Anabaptists, Mennonites, Amish, Pietists, Brethren *and Calvinists

In the part of northern Indiana I come from, there are quite a few Amish, and also quite a few members of the Church of the Brethren, the church in which I was raised, and also several other denominations which have "Brethren" in their names: Conservative Grace Brethren, Fellowship of Grace Brethren, Dunkard Brethren and others.

The Church of the Brethren and the Amish both are Anabaptist denominations. Anabaptists are pacifists. They do not believe in infant baptism. The children of their congregations grow to a certain age, and then they may be baptized and join the church, or not, supposedly of their own free will and with no coercion. I'm sure that the actual measure of coercion varies greatly from congregation to congregation, and from one family to another within that congregation. I have to say that, in my own particular case, as I no longer hold certain religious beliefs with which I was raised, most of my extended family, and other Brethren whom I happen to meet, have continued to accept me as I am, with a really remarkable lack of either judgment or shunning.

Anabaptists split away very early from the main Lutheran church. The first Anabaptist martyr, Felix Manz, was drowned by Lutherans in Zurich in 1527. That's just six years after Luther himself, then a Catholic monk, was declared a heretic. Lutherans wasted no damn time at all in persecuting their own heretics.

Mennonites are also Anabaptists.

The Amish are named after the Anabaptist leader Jakob Amman, born 1644, died early 18th century. The Mennonite church goes all the way back to one of the very first anabaptist leaders, Menno Simons, born 1496, died 1561.

However, the Church of the Brethren are not directed descended from that very first group of Anabaptists. Rather, it came from the Schwarzenau Brethren, who left Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist* churches and joined the Anabaptist movement during the 17th and 18th centuries. Alexander Mack was an early leader of the Schwarzenau Brethren.         *Calvinists do not call themselves Calvinists. They call themselves members of the Reformed Church. They are extremely annoying nit-pickers who love to correct people about things that don't mean shit, such as that they (supposedly) are not Calvinists.

The Schwarzenau Brethren are part of a larger Protestant movement emphasizing pacifism and a personal understanding of God, known as Pietism. 

Right from the first, denominations split off from the Schwarzenau Brethren. There are some churches called "Brethren" which did not come from the Schwarzenau Brethren, and a lot which did. There were numerous splits during the 1880's and afterward. It gets really complicated. The Church of the Brethren, the church of my family, one of the Brethren denominations who chose the "progressive" path rather than the rejection of modernity, adopted that name in 1905, changing from German Baptist Brethren. Which denomination is the true inheritor of the Schwarzenau Brethren, and which have left their path, is, I am fairly certain, a matter of some dispute, and often highly influenced by which denomination one happens to belong to or feel most sympathetic to.

The Church of the Brethren

I was born in 1961, and I grew up in a small, conservative town in rural Indiana. First thing in the morning in every classroom in our school, everyone would stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

That is, almost everyone. At the time -- I'm an atheist now -- my family's religion, the Church of the Brethren, part of an offshot of Lutheranism known as Pietism, said that we weren't supposed to carry guns, not even if we were drafted into the military. The Bible says that Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek. In the Church of the Brethren, we interpreted this as an instruction to be strictly pacifistic. And we weren't supposed to swear on a Bible, not even if we were witnesses in court.

And our denomination also said that we weren't supposed to sing the Star-Spangled Banner or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Nor were we supposed to rise to our feet while others did so. So every day at school, first thing in the morning, everybody else in my classroom rose to their feet and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, while I stayed seated and said nothing. At sporting events, almost everyone sang the national anthem, but those who attended our church stayed seated and didn't sing. If we had to testify in court, we didn't swear to tell the truth, and we didn't touch the Bible. We simply promised to tell the truth.

The thing is, I don't remember anyone ever giving me a hard time about any of this. Sometimes people were curious and asked me why I did this or that differently, and we talked about. But I never got into an argument with anyone about: I expalined how we did things in our church, and that was fine with them. No one ever called me a son of a bitch over it. No one ever stood outside of our little white-painted church carrying picket signs. No one ever called us un-American. We weren't jailed for contempt of court because we behaved differently in court. In the earliest days of the US, people of our denomination sometimes got into trouble for being conscientious objectors to military service, but by the early 19th century, that got straightened out too: we had explained the reasons for our behavior to the United States, and the United States has accepted those reasons ever since, and instead of joining the military, young men from our church would work in military hospitals or do construction work in postwar areas which needed to be rebuilt.

People listened to the reasons for our behavior and accepted them. And conversely, we never accused others of being wicked or un-Christian, because they had different beliefs and did a few things differently than we did. Because when you get right down to cases, very few people are as bigoted, unreasonable or downright dense as our current President.