The Activist Impulse: Three More Historical Case Studies

As part of their shared activist impulse, evangelicals and Anabaptists have both maintained a commitment to a robust public witness. Such a public witness, broadly construed, includes a number of intersecting concerns: evangelism, missions, and a host of social and political issues. As the following chapters describe, these intersecting and overlapping concerns create both moments of tension and moments of creative synthesis between these two traditions.

One early experiment in maintaining an evangelical Anabaptist public witness was the Mennonite Brethren in Christ, which consolidated several Anabaptist groups, all of which had evangelical leanings, and would eventually become part of what is now the Missionary Church. In their chapter,  “Practicing Peace, Embracing Evangelism: Missional Tensions in the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church,” Matthew Eaton, doctoral student in theology and ecology at the University of Toronto, and Bethel College writing instructor, Joel Boehner,  explore the founding of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ and its attempt to integrate evangelicalism and Anabaptism. They focus specifically on the ethical question of war as represented in the Gospel Banner, the official serial of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ. Eaton and Boehner argue that the early history of this American denomination demonstrates that evangelicalism and Anabaptism can successfully coexist in a single institution and actually enhance the distinct identity of both traditions by mutually reinforcing the primary concerns of each: nonviolence for Anabaptism and missions for evangelicalism. At the same time, they document how such a creative synthesis can be a tenuous one, with the possibility of one side of the synthesis overwhelming the other.

Unfortunately, historical discussions of Anabaptism and evangelicalism in North America have tended to focus primarily—if not at times exclusively—on white males. The following two chapters, by Texas A&M historian, Felipe Hinojosa, and Asbury College historian, David Swartz, offer helpful correctives to that trend by discussing the relationship of Anabaptism and evangelicalism with special attention to Latinas/os and women, respectively. In his chapter, “'Pool Tables are the Devil’s Playground': Forging an Evangelico-Anabautista Identity in South Texas,” Hinojosa further examines Mennonite missions by focusing specifically on missionary activity among Mexican Americans in South Texas after World War II. Amid a hotbed of religious competition, Mennonites adopted many of the same outreach methods as evangelicals. But it was the work of the Mennonite Voluntary Service, Hinojosa argues, that ultimately proved more attractive and provided the means for forging the religious identity of these Mexican Americans as both evangélicos and anabautistas.

Just as missions at times has been a unifying concern between evangelicals and Anabaptists, so too has the realm of politics, especially between socially progressive Anabaptists and the so-called “evangelical left.” In his chapter, “Re-Baptizing Evangelicalism: American Anabaptists and the 1970s Evangelical Left,” David Swartz highlights major figures from the 1960s onward, placing the Anabaptist evangelical relationship in its political context. Swartz offers a compelling analysis of the evangelical left that challenges traditional interpretations of the Anabaptist-evangelical relationship. While Anabaptist historians at times portrayed Anabaptists as the victims of evangelicalism’s corrupting influences, Swartz demonstrates that among left-of-center evangelicals, Anabaptists have exerted a surprising degree of influence. He notably traces, for example, the influence of Anabaptist author and activist Doris Longacre on the simple living movement as well as the work of Lareta Halteman Finger and a number of other Anabaptist women and men to enable the rise of evangelical feminism in the late 1970s. Swartz also suggests strong continuity between 1970s thinkers and activists such as Ron Sider and John Howard Yoder and contemporary neo-Anabaptist evangelicals such as Gregory Boyd and Shane Claiborne. For more on the evangelical left, be sure to check out Swartz's blog and forthcoming book, The Moral Minority.*

*This post is slightly adapted from The Activist Impulse, pages 215-16.