For more than 300 years, Mennonites adhered to a strict two-kingdom
theology, owing their supreme adherence to the divine kingdom while
serving as loyal, law-abiding subjects to the state in all matters
that did not contradict their religious beliefs. Traditionally,
Mennonites saw affairs of state as none of their business. In times
of war, the Mennonite church counseled conscientious objection and
spoke against military participation in either combatant or
noncombatant roles. Mennonites did not serve in coercive government
offices. Most refused to vote or sue in courts of law, and held a
generally negative view of expressions of political protest to
government authorities. During World War II, however, the voluntary
participation of Mennonites in conscientious objector labor camps
pulled Mennonite youth out of rural isolation and raised their
awareness of America's social ills and their own responsibilities
as Christians. In the post-war era, Mennonites were no longer "the
quiet in the land," but began to articulate publicly their concerns
about such issues as the draft, the civil rights movement, and the
Vietnam War.
In Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties, Perry Bush explores the dramatic
changes both within Mennonite communities and in their relationship
with mainstream American society between the 1920s and the 1970s,
as Mennonite society and culture underwent a profound
transformation from seclusion to nearly complete acculturation.
Congruent with their entrance into national society, Mennonites
began to engage the state on a number of issues which an older
theological and behavioral tradition had previously defined as
outside their sphere of concern. Bush notes that, as was the casein
mainstream society, it was primarily the church's youth who were
the most passionately involved in the struggle to speak out against
war and other concerns.
Bush's discussion of pacifism and theology parallels the
internal struggle for social and cultural change within Mennonite
communities nationwide. His study also sheds much light on the role
played by religious conservatives in twentieth-century American
social movements. Most studies of anti-war and social justice
movements have focused on liberal Christian and secular activists,
but Bush's account restores Mennonites to a more integral role in
the history of recent social dissent. More generally, by
reintroducing matters of religious ideology in considerations of
recent social history, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties highlights the
dynamic relationship between social and intellectual developments
in twentieth-century America.
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