One Doctrine, Different Strictness

Every major Anabaptist descendant body still names nonresistance and nonconformity as its own, but the doctrine has never dictated a single practical shape. Mennonite conferences range today from Old Order communities that dress plainly, avoid state entanglement, and decline to vote or serve on juries, to Mennonite Church USA congregations largely indistinguishable in daily life from other Protestants while still teaching pacifism as church doctrine and supporting conscientious objection to military service.

The Hutterite colonies took the same premise toward full community of goods, reasoning that nonconformity to the world extends to private property itself. The Amish, who split from the Swiss Mennonites in 1693 under Jakob Ammann, read the doctrine as requiring a far more visible and continuously renewed boundary, expressed through the Ordnung each church district maintains rather than through the doctrine of nonresistance alone. What holds the family together is the shared refusal, unbroken since Schleitheim, to accept that Christian discipleship and the sword can occupy the same hands, and the shared conviction that a church which blends into the surrounding society has already compromised something Schleitheim considered non negotiable. Persecution across four centuries, from the Swiss cantons to Reformation-era Netherlands to Soviet Russia, only confirmed for most Anabaptist communities that separation from state power was not an accident of history but a doctrine worth suffering for, even as they disagreed among themselves on exactly how far separation should reach into ordinary daily life.