Anabaptist Martyrs and the Ambivalence of Mennonite (Non-)Violence

In 2007, an official Mennonite delegation to the Vatican presented Pope Benedict with an icon of the 16th-century Dutch Anabaptist martyr Dirk Willems. Imprisoned for the capital crime of rebaptism, Dirk escaped only to turn and rescue the jailer who had fallen through the ice of a frozen lake. Dirk was recaptured and later executed. This gift to the pope was intended as a gesture of ecumenical reconciliation, pointing to Mennonite values of costly service, nonviolence, and love of enemy. Mennonites regard the 16th-century Anabaptist martyrs as their spiritual forbears who model exemplary discipleship, a discipleship which resonates with Catholic commitments. Yet, in claiming him as a martyr, Mennonites implicitly claimed that Dirk’s Catholic persecutors “hated the faith,” and thus are outside the church of Christ. Could Pope Benedict even regard Dirk as a Christian martyr, as the Mennonites implied he could? The Mennonite delegation appeared to forget that their martyr self-identity is premised on a denunciation of the Catholic (and Lutheran and Reformed) forms of Christianity which persecuted them.

Contemporary Mennonites often link their theological commitments to peacemaking with the witness of the Anabaptist martyrs, executed by the collaboration of church and civic authorities. This martyrdom tradition shapes Mennonite theologies of nonviolence, non-Christendom ecclesiology, and pacifist epistemologies. For example, a resource package intended to help Mennonite youth resist a culture of militarism features a rap by an urban Mennonite leader that draws explicitly on the legacy of Anabaptist martyrs. The recent biography of M.J. Sharp, a U.S.-Mennonite pacifist working for the UN who was murdered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2017 by those with government ties, is framed by the example of Dirk Willems and other Anabaptist martyrs.  

In this presentation, I argue that Mennonite theology—the tradition with which I identify—has not adequately wrestled with the way in which a martyrdom tradition premised on intra-Christian violence (“confessional martyrdom”) undermines nonviolent witness and causes harm in various ways. While this legacy is drawn on as positive resource for peacemaking, it also perpetuates and mask dynamics destructive to Mennonite theology and Mennonite communities. Even as Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions have, in various ways, acknowledged or asked forgiveness for their complicity in the persecution of Anabaptists, Mennonites are tempted to receive these as confirmation of their tradition’s veracity rather than as occasions for deep self-reflection and repentance.

The history of Anabaptist confessional martyrdom has fostered Mennonite sectarianism and triumphalism. While claims to be the true church are rarely stated explicitly, a sense of the superiority and spiritual self-sufficiency grounded in the theological memory of persecution hinders the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition’s reception of gifts from other Christians about whom hateful and caricatured views are perpetuated. This history has also fostered a conflation of aspirational claims about a marginal and therefore faithful church with a descriptive one, thereby furthering self-righteousness and immunizing Mennonite theology from external critique. This logic suggests that because the tradition espouses nonresistance or nonviolence, it must embody these. Violence is necessarily external to the community, and because it was (once) persecuted for righteous reasons, violence cannot be within. Emily Servant names as the “gentrification of the margins,” this tendency for Mennonites to assert their alignment with the margins as a way of way of claiming innocence and denying the possibility of abuse of power. This dynamic can be evident in the failure to hold accountable Mennonite theologian and sexual predator John Howard Yoder. It may contribute to the failure to see the violence in settler colonialism.

An impulse to counter sectarianism and seek ecumenical reconciliation may lead to a different but likewise problematic account of martyrdom identity by construing 16th century persecutors as simply “the state.” While this is motivated by a desire to affirm Catholics and Lutherans as Christians, it does not adequately reflect how the martyrdom paradigm of the early church suffering at the hands of pagan authorities is qualitatively different from confessional martyrdom within the Body of Christ. This strategy tends to problematically locate the key to martyrdom in the fact of steadfastness in the face of death rather than the content of the faith for which the martyr lives and dies. But without grounding in the particular (such as the life and death of Jesus), martyrdom becomes a powerful free-floating signifier which can be more readily put to nefarious use.

Before Mennonites offer their own martyrs as exemplars to other Christians, they ought to recognize the persecutors of the Anabaptists as one with them in the Body of Christ, as part of a complex “us” rather than an external “them.” This places violence within the historical Body of Christ and calls for repentance and moral accountability. Some reconsideration of how Anabaptist martyrs relate to Mennonite identity and ongoing peace witness is already evident in recent bilateral dialogues as well as in plans for how to mark in 2025 the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement.