Anabaptist Trumpism

The authors of "Why many of us voted for Trump" wanted understanding. I got something else.

Months before the Nov 2024 election, I began to prepare my church for the possibility of a second Trump term. I knew that ascendancy of Donald Trump to the highest office in the country would bring pain and difficulty to our church and our community. Already, in the first few weeks of office, those predictions have come to pass.

The trans people in my church worry about their future as the federal government attempts to enforce gender binaries based on dubious biological claims and restrict medical care for trans people. We are a church that includes first generation Americans and people with unsettled immigration status. Our concern for their wellbeing grows as the new administration targets both undocumented immigrants and those who have arrived in this country through designated legal channels. We watch the threat of authoritarianism grow with an unconstitutional executive order aimed at ending birth-right citizenship. As a church with Latine, Black, and Asian members, we are horrified to see Trump’s appointees roll back civil rights protections and purge government agencies of those committed to anti-racism and those charged with non-partisan accountability.

During these terrible days, Raleigh Mennonite has been a place of refuge and safety. We return to one another, week after week, to find the place where we can find comfort and strengthen, provide materially for one another, plan our resistance to rising authoritarianism, and work to protect those in our community who are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

The Mennonite tradition has given us theological and ecclesial resources that guide us in our collective work as an outpost of the body of Jesus. We have clung to the witness of our spiritual ancestors who refused to enact violence against their enemies even as they took a bold stance of resistance against the state-church. We’ve held fast to the stories of Anabaptists whose radical call for peace challenged the authoritarian regimes of their countries, often leading to their own suffering.

But there is another strain within Anabaptism -- the survivalist tradition.

In late 2024, the Washington Post published an article revealing the most Republican names according to public election data: Andy Byler, Steven Stoltzfus, Elmer Stoltzfus, Jacob Stoltzfus and Benuel Stoltzfus. These are ethnic Anabaptist names, names that come from Pennsylvania and Midwest Amish communities. They constitute the most reliable Republican bloc in the United States.[1]

This may come as a surprise to those outside the Mennonite church who associate our tradition with either non-participation or in the “transformative tradition,” a form of life that acts as a living witness to Jesus through intentional works of peace and justice. The Amish buck both expectations.

While the idea of an Amish Super Pac may be baffling based on our theology, a recent Anabaptist World article offered insight into the Trumpism among my co-religious. It’s likely that most people who call themselves Anabaptists in the US voted for Trump in this election. In their article, Levi and Daniel Miler explain why.

The authors acknowledge the complexity within our religious community. Some people vote and some do not. All are bound by “common theological threads such as the centrality of Christ, the Christian community and reconciliation in interpreting scripture.” But for the Millers, the economy, not the teaching of Jesus, was the primary beacon that led them and other Mennonites towards Trump.

They cite their belief that government spending is the cause of rising inflation, how this, in turn, makes people poorer and unable to afford for their basic needs. Inflation is primarily caused by supply chain issues, energy price volatility, and corporate greed (companies charging more for products). Certainly the government stimulus efforts during the pandemic worsened inflation – but those efforts also stabilized the US economy. The myth of Big Government taking away the ability of free markets to reward those who are willing to work lives on in Amish country.

The Miller next talk about voting for “character,” which may surprise Christians who are stunned by Donald Trump’s status as a convicted rapist and felon, a man who had an affair while his wife was pregnant, who mocks disabled people, and jokes about grabbing women’s genitals. But, for the authors, if Trump falters, he has at least brought in JD Vance to represent the kind of moral Christian character the Millers would like to see guiding our country – a man who managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a wealthy success.

The Millers mention the good of free market economies twice in their assessment as to why many Mennonites voted for Trump. They seem to believe that the free market will work for those who work hard. They don’t account for how the free market has led to the accumulation of vast wealth among a very few at the expense of most people, or how the insatiable appetites of these markets have led to the destruction of our planet and the climate disasters we are already experiencing (Mennonite farmers are one of the primary sources of Brazilian deforestation). They don’t share my concerns about the racialized nature of our economy, and how systems that benefit white people continue to disadvantage those who don’t look like most white ethnic Mennonites.

The final reason the Millers suggest Mennonites voted for Trump is their new appreciation for Christendom. Anabaptists faced terrible persecution in our emergence but, the writers explain, we now experience a Christendom that provides safe passage for Christians like the Millers. “Christendom,” they write, “has provided us some stability on traditional marriage, family and sexual norms.” In other words, instead of being a minority, struggling for survival, these Anabaptist now enjoy their status as the center of the social order, with the power of the government at their back.

I know that many people were angry that Anabaptist World published this article, but for me and my community, this article was a warning about what happens to us as a people when we pursue survival at any cost. Our Anabaptist history is one of radical commitment to the gospel, but it is also one in which white, ethnic Anabaptists responded to the trauma of persecution and displacement by aligning themselves with the sinful and deadly interests of the state.

Even though our church has very few white ethnic Mennonites, we participate in networks that help us to repent of this corporate history. We are members of the Repair Network, which works to undo the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery in the Mennonite church. Following their displacement and persecution in Europe, European Mennonites emigrated to the Americas. They were welcomed with open arms as hardworking farmers who stayed out of government business. While claiming non-resistance and refusing to bear arms, these communities were more than willing to claim the lands of Indigenous peoples who were eradicated or displaced by the US military. We are part of the Repair Network both to atone for this sin and to discover the ways we can thwart colonialism in the present.

The rise of the Third Reich in Europe was another time when ethnic Mennonites assured their survival by racializing their identity. Nazis saw Mennonites as an ideal Aryan race to study and quantify. Nazi race undertook extensive documentation of Mennonite’s “pure German blood.” Many Mennonites in Europe embraced their racial purity status.

By 1933 the United (Vereinigung) Mennonites stopped asking for conscientious objector status from the German government. In 1934 the Danzig Mennonites removed pacifism from their confession of faith. Many Mennonites readily swore oaths to Hitler. Ethnic Mennonites under the Third Reich wanted to survive and they embraced Christendom’s favoritism, first accepting the protection of Nazis and eventually aiding their terror by serving in every branch of the military, running concentration camps, and swearing oaths to Hitler. Ethnic Mennonites shifted their theology from voluntary membership in a visible church to a blood-bound nation. They reiterated conspiracy theories about the Jews, scapegoating their historic trauma onto this vulnerable and persecuted people.[2]

Despite being outside the fold of ethnic Mennonites, I am vigilant in my commitment to learning from the disasters of white racialization of Mennonite identity. I am wary of uncomplicated Mennonite histories that glorify suffering without an account of the ways ethnic Mennonites secured their survival. (Healing Haunted Histories by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns is an excellent guide for those who hold both historical trauma and traumatization in their family line.) The history of ethnic Mennonites is a history of receiving the spoils of whiteness even as these communities fenced themselves off from active participation in the violence required to realize their (white) economic and social gain – from colonization of the Americas to relying on the police to protect their private property. I pay special attention to these contradictions when they appear in the guise of righteous pacifism.

The Millers wrote for explanation, and perhaps in hopes of empathy. Instead, I receive their assessment of Anabaptist Trumpism as an alarm to which we must heed if we are to recover witness to the peaceable kingdom in our tradition. In response, I’ve redoubled my commitment to those who refuse the seduction of nationalism. I have pledged myself again to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to put myself in the place where Jesus is, among those whom the Trump administration seeks to destroy.

[1] My friend David Lapp Jost reminded me that the preponderance of these names in PA and OH does not necessarily translate to huge numbers of Amish coming out to vote for Trump. Reliability as a voting bloc means consistency over time, not necessarily vast numbers. In addition, he reminded me that many people have these names and no longer attend Mennonite churches or are part of Amish communities but may have been absorbed into conservative evangelicalism. This is strangeness of Mennonite identity. Are people with historic roots in the Mennonite church who now attend non-Mennonite churches still Mennonites? This is a question with different answers depending on if you ask from the direction of ecclesiology or sociology.

[2] David also mentions that German Mennonites didn’t cede their religious identity overnight. He writes, “most Mennonites in Germany were no long pacifists by the Franco-Prussian war, 70 years before Nazi Germany. It was a small, rural dissident body that remained. There were essentially no pacifists already by 1914. I think it’s important, because it’s not as much about being wooed by the strongman as it is about ‘wanting to be like the other nations,’ so to speak.” Great insight!