Months before the November 2024 election, I began to prepare my church for the possibility of a second Trump term. I knew that ascendancy of Donald Trump to the highest office in the country would bring pain and difficulty to our church and our community. Already, in the first few weeks of office, those predictions have come to pass.
The trans people in my church worry about their future as the federal government attempts to enforce gender binaries based on dubious biological claims. We are a church that includes first generation Americans and people with unsettled immigration status. Our concern for their well-being grows as the new administration targets both undocumented immigrants and those who have arrived in this country through designated legal channels.
We watch the threat of authoritarianism grow with an unconstitutional executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship. As a church with Latine, Black, and Asian members, we are horrified to see Trump’s appointees roll back civil rights protections and purge government agencies of those committed to antiracism and those charged with nonpartisan accountability.
During these terrible days, Raleigh Mennonite Church has been a place of refuge and safety. We return to one another, week after week, to find the place where we can find comfort and strengthen, provide materially for one another, plan our resistance to rising authoritarianism and work to protect those in our community who are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
The Mennonite tradition has given us theological and ecclesial resources that guide us in our collective work as an outpost of the body of Jesus. We have clung to the witness of our spiritual ancestors who refused to enact violence against their enemies even as they took a bold stance of resistance against the state-church. We’ve held fast to the stories of Anabaptists whose radical call for peace challenged the authoritarian regimes of their countries, often leading to their own suffering.
But there is another strain within Anabaptism — the survivalist tradition. In late 2024, the Washington Post published an article revealing the most Republican names according to public election data: Andy Byler, Steven Stoltzfus, Elmer Stoltzfus, Jacob Stoltzfus and Benuel Stoltzfus. These are ethnic Anabaptist names, names that come from Pennsylvania and Midwest Amish communities. They constitute the most reliable Republican bloc in the United States.
This may come as a surprise to those outside the Mennonite church who associate our tradition with either nonparticipation in the state or the “transformative tradition” that provides a living witness to Jesus through intentional works of peace and justice. The Amish buck both expectations.
While the idea of an Amish Super Pac may be baffling based on our theology, a recent Anabaptist World article offered insight into the Trumpism among my co-religionists. It’s likely that most people who call themselves Anabaptists in the United States voted for Trump in this election. In their article, Levi and Daniel Miller explain why.
The authors name the complexity within our religious community. Some people vote, and some do not. All are bound by “common theological threads such as the centrality of Christ, the Christian community and reconciliation in interpreting scripture.”
Next the Millers explain that the economy was the primary issue for them and other Mennonites in the 2024 presidential election. They cite their belief that government spending is raising inflation, making people poorer and unable to afford their basic needs.
There is no evidence for this — inflation is caused by supply chain issues, energy price volatility and corporate greed (charging more for products), not government spending. But the myth of Big Government taking away the ability of free markets to reward those who are willing to work lives on in Amish country.
They next talk about “character,” which may surprise Christians who are horrified by Donald Trump’s status as a convicted felon, who was found liable for sexual abuse by a jury, who had an affair while his wife was pregnant, who makes fun of disabled people and jokes about grabbing women’s genitals. But, for the authors, if Trump falters, he has at least brought in JD Vance to represent the kind of moral Christian character the Millers would like to see guiding our country — a man who managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a wealthy success.
The Millers mention the good of free market economies twice in their assessment as to why many Mennonites voted for Trump. The authors seem to believe that the free market will work for those who work hard. They don’t account for how the free market has led to the accumulation of vast wealth among a very few at the expense of most people, or how the insatiable appetites of these markets have led to the destruction of our planet and the climate disasters we are already experiencing (Mennonite farmers are one of the primary sources of Brazilian deforestation). They don’t share my concerns about the racialized nature of our economy, and how systems that benefit white people continue to disadvantage those who don’t look like most white ethnic Mennonites.
The final reason the Millers suggest Mennonites voted for Trump is their new appreciation for Christendom. Anabaptists faced terrible persecution in our emergence but, the writers explain, we now experience a Christendom that provides safe passage for Christians like the Millers. “Christendom,” they write, “has provided us some stability on traditional marriage, family and sexual norms.” In other words, instead of being a minority, struggling for survival, these Anabaptists now enjoy their status as the center of the social order, with the power of the government at their back.
I know that many people were angry that Anabaptist World published this article, but for me and my community, this article was a warning about what happens to us as a people when we pursue survival at any cost. Our Anabaptist history is one of radical commitment to the gospel, but it is also one in which white, ethnic Anabaptists responded to the trauma of persecution and displacement by aligning themselves with the sinful and deadly interests of the state.
Following their displacement and persecution in Europe, European Mennonites emigrated to the Americas. They were welcomed with open arms as hardworking farmers who stayed out of government business. While claiming non-resistance and refusing to bear arms, these communities were more than willing to claim the lands of Indigenous peoples who were eradicated or displaced by the U.S. military.
At Raleigh Mennonite Church, we are part of the Repair Network to atone for this sin, undo the Doctrine of Discovery and to discover the ways we can thwart colonialism in the present.
The rise of the Third Reich in Europe was another time when ethnic Mennonites assured their survival by racializing their identity. Because European Mennonites lived in cloistered communities for centuries, the Nazis saw Mennonites as an ideal Aryan race to study and quantify. Nazis undertook extensive documentation of Mennonites’ “pure German blood.” Many Mennonites in Europe embraced their racial purity status.
By 1933 the United (Vereinigung) Mennonites stopped asking for conscientious objector status from the German government. In 1934 the Danzig Mennonites removed pacifism from their confession of faith. Mennonites under the Third Reich wanted to survive, and they embraced Christendom’s favoritism, first accepting the protection of Nazis and eventually aiding their terror by serving in every branch of the military, running concentration camps, and swearing oaths to Hitler.
German Mennonites shifted their theology from voluntary membership in a visible church to a blood-bound nation. They reiterated conspiracy theories about the Jews, scapegoating their historic trauma onto this vulnerable and persecuted people.
Despite being outside the fold of ethnic Mennonites, I am vigilant in my commitment to learn from the disasters of White racialization of Mennonite identity. I am wary of uncomplicated Mennonite histories that glorify suffering without an account of the ways ethnic Mennonites secured their survival. (Healing Haunted Histories by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns is an excellent guide for those who hold both historical trauma and traumatization in their family line.)
The history of ethnic Mennonites is a history of receiving the spoils of Whiteness even as these communities fenced themselves off from active participation in the violence required to realize their (White) economic and social gain — from colonization of the Americas to relying on the police to protect their private property. I pay special attention to these contradictions when they appear in the guise of righteous pacifism.
The Millers wrote for explanation, and perhaps in hopes of empathy. Instead, I receive their assessment of Anabaptist Trumpism as an alarm to which we must heed if we are to recover witness to the peaceable kingdom in our tradition. In response, I’ve redoubled my commitment to those who refuse the seduction of Christian nationalism. I have pledged myself again to the gospel of Jesus Christ, to put myself in the place where Jesus is, among those whom the Trump administration seeks to destroy.
This article was originally published on Substack. Used with permission from the author.
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