministers meeting in 1959 illustrate some of these shifts. The study conference had carefully reviewed the benefits and drawbacks of Mennonite men being required to wear the regulation plain coat. Russel Krabill suggested, in a paper presented at the conference, that based on thirty-five questionnaires to nine conferences most of these conferences foresaw change coming. At the same time they were concerned that timing be right before the plain suit was "laid aside." These conferences recognized that a consensus should be built first, so that laying aside the plain suit would be a unified move and not the source of division. The nonconformity of the thirties and forties was also concerned with unity, but it was expected that such unity was created primarily by obedience to the rules of central authorities, rather than through consensus building at a local level. So not only were Mennonites beginning to consider forgoing outward indicators of distinction from others in society, they were also adjusting the dynamics of that decision-making process in a more egalitarian direction.

While Lancaster was one of the conferences surveyed in the plain coat study referenced above, bishop board minutes late in 1949 indicate that the authoritarian approach was receiving some attention as the bishops planned for leadership in the fifties. At a September 1949 meeting the board charged three bishops with revising the doctrinal questions used to instruct nominees for ordination. During the course of the discussion, "one brother suggested that we should try to guide with the word ‘recommend’ in the case where it cannot be controlled." Although obedience was still the goal, the bishops seemed to recognize that tempering the language of command to that of suggestion might induce a more positive response.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, and other Interviewee Recollections

Several interviewees felt that the guidelines of nonconformity, and especially nonconformity’s visible manifestations, created walls between Mennonites and other people, while many spoke to the positive interactions that took place because of, or maybe in spite of, these differences. Rhoda Weaver sensed that her father, a minister at Millersville Mennonite Church, was greatly respected by their non-Mennonite neighbors. Wayne Hottenstein also testified to the deep respect his father earned outside of Mennonite circles and asserted that nonconformed living "had terrific influence in the community." In fact the Hottenstein family was Lutheran until after his grandfather died. His grandmother buried her husband in a Mennonite cemetery and joined the Mennonite church. According to family lore, she chose to become Mennonite because she thought Mennonites were so "reasonable;" their lifestyle attracted her.

One member of the Erisman congregation commented that even in the midst of strict nonconformed practice, formerly non-Mennonite persons joined the church. Mary Elizabeth Gingrich noted, however, that the restrictions, especially in dress, associated with joining the church and "going plain" also turned quite a few Mennonite young people away from the worshipping community they would likely have otherwise embraced.

Almost across the board interviewees perceived nonconformity to have had very little to do with how they handled their money. Charles Good reported receiving strong teaching early in life that Mennonites live the common life, are ordinary, not "eloquent" people and should not spend money on expensive things for their homes. But many recalled few teachings on stewardship themes until at least the 1950s and those usually not in connection with the doctrine labelled nonconformity. Arthur Miller’s family and church (Landisville) emphasized simple living, but the specifics were not a matter of church teaching or doctrine. "Each person," Miller said, "more or less interpreted simple living in their own way." It was of most importance that one bought a plain suit or a black car, for example, but how much a person spent on those items was not the church’s concern. According to Clayton Nissley, "there was . . . some talk when a person got a big lavish car, even if it was black," but he cites several Packards in the church parking lot as evidence that basically members made their own decisions about what vehicles to buy and how much to spend. As a side note, several persons mentioned that their families purchased new vehicles in the mid-thirties, economically a very difficult time for much of the nation. While Nissley emphasized that his family was not wealthy, they had the means to buy two brand new cars, a Dodge and a Plymouth, in 1936.

Lancaster Mennonites may have failed to connect nonconformity with economic decision-making because economic themes did not feature prominently in the conference’s Rules and Discipline. In fact, such themes were entirely absent as identifiable subjects until the 1954 discipline supplement which addressed "Stewardship and Materialism" and "[Financial] Benevolence." Since one’s standing with the church involved obedience to the items in the discipline and it was read twice a year as members prepared themselves for communion, its major topics found more permanent residency in peoples’ minds and hearts than did nonconformity’s components conveyed through other media.

Several Approaches to Understanding Mennonite Emphasis on Nonconformity

Various terms describe a minority cultural group’s interaction with a dominant society. I will follow Rodney Sawatsky’s useful definitions for several of these terms. For the United States context, Sawatsky considers "Americanization" and "acculturation" to be synonyms pointing to a group’s accepting some elements of the dominant culture even while intentionally rejecting others. "Assimilation," on the other hand, involves "a more total loss of unique identity" and becoming incorporated into the common cultural life. Mennonites of the mid-twentieth century were certainly not interested in surrendering their group identity to the larger society. The extent to which nonconformity prevented or enabled Americanization, however, is a matter of discussion.

Steve Nolt’s work on ethnicity and the Pennsylvania Germans of the early republic period (1790-1848) may provide one framework for understanding Mennonites’ embrace of the doctrinal approach to nonconformity about a century later. According to Nolt, the term "ethnicity" refers to, most basically, a sense of peoplehood. Nolt explains how ethnicization, or the formation of this sense of peoplehood, was really a "side door to Americanization" for Pennsylvania Germans in the early nineteenth century. He says,

Twentieth century Mennonites continued to organize their particularity around religion, but they went a step further in the acculturation process by expressing that particularity in the doctrinal language accepted by American Protestantism and especially by those participating in the American Fundamentalist impulse. The doctrine of nonconformity, then, conveyed Mennonite peculiarity in a particularly American way. Paul Toews recognizes the push and pull of Mennonite interaction with society. In speaking of Mennonite Fundamentalism he says, "it was part of the Americanization process and part of the resistance to Americanization. It was a means of both reinforcing Mennonite separatism and of accelerating the integration of Mennonites into the larger society."

Beulah Stauffer Hostetler labels the Mennonite Church centralization of authority and codification of practice that began at the turn of the twentieth century and produced the doctrine of nonconformity "defensive structuring," a concept developed by Bernard Siegel. Defensive structuring "is a process whereby members of a group attempt to preserve a religious or cultural identity in the face of what they feel are pervasive and long-lasting threats to that identity." Hostetler notes that groups resorting to defensive structuring frequently possess a highly integrated culture. For Mennonites, of course, religious and cultural identity were bound up together, making this type of defensive action even more attractive. Other characteristics of groups that engage in defensive structuring involve situations in which "broad segments of the culture are related to a few key values" and in which individuals function subordinately to the group, both evident in early- and mid-twentieth century Mennonitism.

Mennonites were not alone in their struggle for identity preservation in the face of the overwhelmingly dominant American culture’s threats. J. Howard Kauffman, commenting at the end of a career in twentieth century Mennonite sociology, asserted that the Mennonite experience in this regard exhibits parallels to the cultural encounters of other religious groups. Reformed and Lutheran congregations with strong Pennsylvania German identification, for example, also walked the identity preservation/assimilation line.

According to Hostetler, defensive structuring "was a response to both religious and secular encroachments upon key values." Her study focuses on Franconia Mennonites of eastern Pennsylvania and she locates their key values in the seven articles of the Schleitheim Confession. One of these key values is separation from the world. She does not observe this defensive response only in eastern Pennsylvania, however. For example, she suggests that a special session of Mennonite General Conference which convened at Goshen College during August 1944 resulted from "widespread tensions in the church concerning defensive structuring." This special session produced a document entitled "Resolutions on Nonconformity." The doctrine of nonconformity, then, according to Hostetler, was a defensive structuring device to preserve a cultural identity that highly valued separation from the world.

Hostetler notes the paradoxical way in which Mennonites actually participated in the methods of the world, even in the midst of this defensive structuring for the preservation of separation from the world. She observes that

Reginald Good identifies this phenomenon as "defensive/offensive restructuring" and suggests that Mennonites organized their mid-century life to both resist social assimilation and at the same time "compete with non-Mennonites in the public arena."

The doctrine of nonconformity also arose to challenge the all-consuming values of the emerging middle class. These values included individualism born of self-reliance, emphasis on competition, efficiency, and innovation at almost any cost. Church leaders perceived these foci to be antithetical to the core Mennonite value of community and its mutually caring relationships. Hostetler states that many of the rules arising between 1909 and 1940 in the Franconia Conference "addressed the emerging middle class." By putting limits on structural associations, for example, the conference regulated members’ social and business activities, two main arenas of exposure to middle class values.

Persons in the middle class worked to get ahead, get attention, and build a comfortable life for themselves. Mennonites, by contrast, historically valued humility, community connection, and mutual aid. They lived by a "spirit of fellowship," the kind of organizing principle that Troeltsch observed can only be "derived from religious ideas." Middle class values required no religious component, only a high view of self. It was this egotism and its penchant for community destruction that Mennonites hoped to avoid.

Although nonconformity promoted group consciousness and its visual cultural symbols helped in social boundary setting, Mennonites failed to escape the effects of individualism and its attendant values. Already in 1957 Calvin Redekop lamented that "Mennonites no longer conceive of themselves as a group but as individuals in a competitive society." He goes on to state, "The Mennonites have thus accepted a major portion of American cultural practices by adopting the competitive system as decisive in their lives."

Materialism, the privilege of the new middle class, also began making inroads among Mennonites. J. Winfield Fretz drew attention to Christians who "roundly condemn materialism and, at the same time, embrace it." Mennonites should be especially concerned with this development, he said, since they profess that simplicity, nonconformity, and renunciation of pride in favor of humility and obedience constitute the true Christian life. According to Fretz, "Many of our practices when examined in the light of these professions are likely to leave us somewhat embarrassed."

Nonconformity may have been an attempt to put the brakes on the Mennonite movement from sect to church in Troeltschian typology. Barbara Bowie Wiesel draws attention to H. Richard Niebuhr’s prediction that "with the increase of wealth that would result from the practice of sectarian virtues, the original fervor of protest could not be maintained" and the group thus sets out on the road to becoming the very sort of organization its founders rejected. Liston Pope also, writing in 1942, "hypothesized that as individuals became prosperous they would begin to remould their religion to conform to the church type." The Protestant church type, according to Troeltsch, "demands the same moral standard from all alike . . . [and] proclaims the impossibility of overcoming sin [in daily life] for all alike." The sect type takes a different approach, claiming a Christian can defeat sin in life and thus requiring that she or he live by certain high moral standards. The doctrine of nonconformity placed those standards front and center, essentially reminding the Mennonite Church of its sect orientation. It is telling that some of nonconformity’s advocates contrasted sixteenth century Anabaptist approaches to Christian living with that of the Catholics, Lutherans, and other now-mainline Protestants that "fit" into the church type.

Mennonites may also have used the construct of doctrinal nonconformity and its many specific rules to prevent members from exercising what they, historically humble and nonresistant people, considered to be the social violence of coercion on the church community and the broader society. Ernst Correll, in a 1942 treatment of "The Sociological and Economic Significance of the Mennonites as a Culture Group in History," observed that Mennonites who took "a resolute stand of ‘defenselessness’ in the face of many conflicts evolved a new feeling for stewardship; a desire for self-discipline; a refining of sense—elements that climaxed in the making of the ‘responsible personality type of [person],’ the motivating force in ‘Mennonite Sociology.’" Swiss Anabaptists in the sixteenth century eschewed use of force and thus this resource was inaccessible for inspiring cooperation from others. Their options for survival, especially in the face of continuing sporadic persecution, involved living completely independently from the rest of society or cultivating character that made friends.

In twentieth century America, Mennonite descendents of the Swiss Anabaptists and others finally had the chance to put down roots and build up economic resources. With money comes power and potential political voice easily wielded in the service of coercion for one’s own selfish ends. The doctrine of nonconformity specified that Mennonites not hold political office or vote. It also initially prevented farmers and others from joining agricultural or trade organizations that might use their combined economic power to make demands of governments or local authorities. Also, the extent to which the rules minimized great differentiation in the type of clothes members wore or the vehicles they bought, nonconformity also helped somewhat in avoiding visual economic display that might intimidate poorer persons in the fellowship.

Finally, nonconformity’s defense, if not its original cause, frequently involved a theology of suffering. In the words of Nathan Yoder,

Those who protested the social suffering invited by the unusual clothes the church prescribed were often shamed for a lack of humility or for an unwillingness to "take up the cross." Gospel Herald articles of the 1930s frequently made comments to this extent in discussing nonconformity. Women, required to maintain comparably greater visual differences from the general population than men, bore the brunt of this social stigma.

Yoder is referring to his Amish youth in Iowa around the turn of the century, but the principle of visual separation in his experience was similar to that espoused by Mennonites from the 1930s through the 50s. No doubt the authors of the nonconformity doctrine would protest the suggestion that oddity was being preserved for its own sake or that the visual distinction was invitation for persecution, but clearly this is how some folks experienced it. In light of the relative freedom and comfort in which North American Mennonites lived and the assumption that true Christianity necessarily entails suffering, Yoder may be pointing to an unacknowledged purpose behind the doctrine.

Mennonite Economic Life: Lessons for this Century from the Last

The sixteenth century Anabaptist movement arose partly in response to economic injustice. Even though early Anabaptists "protested exploitation and expressed a realized eschatology through economic sharing," Walter Sawatsky, in preparing to speak for Mennonites in a 1989 ecumenical dialogue, "found Mennonite involvement in economic transformation the most problematic." Walter recalled his written comment from 1989 concerning "how little there is in current Mennonite literature on the global economic issues" and notes that "a decade later I find little evidence that Mennonites are taking up the intellectual and practical challenge of confronting poverty." Calvin Redekop, also writing in 1989, focused on a more local or national level but made a similar observation. Redekop writes, "by and large, the economic-religious faith issue has not been a great issue of conscious or rational concern among Mennonites." As a result

The doctrine of nonconformity dealt with some economic questions, but the doctrinal orientation focusing first of all on correct belief, along with a separation from the world approach to nonconformity, meant that many economic issues took on an "us and God" feel. Mennonites seem to have given little thought to how their economic choices affected those outside the local fellowship, even though it was in precisely the economic arena that Mennonites had most interaction with such folks.

Even J. C. Wenger, who wove economic issues throughout his discussion of nonconformity in Separated Unto God, appeared to be primarily concerned that Mennonites attend to their own moral purity rather than looking outward toward the injustices being perpetrated on various people and groups around them. For example, Wenger considers conditions under which a nonresistant Christian might work in a "closed shop" environment where each employee must belong to the labor union. Since labor unions use "sub-Christian" methods including coercion and violence, Mennonites could not in good conscience be members. Working at such a place would be permissible, however, says Wenger, if the union agrees that the Mennonite employee’s union dues will be contributed towards a philanthropic cause "either for the welfare of labor or in the community at large." While Wenger takes the complex issue of how a nonresistant Christian can remain so in a closed shop seriously, he does not urge the worker to address the broader issues of the labor struggle. In fact, he encourages Mennonites to "remain aloof from all struggle, both between nations and between economic classes."

In reality, Mennonites in the twentieth century and in the twenty-first participate in the social, economic, and even political struggles around us, and now, more often then not, on a global scale. Frequently we contribute on the side of injustice, unaware of or simply ignoring the oppression on which our North American comfortable, convenient, affluent lifestyles are built. A simple purchase at the "local" grocery store often, after all, turns out to be a global transaction—the pears may be from Argentina, the strawberries from Mexico, each item labelled with a sticker stating its country of origin. Do we consider the immense resources involved in transporting the fruit over long distances or how we are feeding the demand that makes it profitable for some company to transport it? Do we realize that rarely do the farmers or farm workers benefit proportionally as the result of the various transactions that deposit the item at our local retailer? Walter Sawatsky, in asking Mennonites to think globally, echoes the words of his ecumenical conversation partner who pled with his own denomination "to get involved in multinational economics as church, to wrestle seriously with contemporary social theory, to critique the global system of information distribution, and to ‘break the taboo on talking about [the church’s] own complicity’ in these global economic injustices."

While the doctrine of nonconformity did little to address global justice issues, it did produce communities largely concerned about the same things. Can we learn from the emphasis on unified witness and the impulse to question what the "world" has to offer as we think about how to use our economic power and resources to further God’s purposes? Is it possible that our Mennonite communities, supposedly largely consisting of an amalgamation of individualists today, might seriously reconsider our lifestyles and together work at intentional living, economically and otherwise?

Nonconformity’s rule-based approach largely produced a practice organized around particular cultural forms. If Robert Siemens is right that "the substance of peoplehood is economic and social, its forms, or media, are cultural," one can identify a major reason why the breakdown of nonconformity’s outward forms accelerated Mennonites’ move toward individualism: the cultural forms proved to be a false basis for community or peoplehood. Had nonconformity significantly addressed the social and economic realities at the core of community life together, even religious community life, we may be facing the twenty-first century with a healthy, positive mutual lifestyle accountability within the church and guidance to this end from leaders instead of with the general lack of these things.

Nonconformity to the marketplace notion that a person’s value is based on his or her productivity is essential if we are to carve out any space for meaningful interaction and attend to the life of the spirit. Productive people must be busy people, society tells us. We protest how busy our lives have become but rarely take the time to consider why or on which assumptions we are operating. The church, instead of asking the hard questions about life organization and what it says about life purpose, tends to induce guilt in busy people who simply "don’t have time" for its programs and committees. We accumulate toys and other things or spend money on ourselves in order to "relax"—and for what purpose? To pool enough energy to be able to jump back into the frenzy again?

How can we live nonconformed lives that properly value the resource we call "time?" Once again, the market-based approach says that time is a commodity, that it must be "used" efficiently, that "time is money." However, if we stop using dollars and cents to value our time we may find a new freedom to move to the rhythms of God’s economy where we live lives of awareness and intentionality in the context of communal discernment, support, and accountability. We’d have time to notice and urge each other to be aware of: the health needs of our own bodies, the relationship needs within our families and beyond, what we can learn from and how we can share with those different from ourselves. Together we can intentionally consider our purposes for being and carefully organize our lives around what truly matters, choosing to use our resources to meet those ends.

The Mennonite Church has been understandably reticent to speak to lifestyle issues, except in very general ways, due to the negative perception of the power dynamics involved with the doctrine of nonconformity. But many things have changed since the time when leaders may have resonated with George R. Brunk I’s comment that "we have a closed policy as to all that the Bible teaches—all that the church rules—all that a bishop rules." Pastors and people are more likely to walk together, to argue theology, to address the complex issues of faith as pilgrims on a road rather than as a master handing out orders to unquestioningly obedient servants. The critical thinking and discernment essential to orienting one’s life towards God and acquiring the skills to identify mainstream America’s destructive cultural tendencies as such, can happen best in the framework of a broader church discussion. Small groups in the church are great places to start the conversation, but we need many voices at the table in order to faithfully bring the Scriptures, history, and stories of God’s Spirit working today throughout the world to bear on the task.

Conformity is a sort of "other-directedness" that takes its cues for personal action solely from the responses of other people, wrote Lloyd Ramseyer in a 1959 MQR article. The result for a society that functions this way is a bunch of busy, pointless people who feel strikingly alone and spiritually shallow. The Mennonite Church of the mid-twentieth century was concerned that its members might unthinkingly take their cues from the sinful world around them. Rather than asking people to engage the core issues, however, the church during the 1930s and 40s especially simply substituted the church’s directives into the equation, asking folks to respond without thinking, to its cues.

Mennonite Christians claim to follow Christ, to take our cues for action from Scripture’s testimony about Jesus and the nudging of the Holy Spirit among us. But without the context of a broader discussion or a realm of concrete accountability, it’s very easy to float through week after week taking cues primarily from a self-absorbed culture that sees only "foolishness" in the ways of Jesus. If we continue to believe, as J. Howard Kauffman put it in 1949, "that life cannot be divided into secular and sacred segments. All of one’s activities are expressions of the basic Christian tenets which undergird his [or her] life," then why do we spend our resources pursuing selfish ends and cutting ourselves off from meaningful relationships with each other? We choose shopping instead of visiting, watching television and imbibing its warped marketing cocktail instead of praying or singing together. Most significantly, we do these things without thinking, without seriously considering the global ramifications of how we’re spending our money, the relational trade-offs in which we’re participating by making ad hoc decisions about how to use our time resources, and what our witness is conveying to those who aren’t familiar with God’s message of hope and true life in Jesus.

Mary Schertz partly has in mind the Mennonite Church posture towards the world at the height of doctrinal nonconformity when she says

I agree. I am not calling for a return to thought patterns that tend to move us in an isolationist direction. Rather, I am suggesting that unless we sweep the world’s answers out of our souls and make space for the living Christ, who calls us to be aware of the needs beyond ourselves and choose with purpose to extend ourselves in those directions, we cannot join God in "offering grace and holding out hope" with any integrity. May we discern the major components of a healthy Christian lifestyle together and hold each other accountable to living out the situation-specific implications of these truths, recognizing that our economic choices are at the very crux of the Christian life.