Dr. Maxwell Kennel

Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies

Director of Pandora Press and Editor of the Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies Series.

Co-Investigator on the CREATE Project and Affiliate at the Arcand Centre for Health Equity at NOSM University.

Author of Postsecular History (Palgrave, 2022) and Ontologies of Violence (Brill, 2023), and editor of Astrid von Schlachta’s Anabaptists. Trans. Vic Thiessen (Pandora, 2024), and Robert Friedmann’s Design for Living (Wipf & Stock, 2017).

“Beyond the Crises of Origins and Ends” (Elizabethtown Conference: Early Anabaptism in Global Perspective)

Beyond the Crises of Origins and Ends

Theopolitical Normativity in Anabaptist Historiography

maxwell kennel

Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College

EARLY ANABAPTISM IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Past, Present, and Future at 500 Years

July 23, 2025.

Presented remotely, with thanks to Steve Nolt.

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The Anabaptists have been described using categories like the “Radical Reformation” or the “Left Wing of the Reformation,” although many contemporary historians have rightly challenged these designations and the supposedly stable centers against which they are positioned – I am thinking here, in particular, of Mike Driedger’s essential essay “Against the Radical Reformation.”

As I continue to edit the Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies series with Pandora Press (which has just published important works by Astrid von Schlachta, James Stayer, and Thomas Kaufmann, and which will soon publish works on Anabaptism by Friedrich Durrenmatt, Hans-Jurgen Goertz, and Gottfried Seebass), I am becoming more and more aware of how varied and diverse the reception of Anabaptist history continues to be.

Anabaptism is a fascinating and fraught area of study for historians in particular, often because the Anabaptist groups are textured and layered in ways that resist easy or representative summary. Even in terms of one of their most representative characteristics – their approach to violence – it is clear that some Anabaptists are exemplars of nonresistant martyrdom and defenselessness that refuses to retaliate, while others became demonized representatives of violent theocracy. Even on this central point of distinction, it is difficult to say one thing about Anabaptism – as an -ism – that isn’t challenged by another place or period in their history.

Anabaptist historiography reflects this set of tensions, differences, and contradictions. Here is a whirlwind tour: the historiography of the Anabaptist groups has unfolded through many stages, beginning with the polemical rejection of the Anabaptists as violent fanatics and enthusiasts arising from the often-decontextualized accounts of the siege at Münster (as is found in the works of Heinrich Bullinger and later Catholic and Lutheran polemics), then proceeding to the recovery of the Anabaptists as moral exemplars for Mennonite pacifism (as normatively advanced by confessional historians in the 1950s–1970s, often called “the Bender school” after Harold S. Bender), followed by a critique of both the simplistic emphasis on pure and singular origins of Anabaptism and the normative idealization of the Anabaptists (levelled by social historians of the “polygenesis” school in the 1980s–1990s), followed by a post-confessional period of complexity and ferment in the mid-1990s where studies like C. Arnold Snyder’s Anabaptist History and Theology and Hans-Jürgen Goertz’s The Anabaptists mediated between confessional-theological and historical-sociopolitical interests in an effort to dignify both without being limited by either (albeit in very different ways).

The studies of early Anabaptism by Snyder and Goertz have remained standard scholarly English-language works on Anabaptist history since their publication over thirty years ago. Conspicuously, in the past quarter-century, no comprehensive and field-defining histories of the Anabaptists as a whole have been published (perhaps apart from the third edition of George Huntston Williams’ The Radical Reformation in 2000). Two popular histories of the Mennonites were published in the intervening period, but the audience of these texts were not scholars but high-school students and confessional adherents.

However, the year 2025 marks the 500-year anniversary of the beginnings of the Anabaptist movements, and it is interesting then, that two new comprehensive histories of the Anabaptist groups have just been published in English in 2024. The first is Troy Osborne’s Radicals and Reformers: A Survey of Global Anabaptist History, and the second is Astrid von Schlachta’s Anabaptists: From the Reformation to the 21st Century (originally published in German in 2020, and published in English translation in late 2024).

I will disclose here that I studied under Troy Osborne as a graduate student, and that I am the series and volume editor of Victor Thiessen’s translation of Astrid von Schlachta’s book, so my approach to these two texts is anything but impartial. But it is precisely the inescapably normative and value-laden character of the interpretation of Anabaptist history that this presentation is focused on.

Specifically, the question I will turn to now concerns how the relationship between normativity and description is configured in these two recent histories of Anabaptism, and specifically how the historiographical mediation between accounts of what is and claims about what ought to be bears upon the future of the conversation.

In the abstract for this presentation, I have promised to present a realist option that affirms the inherent normativity of all historical writing without abandoning history to the problems that arise when confessional and secular historians see what they want to see in the past. That’s a tall order, but it is a necessary one. So, I will briefly field some methodological tensions between the two new books by von Schlachta and Osborne, and then move to some suggestions for how to reckon with normativity in Anabaptist historiography.

Both of these new Anabaptist history books are sweeping treatments of Anabaptism that try to move across time and space to collect what is most salient about the tradition and then to represent it responsibly. Both books cover the 500-year history quite well, but they do so differently. Where Osborne writes from a North American perspective, von Schlachta writes from a European perspective. Both authors are highly trained social historians who treat their subject matter responsibly, without idealizing or denigrating the Anabaptists, and both write with an angle from their specializations (Osborne on the Dutch Mennonites, and von Schlachta on the Hutterites).

For a deeper look at my own comparison of these two important books, see my article “Pacifist Historiography” forthcoming next month in the UK theory journal Angelaki. My argument in the article is that Osborne treats the Anabaptists in fair and even-handed ways, often ending his chapters with accounts of the highs and lows, withering and blossoming, faithful and unfaithful ways that Anabaptists have lived their faith. By contrast, von Schlachta ends her chapters on cliff-hangers, never resolving for the reader the significant tensions she fields in her quotations, stories, and vignettes. Both books are about 450 pages, both of them cover similar material, but they differ on a few key points.

Osborne’s book speaks of Global Anabaptism as a diverse whole, whereas von Schlachta speaks of Anabaptists in the plural; where Osborne proceeds chronologically, von Schlachta proceeds thematically, with a concluding chapter on Mennonites and art. The major methodological difference I identify is that Osborne’s liberal approach always sees “both sides” of the Anabaptist coin while von Schlachta’s European historical approach withdraws from the pressure to resolve contradictions in her subject matter. Put too bluntly, where Osborne’s Radicals and Reformers is even-handed, von Schlachta’s Anabaptists is hands off.

Now what to do with the presence of normativity in these two new Anabaptist histories, and in the field in general?

We should begin with honesty that moves beyond cliches like “everyone is biased,” toward an admission that every historian is political. Conceptualizing the Anabaptists in even-handed ways or hands-off ways is still a political thing, often reflecting methodologies indebted to political liberalism or centrism.

There is no escaping some form of political normativity, even in the most neutral sounding microhistory or generalized statement. We know that the telling of history never just is, but always gives an account of what ought to be. So the realist option must begin by admitting this, and then seeking a normative way that one ought to approach the history of the Anabaptists that doesn’t fall prey to anachronistic projection, ideological abuses of the past, or confessional narrowness.  

Some scholars still use the Anabaptists as simple moral exemplars to fund an ideological vision, making highly simplistic statements that cover over the complexities of the past. Such statements seem limiting and narrow, and they paper over some parts of Anabaptist history in favor of others.

Other scholars who rightly recognize that this is an irresponsible methodology have become so allergic to ideological uses and abuses of the past, that they have withdrawn from the very notion that the past is edifying or useful at all, taking refuge from normativity in the realm of layered and complex descriptions, to a level of abstraction which doesn’t say anything at all.

Beyond these two caricatured tendencies, Osborne and von Schlachta represent two highly developed and complex examples of historical approaches to the Anabaptists that refuse simplistic ideological readings of the past, but which nonetheless make subtle normative arguments about how the Anabaptists should be studied and followed. For both, it is a given that the Anabaptists were so diverse that any decontextualized abstract statement will always find a counterexample. It is a given that Anabaptism is too complex for simple statements like “Anabaptism is this or that.” It is always a question of what the Anabaptists were like in this specific place and time, or that specific place or time, and if a representative generalization is ventured, it risks being so tentative that it is not interesting or useful; like von Schlachta’s statement that for the Anabaptists, change is normal, or Osborne’s refrain that the Anabaptists were diverse. But beyond these vague statements, there is still politics and ethics underneath the methodologies of these two books.

For Osborne, the implicit argument is that the Anabaptists are a diverse whole with many sides over space and time, always alternating between sides of distinctions – sometimes withering, sometimes blossoming, sometimes faithful, sometimes unfaithful. By contrast, von Schlachta’s implicit argument is that the Anabaptists were not really a whole, but were scattered, plural, and diverse in ways that are contradictory when everything Anabaptist is put under one roof.

Both of these approaches, even-handed and hands-off, are options that present themselves for historians of Anabaptism. But my argument is that it is first important to acknowledge that these approaches are political, and second, that we must find more enriching ways to conceptualize Anabaptist historiography that neither retreat from normativity in these ways, nor fall into theological idealizations, anachronistic projections, or ideological abuses of the past.

In the abstract I allude to the work of three thinkers who saw all writing of history as partisan – Raoul Vaneigem, Simone Weil, and Michel de Certeau – and here I will just give a sentence on each for your information and edification, as a way of pointing to philosophers of history who treated the tensions of their work in sharp and critical ways, rather than in ideological ways, or by conceptualizing tensions by being even-handed or hands-off.

Raoul Vaneigem, in his sweeping book Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century, argues that there is a germ of resistance within Christianity to the worst parts of itself. A situationist and Marxist, Vaneigem tells an expressly partisan history of dissenting groups in and around Christianity over the course of 18 centuries (with a chapter on the Anabaptists), concluding with a wild call to critique capitalism, to resist all Gods and masters, and to create a new world.

Simone Weil, in her iconoclastic work, suggests that compassionate attention is the guiding value above history, which is composed of force, necessity, oppression, and suffering. She thinks that only by turning toward suffering with attention and listening will reveal its truth and allow it to be remediated.

Michel de Certeau, the French Jesuit scholar of religion, writes in his book The Writing of History, that historiography is a paradox between reality and the discourse we have on reality – where the task is connecting them. This means that there is a kind of accountability at the core of historiography where we do not avoid, but embrace the fact that history is told in ways that cannot avoid political problems (xxvii).  

None of these thinkers can be reduced to being either secular or religious. Vaneigem is a situationist Marxist and yet he devoted years of his life to the study of religion. Weil was an uncategorizable thinker influenced by Christianity, the ancient Greeks, and factory workers. And de Certeau was a cryptic Jesuit scholar of religion who never embraced or forsook his spiritual vocation. All three speak of history as something that must be met with specific values, and yet none could be called liberal or conservative by our present measures, and yet they each treat their subject matter with dignity while desiring from it something more than ideology and more than neutral description.

I bring them up here in conclusion because I think that we need more difficult thinkers like these in Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies – thinkers who are uncapturable by disciplinary distinctions, and who can refuse both polarizing and neutralizing ways of thinking, while nonetheless contributing to their subject matter, discourses, and disciplines.

As alluded to in the title of this paper, the normativity that will always remain in historiography will always have a theological remainder. No matter how secular it all may seem, even the narrative tropes we use to conceptualize history, like progress or return, have religious histories. Honesty about this will require a movement beyond focus on origins (whether plural or singular), and beyond focus on ends (like the normative and moralizing ends that we want for the Anabaptists).

In some ways, the discourse has moved beyond these discussions of origins and ends, but has done so with great emphasis on complex and contextual approaches. My normative suggestion is that we consider Anabaptist history to be:

  • Both usable (if done carefully and contextually) and unusable (because the difference between past and present will always mean that parallels between past and present are provisional and limited).
  • Both singular and plural – singular because we still find it useful to use the category of Anabaptism or Anabaptists, and plural because all generalizations about the Anabaptists are challenged by the diversity and plurality of Anabaptisms.

This means that our talk of Anabaptism is both:

  • Vulnerable to anachronism, ideology, and idealization; and:
  • Ideally suited for studies that inform contemporary discussions of violence, demonization, persecution, and scapegoating.

I’ll conclude with a brief anecdote. This morning I spoke with Gary Waite about his work on a reprint of his 1990 book, David Joris and Dutch Anabaptism, 1524-1543 – and Gary’s approach is a model of how to study the Anabaptists in ways that avoid cheap ideological uses of the past, while nonetheless making careful, substantial, and critical use of the past in the present. Gary studies messianic prophets, witchcraft, and the devil in the Early modern period, and he chooses to move beyond describing the past when he intervenes in present problems like the rise of Christian nationalism, which he argues, uses similar (but not identical) patterns of demonization to that of the sixteenth century. Gary’s article from March of this year is called “Christian nationalism in the U.S. is eerily reminiscent of ‘dominionist’ reformers in history,” and it approaches a more critical theopolitical vision of Anabaptist history that shows how its study is relevant now, in North America, as the far-right rises and the pursuit of careful visions of the past in threated.

For more, see: