I became an Anabaptist because of George W. Bush.
Well, not so much Bush personally—though the former president’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the context in which I began to grapple with what Jesus said about enemies. But I mostly mean the embrace of Bush and his Republican Party by American evangelical culture in the early 2000s.
Those were God-and-country years, kind of like these. We didn’t hear about “Christian nationalism” back then (the preferred nomenclature was “theocracy” and its variations), and certainly the GOP platform was different than it is today on key points. Bush himself was, in retrospect, a much more conventional figure than the next Republican to hold his office.
But the sense that we evangelicals had an ally in Washington, that there was no real question whom a true Christian would support, that being a good Christian was very closely tied to being a good American, that it was perfectly appropriate to play videos in church services that explicitly likened the sacrifices of American soldiers to the salvific death of Christ—all that was as much in the air in 2004 as in 2024.
Anabaptism, which marks 500 years today, felt like a revelation.
I was first attracted by the tradition’s deep skepticism of politics and power and its simple, obedient reading of biblical commands to peace—a reading reinforced by the testimonies of the early Anabaptists, many of whom were martyred by fellow Christians for their faith. With time, I also came to love and admire Anabaptism’s distinctive prioritization of robust community life and high expectations for ordinary Christians’ knowledge of the Bible.
I spent about a year learning about Anabaptism before a move to a new city gave my husband and me the opportunity to join an Anabaptist church that would eventually become a congregation of Mennonite Church USA (MC USA). Our church had a handful of ethnic Mennonites, people whose families had been in the tradition for generations, in some cases with relatives in the Amish community. But most of the church consisted of people like me: refugees of Bush-era evangelicalism looking for a church that would ask more of us.
We wanted our lives to revolve around church. We wanted a community where living in walking distance of one another and getting together multiple times a week, both for church and just to hang out, would be normal and expected. In our church’s first phase, before I arrived, many members even lived in community houses, eating and gardening together and sharing their resources.
The houses broke up as people started getting married, from which you can infer—if you hadn’t already—that the congregation was overwhelmingly people in our mid-20s. I don’t say that dismissively; we were young but serious, and the influence of the Anabaptist tradition was an orienting force for our enthusiasm.
The first winter there, my husband and I joined both a small group and a sermon discussion group, which meant spending (because we did not have our own building and so worshiped on Sunday evenings) three nights of every week on church. We loved it.
It was sometime after our church had formalized its Anabaptism by joining MC USA that I began to realize we had a problem—and not just our congregation, so far as I could observe, but the larger body.
I’m not interested in besmirching a church that was deeply formative for me and where I still have many dear friends. So instead, I’ll simply say that I think we did an excellent job of fostering the Anabaptist distinctive of thick community life, but we didn’t do such a good job of maintaining our early congregational focus on theology and Scripture. We never stopped preaching the Word, but when a denominational discernment process about gay marriage exposed disagreement in our ranks, it became apparent that many of us had not absorbed the historic Anabaptist view of the Bible as an authoritative rule of Christian life.
This shift was also apparent when I attended a theology conference at the denomination’s flagship seminary with several women from my church. Many of the offerings at this event were baffling. Relatively little would have been recognizable to the founders of our tradition.
One session, burned into my brain, posited that Jesus was transgender. A friend attended to find out what the argument could possibly be; she said the speaker had said that because Jesus had no human father, he could only have an X chromosome, and because he presented as a man, he was therefore trans. As my friend gave this report, I thought I could faintly hear Menno Simons spinning in his grave.
It may come as no surprise that MC USA, though delayed by the pandemic, ultimately voted to change its theology on gay marriage to an affirming stance. More conservative churches have largely left the denomination, forming conferences of their own.
In some cases, the conservatives retain historic Anabaptist distinctives. But in others, they’re slipping away from the tradition’s defining stances on peace and politics, looking increasingly like any other evangelical church. The progressives, too, are dipping into politics, and both camps—as I wrote for The New York Times in 2022—are doing so without the grounding of a theological tradition concerned with how to do that well.
The result, as Anabaptist scholar John Roth wrote at Plough, is that their “political witness” often “basically aligns with the partisan divisions of the broader culture.”
Of course, it’s not as if the future of Anabaptism in the West depends on Americans swayed by the winds of politics and culture. Ultimately, it depends on God, and even humanly speaking, Old Order Mennonites, the Amish, the Bruderhof (the publishers of Plough), and similar traditions remain much as they have for decades or centuries.
But the kind of Anabaptism that was crucial to the growth of my faith as a young adult—distinctive and traditional but not insular or anachronistic—does seem to be in jeopardy here. Its withering would be a great loss.
Though a cross-country move has landed me in an Anglican church for a variety of reasons, I still consider myself an Anabaptist. I realize the forebears of the tradition might disagree, to which I can only say that I aspire to imitate them more than I do.
I hope the movement they started will be robust and vibrant another 500 years hence, if the Lord tarries. I hope it will be available to other Christians, especially young ones, who may be inspired by their model of radical commitment to Christ.
Bonnie Kristian is editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
The post The Peace Church that Changed My Life appeared first on Christianity Today.