Mennonite Ethnicity

Lately I've been thinking more about my own experience with religious ethnicities. Though my parents are both Mennonite (my dad by birth, my mom by conversion), there weren't any Mennonite churches anywhere around where I grew up. There were tons of church of the Brethren churches, though, and Brethren being the closest Anabaptist equivalent to Mennonite that we could find, I went to a Brethren church my whole life. I always thought that “Mennonite” and “Brethren” were pretty synonymous terms. From what I could tell, they both believed in pacifism and they both really liked the Sermon on the Mount—it was really only a little quibble about dunking or sprinkling baptism that divided them. Then I came to Goshen College and realized that culturally, Mennonites and Brethrens were in completely different worlds.

The Mennonites I met were so much more tied to their cultural heritage than any Brethrens I knew. They were so much more obviously a cohesive group with a fixed center, which was a direct descendant of their Mennonite past. Brethren people never played any kind of “Brethren game,” they never ate any kind of exotic foods from their Anabaptist past, they didn't use the word “community” nearly as much as Mennonites did, and they didn't uniformly brag about buying their clothes at thrift shops. Overall, Brethren people seemed much more mainstream than the Mennonites I met at Goshen. I am realizing only now that while Mennonite and church of the Brethren theology is fairly comparable, it seems that Mennonites have hung on to their heritage in a way that sets them apart as a distinct ethnicity, while Brethrens have more or less assimilated into the mainstream, culturally speaking.

Ann Hostetler writes in “The Unofficial Voice” that assigning the term “ethnicity” to a religious group is often mistrusted because it can exclude people on the basis of race. But exclusion and all, I think the term is aptly applied to Mennonites. I definitely feel a greater sense of inclusion/exclusion among Mennonites than I ever felt in the church of the Brethren. Fortunately for me, I do have ethnic Mennonite roots, so I can often pretend to be at the center of the community—until, that is, we sing 606 in chapel and I have to expose my inexperience by using the hymn book while everyone else sings from memory. When you have such a cohesive ethnic group, it seems inevitable that there must be some amount of exclusion to create the strong sense of internal community that Mennonites so value.

It's difficult to think about completely getting rid of the inside/outside paradigm in Mennonite culture, like Hildi Froese Tiessen talks about in “Beyond the Binary.” It's lovely to theorize about how nice it would be to get rid of the hierarchy of in-ness and out-ness, but if Mennonites erased those divisions, I can only see Mennonite ethnicity going the way that Brethren ethnicity has gone. As much as I would love to include everyone, I would not want Mennonites to lose their distinctive ethnic traits and become more mainstream.