Currently reading: “Mennonite in a Little Black Dress”
Brandon bought me this book as a surprise Mother’s Day gift last week. Yes, he picked it out on his very own! And he picked a gooder.
I laughed out loud. Elizabeth Gilbert said she did the same, but she probably isn’t Mennonite. And even though my mom could definitely relate more to the anecdotal stories about growing up Mennonite*, Rhoda Janzen wrote about Verenike – enough to make her my very favourite author EVAR. Her Mennonite family currently lives in California, but came to America through Ontario and Saskatchewan. Her great-aunt immigrated to Saskatoon. Probably right around the same time as my great-grandparents.
As someone who has answered the “Mennonite? Don’t they drive around in horse-drawn buggies, shun technology and wear doilies on their heads?” questions every time my family heritage comes up, I especially liked Ms. Janzen’s little history appendix at the back of the book.
Clearly the dominant American culture confuses us Mennonites with the Amish, who in fact began as an insurgent faction rebelling from the Mennonites. The Amish cut away from the Mennonites in 1693 because the rest of us were too liberal. That’s rich, no? A liberal Mennonite is an oxymoron if ever there was one.
So many Mennonite beliefs and practices are conservative that folks are perplexed by what they see as a curious dichotomy. On the one hand, the Mennonites resist change with their narrow doxy and their old-fashioned commitment to family values. On the other hand, those same Mennonites have actually identified with some leftist attitudes over the course of their near-five-hundred-year history. Because they are pro-peace, they are antiwar. Because they are nonviolent, they oppose the death penalty. Because they are anticonsumer, they promote a simple lifestyle that advocates for the environment. It’s a curious collision of opposing forces that even today results in split political filiations among American Mennonite churches. Some are Republican; others lean Democrat.
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*My siblings and I were way more mainstream. I even had a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox in kindergarten!