The Anabaptists

On 21 January 1525, in a house in Zurich, Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock at his own request, and Blaurock then baptized the others present. They were not founding a denomination. They were finishing an argument they had been losing.

The argument was with Huldrych Zwingli, whose reformation they had joined and then outrun. Zwingli had taught them to test everything by Scripture; when they applied the test to infant baptism and to the Zurich council's authority over the church, they found no warrant for either. Zwingli agreed with much of the reasoning and would not act on it, because the reformation in Zurich proceeded at the council's pace. ★ That is the whole quarrel, and it is not really about water: they concluded that a church whose reforms wait on a city council is a church governed by a city council.

The council answered within two years. On 5 January 1527 Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat — bound and thrown from a boat, the sentence chosen as a deliberate mockery of rebaptism. He is generally reckoned the first Protestant executed by Protestants. Field A.

Schleitheim, and a movement that had to define itself fast

In February 1527, weeks after Manz's death, Michael Sattler led the drafting of the Schleitheim Articles — seven of them: believers' baptism, the ban, the breaking of bread, separation from the world, shepherds in the church, the sword, and the oath. Sattler was burned that May, his tongue cut out first; his wife was drowned days later. The confession that defines the tradition was written by a man with weeks to live, and it reads like it: nothing speculative, everything practical.

Münster — the disaster that everyone else remembered

⚠︎ In 1534–35 a violent apocalyptic faction seized the city of Münster, declared it the New Jerusalem, instituted polygamy and community of goods by force, and was destroyed by siege. They were Anabaptist in the loosest sense and repudiated by the peaceful majority — but Münster became the word "Anabaptist" for three centuries of European rulers. Field B.

Menno Simons, and the name that stuck

A Dutch Catholic priest who left the priesthood in 1536, Menno Simons spent twenty-five years as a hunted pastor gathering the scattered peaceful Anabaptists and writing them into coherence. He is why most of them are called Mennonites, and why the movement recovered from Münster at all.

And then the splits, which are the tradition's characteristic move

In 1693 Jakob Ammann broke with the Swiss Brethren over the strictness of shunning and the practice of footwashing. His followers are the Amish. The Hutterites had already gone their own way in Moravia under Jakob Hutter (burned 1536), holding full community of goods — no private property at all — which they still practise. A tradition with no mechanism to compel agreement resolves disagreement by separating, and it has done so continually for five centuries.

Read Anabaptist doctrine expecting a system and you will conclude they have none. They hold the creeds without much argument and spend almost no energy on the questions that divide the rest of this hall. Their whole weight is on one place the others treat as application: what a Christian actually does.

Nachfolge — discipleship as the centre, not the consequence

The governing idea is following. Not that discipleship follows from justification, but that following Christ is what being a Christian is. The Sermon on the Mount is read as legislation for the church rather than as an ideal to admire — which is why the sword, the oath and the lawsuit all go together. ⚠︎ Our own house should mark the risk here plainly: a tradition that centres on conduct is one illness away from making conduct the ground of standing. They are not always well, and Section X says so.

The believers' church

• Baptism on confession — an adult act of the will. Nobody is born into this.
• The ban and shunning (Meidung) — a church of the willing must be able to say who has stopped being willing. The 1693 split was about how severe this should be, which tells you how central it is.
• Community discernment. The congregation reads Scripture together and decides together — the "hermeneutic community." No bishop rules on meaning from outside.
• Gelassenheit — yielding, submission, putting one's own desires second. The single most important word in Plain life, and the engine under Field E.

The three refusals

• The sword. Not merely war: the magistracy, the police power, and personal self-defence. Schleitheim places the sword outside the perfection of Christ — ordained by God for the world, and not for the disciple.
• The oath. Refused on Matthew 5:34. A man whose word requires swearing has admitted his word is otherwise unreliable.
• The state church. Not toleration, not disestablishment as policy — the flat claim that the magistrate has no standing in the church at all. ★ They held this a full century before Dossier XIX's Baptists and never made a single exception to it.

What they do not do

They do not build systematic theology, and they do not much argue about the ordo salutis, predestination or the mode of Christ's presence. ⚠︎ This hall should record that as a real limitation and not only as humility. A tradition that will not do doctrinal work has no defence prepared when a doctrinal question finally arrives — which is exactly the situation Field F finds them in on the machine.

The Amish have no general conference, no mission board and no cooperative agency of any kind. That is not a summary. That is the complete description.

The district

The governing unit is a church district of roughly 75 baptized members — small enough to meet in a house, which is why they meet in houses. It ordains a bishop, two to four preachers and a deacon. ★ They are chosen by lot. Nominees are put forward, hymnals are set out, one contains a slip, and the man who draws it serves for life, unpaid, without having sought it. A polity that cannot be campaigned for cannot be captured by ambition — set that directly against Dossier XIX, where an annual election was the exact mechanism by which the whole denomination changed hands.

Above the district: almost nothing

Bishops of neighbouring districts confer, and affiliations drift into recognisable fellowships, but there is no assembly with authority and no office above the local one. The one exception is the Old Order Amish Steering Committee — three people, founded 1967 — and it exists to talk to the federal government, not to govern the Amish.

The Mennonite side does have conferences

Mennonite World Conference gathers 110 member churches in 61 countries, but its own charter makes it a communion, not a governing body: it may admit members and advise them, and it cannot instruct anyone. ⚠︎ The 2026 Ethiopian withdrawal is the proof: the largest member church in the world declined to host the assembly and there was no mechanism by which anyone could do anything about it except find another host.

And the vacancy nobody filled

⚠︎ The International Community of Mennonite Brethren released its global director on 1 October 2024 over a serious financial deficit and has run on its board and regional leaders since. A global body operating for nearly two years with no chief executive is not a crisis in this tradition. It is Tuesday.

★ This is the definitive Sword & State section of the entire hall, because for this tradition the sword is not a chapter of the history. It is the doctrine, and everything else follows from it.

Civil power — the position

Schleitheim, 1527, article six: the sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ, and the disciple does not bear it. Not in war. Not in the magistracy — a Christian may not serve as a magistrate, because the office requires the sword. Not in self-defence. And article seven: no oath, at all, including the civic oath. ⚠︎ Understand what these two articles cost in a sixteenth-century state: together they made the holder untriable, unswearable, unconscriptable and ungovernable. That is why the executions were so ferocious, and why they came from both sides.

Wars without — they have none, and that is the point

There is no Anabaptist war to record. ⚠︎ With one exception, and it is the tradition's permanent scar: Münster, 1534–35, where an apocalyptic faction took a city by force. Field B. Everywhere else the record is of a people who moved countries rather than take up arms — out of Switzerland, out of the Palatinate, into Russia, and out of Russia to the American plains and Canadian prairies in the 1870s when the Tsar withdrew their military exemption. Emigration as a theological act, performed repeatedly across four centuries.

Wars within — the ban, and the endless dividing

The violence this tradition has actually committed has been done to its own members with the ban. Shunning splits families; the 1693 division that produced the Amish was about how hard to shun. ⚠︎ A church that refuses all external coercion still needs a way to enforce, and the ban is it — which means the full weight of community pressure falls on the people least able to leave. This hall should not romance the peace position without recording that.

What they have won by refusing

• ★ Wisconsin v. Yoder, 15 May 1972, decided 7–0 — compulsory school attendance beyond the eighth grade held unconstitutional as applied to the Amish. One of the strongest free-exercise holdings in American law, won by people who neither vote nor sue, defended by outsiders on their behalf. Field D.
• Civilian Public Service, 1941–47. Thousands of Anabaptist objectors served in lieu of combat, many in mental hospitals — and their documented reports of conditions helped force American psychiatric reform. Refusing to fight produced a reform nobody else was positioned to make.
• Germantown, 1688 — Mennonites and Quakers issue the first formal protest against slavery in the American colonies.

Infiltration — the one office the state created

★ The cleanest fact in this dossier. The Amish built no national body for three centuries. Then in 1967, facing the Vietnam draft and the alternative-service question, they created the Old Order Amish Steering Committee — three people — which has since handled labour law, photo identification, workers' compensation, insurance and Social Security. The only national institution in Plain America was called into being by the state's demand for their sons, and it exists to negotiate with the state and for nothing else. ⚠︎ The state did not infiltrate this church. It could not find a door. So it compelled the church to build one.

⚠︎ The range here is wider than in any other dossier in the hall, and a reader who takes the Amish as typical will be wrong about 95% of the tradition.

An Old Order Amish service

• There is no church building. Worship rotates through members' homes and barns — which is why the district is capped at about the number a house will hold.
• Three hours or more. Backless benches, men and women seated separately.
• Unaccompanied unison singing from the Ausbund — the oldest hymnal in continuous use in Christendom, much of it written by imprisoned Anabaptists in the 1530s. Sung extremely slowly: a single hymn can run a quarter of an hour.
• Two sermons, extempore, in Pennsylvania Dutch, by men who did not choose to be preachers and are not paid.
• Communion twice yearly, with footwashing, and only after the district has achieved unity — if there is unresolved conflict, communion is postponed.

A Mennonite service in Addis Ababa, Jakarta or Kinshasa

Where 84% of the tradition actually is, you would walk into something largely unrecognisable from the above: full congregational singing with instruments, contemporary worship, lengthy preaching, and in the Ethiopian churches an intensity of prayer and expectation closer to Dossier VI than to Lancaster County. Meserete Kristos grew from ten to 800,000 in seventy-five years, much of it while illegal under the Derg, and it did not do that quietly.

And a North American Mennonite service

Plain to moderate: hymnody in four-part harmony sung well and without instruments in many congregations, simple sanctuaries, strong emphasis on peace and service, and a congregational business meeting that works by discernment toward consensus rather than by motion and vote.

1 · Five hundred years old, and counted

2025 was the 500th anniversary, commemorated in Zurich on 29 May 2025 under the theme "The Courage to Love" — in the city that drowned Felix Manz. The wider family stands at 2.13 million baptized in 86 countries; MWC at 1.44 million across 110 member churches in 61 countries.

2 · The Plain branches are growing very fast, by birth

The Amish grew 131% between 2000 and 2025, from about 177,910 to 410,955, with nine new settlements in a single recent year and none dissolved. Hutterites reached roughly 58,000 in 544 colonies, colonies up 12.6% since 2009. ⚠︎ But the Hutterite fertility rate has fallen from above nine in the 1940s to about three or four, with later marriage and rising defection. The growth is real and the engine is slowing.

3 · The unity crisis is live, and it broke along the North–South line

⚠︎ Ethiopia's Meserete Kristos Church — the largest member body in the world — withdrew its invitation to host the 2028 world assembly after conflict over its links to North American churches that accept same-sex marriage. Assembly 18 moved to Tanzania on the Executive Committee's acceptance of a new invitation. ★ Note the shape: this is the same fault line that split the Anglican communion in Dossier XVII, arriving in a tradition with no communion structure to split. What happened instead was that the host simply withdrew.

4 · The institutions are thin and getting thinner

⚠︎ ICOMB has had no global director since 1 October 2024, released over a serious financial deficit. MCC U.S. changed executive directors this month — Rukshan Fernando in, Ann Graber Hershberger retired. A tradition that never invested in central institutions has few to lose and correspondingly little to hold it together when a dispute of this size arrives.

• ★ The Plain people will still be here, and this is the safest forecast in the hall. They have survived Zurich, the Habsburgs, the Tsar, two world wars and the entire twentieth century with nothing to confiscate and no leadership to arrest. A body with a high birth rate, a working retention mechanism and no seizable centre is very close to indestructible.
• They will be much larger and much less European. At current rates the Amish alone pass a million within decades; the Mennonite centre of gravity moves further into Africa.
• ⚠︎ The retention question is the real one. Hutterite fertility has already fallen from nine to three or four with rising defection. The Plain model depends on a birth rate and a retention rate simultaneously; if either fails the arithmetic reverses quickly.
• ⚠︎ The North–South rupture will not be repaired, because there is no mechanism to repair it. Forecast: not schism — quiet non-association. Bodies stop inviting each other and continue to exist. That is what this polity does instead of splitting, and it is why it never has a decisive crisis.
• ★ And the interesting one: their technology practice becomes legible to everybody else. As machine capability increases, a five-century-old protocol for adopting tools without being reorganised by them stops looking quaint and starts looking like the only method anyone has actually tested. Field F.

⚠︎★ The answer here is genuinely double, and the hall must record both halves or it will report this tradition wrongly.

Half one: there is no doctrine, and none is claimed

NO POSITION ON RECORD. This pass found no formal Anabaptist or Mennonite statement, resolution or framework on artificial intelligence. There is a live argument on Anabaptist college campuses about whether generative tools belong there at all, and observers are pressing Anabaptist institutions to explain how adopting them coheres with commitments to neighbourly love, peace, and a third way between conformity and withdrawal. ⚠︎ But there is no document. Recorded as an absence, exactly as the Assyrian dossier's Field F was — and for the same reason: an absence must never be reported as a position.

★ Set that beside Dossier XIX and the contrast is the sharpest in the hall. The Baptists wrote three statements in seven years and are the tradition with the doctrine. Their nearest cousins have written nothing at all.

Half two: they have the best practice in the hall, and it is five hundred years old

The Amish are not against technology. That is the universal misreading. They are against being changed by it without consent, and they run an actual procedure to prevent it:

• ★ The question is never "is this modern?" It is whether the thing will damage family life, faith, or the community's togetherness — weighed for spiritual well-being, social cohesion and economic viability.
• The decision is local. Each district decides for itself through its Ordnung — and the Ordnung is deliberately unwritten, which keeps it dynamic and revisable rather than a statute to be lawyered.
• Adoption is preceded by testing. They watch, try, and think through downstream consequences before committing — the eye is on what the tool does to the community in thirty years, not on what it does this quarter.
• They separate owning from using, and access from possession. A tool may be used at the shop and not owned in the home; used by arrangement and not installed. The distinction is the whole craft.
• They modify rather than accept. Scholars describe them "Amishizing" or hacking a technology so its benefits can be had without its default social shape.
• Answers legitimately differ between districts, and nobody is required to harmonise. The variation is a feature: it is a distributed experiment with many arms.

• Above them: Zwingli's Zurich reformation, which they joined and then outran. They are the Reformed reformation carried to a conclusion Zurich would not accept.
• Beside them, and constantly confused with them: ⚠︎ the Baptists (Dossier XIX) — same conclusion on baptism, different ancestry, and they arrived independently about eighty years later. Most Baptists will swear an oath, hold office and bear arms. These will not. Do not merge the files.
• Within them: Mennonites, Amish (1693), Hutterites (community of goods), Brethren (Pietist, 1708), Brethren in Christ, Bruderhof (1920). Related by conviction, separated by exactly the disputes a body with no arbitration mechanism cannot settle.
• Downstream of them: the modern peace church tradition, much of Christian nonviolence theory, and — through John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus and Stanley Hauerwas — a large share of late twentieth-century Protestant ethics. ⚠︎ Yoder's own record of sexual abuse is documented and is dealt with in Section XI rather than omitted.
• Nearest to us: on the state, closer than anyone in the hall — they hold our position and hold it harder. On the sword, further than almost anyone. This is the file where we agree most about the magistrate and least about what a Christian may do in the world.

That is the strongest single argument made by any group in this hall, and it should be conceded almost entirely. The historical claim is true: the Anabaptists have no crusade, no inquisition, no established church and no blessed war to answer for. Every other Christian body mapped here has at least one, and the hall has now recorded them one by one.

Where the answer lies is narrower than it first appears, and it is two things.

First, the clean record is partly a function of never having had the option. A movement hunted from its second year and thereafter mostly rural and tiny was never offered the temptation the others failed. Münster is the one occasion when a faction did get a city — and what it did with it was atrocious. That is a single data point and it should not be pressed too far, but it cannot be waved away either. Field B.

Second, and more serious: the refusal of the magistracy is not obviously obedience — it may be delegation. They accept the protection of a state whose sword they will not carry, are defended by police they will not serve as, and won Yoder in courts they will not sue in. Schleitheim's answer is that the sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ, so someone must bear it and it must not be us — which concedes that the office is legitimate and declines to staff it. ⚠︎ Our house's counter is that an office God ordains is an office a Christian may hold, and that leaving it entirely to the unbelieving is not obedience but abdication. That is the real argument, and it is not settled by either side quoting Matthew 5.

Strengths

• ★ The cleanest hands in this hall. No crusade, no inquisition, no state church, no blessed war.
• Effectively indestructible polity — nothing central to seize.
• The strongest retention and birth rates in the hall among the Plain branches.
• ★ A tested, working method for living beside powerful technology.
• Relief and peace work (MCC) far out of proportion to their size.
• Genuinely global: 84% of the tradition is African, Asian or Latin American.

Fault-lines

• ⚠︎ No doctrinal capacity. Nothing prepared when a new question arrives. Field F.
• ⚠︎ No mechanism to settle disagreement — so they divide, and have for five hundred years.
• ⚠︎ The ban's coercive weight on those with nowhere to go.
• ⚠︎ Institutional thinness — ICOMB has run without a director since October 2024.
• ⚠︎ The North–South rupture is live and unfixable by any existing structure.
• ⚠︎ Yoder, and what it says about a discipline-centred polity that could not discipline its own most celebrated son.
• ⚠︎ Falling Hutterite fertility — the growth engine is slowing.

• Never call them Baptists and never call the Baptists Anabaptists. Different ancestry, different conclusions on the oath, the magistracy and the sword. Dossier XIX is a separate file for a reason.
• ⚠︎ Never open with Münster. It is the single laziest move available and it is what their persecutors used for three centuries. If it comes up, it comes up from us as Field B — with the repudiation attached.
• Do not romanticise the Plain life. They are not a costume or a simpler age. Ordination by lot, the ban, and communion postponed for unity are hard practices carried by real people.
• Argue the sword at the level of the magistracy, not of war. The pacifism question is where both sides recite; the live question is whether a Christian may hold an office that bears the sword, and that is a genuine argument between us.
• ★ Go to them for method, not for doctrine. They have no statement on anything modern and the best practice in the hall. Ask how a district decides, not what the tradition holds.
• Read the Martyrs Mirror before forming a view about their seriousness.

The dead

• Conrad Grebel (c.1498–1526) · George Blaurock (burned 1529) · Felix Manz (drowned 1527) — the three men in the room on 21 January 1525.
• Michael Sattler (burned 1527) — the Schleitheim Articles.
• Menno Simons (1496–1561) — the name, and the recovery after Münster.
• Jakob Hutter (burned 1536) · Jakob Ammann (the 1693 division).
• Thieleman J. van Braght — the Martyrs Mirror, 1660.
• ⚠︎ John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) — The Politics of Jesus. Read with Section X's entry open; the abuse record is documented and is part of the file.

The living — see the deck for all 15

• Desalegn Abebe (A♠) — Ethiopia, and the actual centre of gravity.
• César García (K♠) · Henk Stenvers (Q♠) — MWC.
• ★ Donald B. Kraybill (A♦), Steven M. Nolt (K♦), Karen M. Johnson-Weiner (Q♦) — read The Amish and What the Amish Teach Us before anything else on Field F.
• Christ Blank (A♣) — the one national Amish office.

Documents

• The Schleitheim Articles, 1527 — seven articles, and short enough to read in one sitting.
• The Dordrecht Confession, 1632.
• The Martyrs Mirror, 1660 · the Ausbund — the oldest hymnal in continuous use in Christendom.