This session explores the idea of violence and nonviolence in relation to borders, global migration and Christianity. Borders are spaces of death and life. Established identities are stretched, at times inciting conflict and at other times transformation. New identities emerge. The papers in this session will cross the issues of migration and Catholic Social Teaching, as well as indigenous peoples and ecclesial membership.
Contemporary Mennonites link their theological commitments to nonviolence, peacemaking, and non-Christendom ecclesiology with the witness of the 16th-century Anabaptist martyrs, executed by collaborating church and civic authorities. Yet, interpreting Anabaptist deaths in a martyrdom paradigm implies the denunciation of the Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed persecutors who acted in “hatred of the faith,” an implication typically denied or forgotten, yet one which resurfaces in Mennonite theologies and practices in problematic ways. In this presentation, I argue that a confessional martyr tradition cannot itself sustain a nonviolent witness without a more direct reckoning with its own complicity in church division. While Anabaptist martyrs may inspire peace practices, their legacy may also foster self-righteousness, sectarianism, settler colonialism, the denial of violence within Mennonite communities, and resistance to external critique. Mennonite theology must reflect more deeply on how its martyrdom identity is implicated in patterns of violence.
This paper critically examines Anabaptist political ecclesiology, beginning with the assertion that willingly accepting suffering at the hand of one’s abusers is salvific, redemptive, and transformative. This approach, known as “revolutionary subordination”, has been devastating to victims of sexual and gendered violences in Anabaptist ecclesial communities. Given that Anabaptists root political theology in the suffering of Jesus on the cross, “revolutionary subordination” can be challenged with historical and theological analyses of the crucifixion as an act of imperial violence, one that strips victims of their dignity and humanity. If we begin to understand violence as the imposition of “shame” on crucified and penetrated bodies, we can better understanding the cross's fundamental rebuke of violent self-aggrandizement, including that of colonization, patriarchy, racial capitalism, and spiritual abuse. Then, we will better articulate both peace and cruciformity as radical identification with the suffering and rebuke of their abusers.
The familiar rationale for Mennonite consensus-finding is that it evenly distributes power among all members. By resisting the tendency toward hierarchy, the reasoning goes, Mennonites foster traits that are conducive to peacemaking: a sense of responsibility, practice expressing their views, and the skills needed for dialogical problem-solving. Thus, church meetings where everyone sits in a circle and bickers about the budget play a role in forging the traits necessary for standing up for peace in a violent world. This familiar explanation has come under some criticism, however, about its naivete with regard to power. This paper surveys these critiques—and makes some of its own—before arguing that Mennonite ecclesiology can nonetheless foster virtues of dissent and an alternative moral imagination that calls into question the antagonistic, zero-sum assumptions that sustain and escalate violence.
This paper will draw upon the historical events of Mary Dyer, along with Anne Hutchinson, and their conflict with the Puritan community, to suggest that five themes were going forward in the emerging Quakerism vis-à-vis Puritanism. These themes remain relevant today: (1) a challenge to the notion of religion as ethics; (2) a challenge to the scapegoating tendency of certain religious attitudes; (3) a priority given to the role of experience as foundational to religious understanding; (4) a rise in the authority of women’s voices in religious matters; and (5) an ecclesial understanding of friendship.