Introduction
Before any progressive or resistant reimagination of community will be efficacious, we need to account for the relentless return of the dominant discourse and practice of community. What is the motor driving this discourse ever onward, despite our best efforts to shift it?
—Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community1
Many Mennonites spend a lifetime
a) in service to others
b) working for the church
c) getting over the fact that they’re Mennonite
—Craig Haas and Steve Nolt, The Mennonite Starter Kit: A Handy Guide for the New Mennonite2
In 2009, the year I began a PhD program with the intent of writing about U.S. Mennonites, the Mennonite Church USA was a denomination of 110,000 people. Today, as I write in early 2015, that number is down to approximately 97,000. Reviewing these numbers has served to remind me of a spark of realization that I had in 2007, the year I first began to consider getting a doctorate, before I even knew that American Studies was the field in which I would find an intellectual home. What I realized was that I wanted to write about the ways that Mennonites talked about their own collective survival.
At the time that I had this realization, I was in the throes of various attempts to work out in writing why Mennonites felt so inescapable to me. Furthermore, I wanted to understand why that inescapability seemed to manifest as an agonized longing to say something, to have a voice in making meaning out of Mennonite experiences, even though I had ostensibly departed from the Mennonite church and Mennonite institutions that shaped my childhood and early adulthood.
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1 Miranda Joseph, Against The Romance Of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxxi.
2 Craig Haas and Steve Nolt, The Mennonite Starter Kit (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 1993).
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Once, in the outline of an essay, I scrawled, What I’m really trying to say: Get over it, Mennonites. You’re not special.
It was an ironic statement, given that my fixation with Mennonites as subject matter was tied closely to that very sense of cultivated otherness that I wanted to critique. I grew up in south central Kansas, one of a handful of locations in North America in which Mennonites were numerous and culturally prominent enough to be called an enclave. During my childhood in the 1980s, when progressive, white, baby-boomer Mennonites like my parents were complaining about Ronald Reagan, worrying about the arms race, sending relief missions to Central America, and sponsoring Vietnamese refugees through their churches, I learned to think of Mennonites as categorically different from the other people I knew, more peaceful, more just, less consumed with, well, consuming. It was an easy illusion to sustain in that small-town, working-class Midwestern setting, where the excesses that my parents most despised about the conservative, white, U.S. culture in the eighties and nineties—materialism, militarism, disdain for the poor and marginalized—felt as though they went overwhelmingly unquestioned by everyone but the people I went to church with.
In addition, the Mennonite adults I knew were vocally concerned about the rise of the Christian right, not only its electoral politics, but also its preoccupation with individual salvation narratives and eschatology over compassionate communal ethics. They worried particularly about the right’s influence over Mennonites. Throughout my childhood, the judgment I heard most commonly of other Mennonites was that they were drifting towards the culture of televangelism, fire-and-brimstone preachers, and obsessions with abortion and homosexuals. This was not to say that abortion and
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homosexuality were particularly acceptable even to more liberal-leaning Mennonites, but rather that they viewed fixation on these subjects by religious conservatives as excessively judgmental and unreasonable, and felt that Mennonites were more rightly concerned with other things, such as challenging U.S. militarism and serving the poor. For the first eighteen years of my life, the most educated, justice-oriented, and politically liberal people I knew were Mennonites.
While this dissertation deals with history that was happening during my growing-up years—sometimes just down the street from me—I was largely oblivious to it. My understanding of Mennonites as exceptional in matters of justice underwent some challenges when I attended a Mennonite college, however. The seeds of my own disillusionment with Mennonites were sown largely through my college friendships with queer people, whose lives were made more difficult not only by conservative homes and surroundings but also by cautious Mennonite moderates on campus, who feared that too much gay visibility on campus would scare away conservative donors.
At twenty-five, I married my Mennonite boyfriend in the same Mennonite church in which I grew up. It was an act of heteronormative privilege to marry in that church without vocal judgment, and while we knew that on some level, it didn’t stop us. If we hadn’t married in a Mennonite church, it would have caused our families pain; at the time, this seemed like adequate justification for doing, essentially, what was expected of us. Our pastor gave us the required premarital counseling, but she did so in the apartment we were already sharing, and graciously left out the questions she was supposed to ask us about premarital sex. In actual fact, we were as much in violation of the letter of the Mennonite sexual law as any of our queer Mennonite friends, most of whom had left the
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church already or were barely hanging on. But no one seemed to particularly mind. This was in 2001, and nationally speaking, Mennonites were engaged in serious conflict over if and how heterosexual supremacy would be codified into their newly-formed denomination. The focus of the denominational border policing was not on our bodies or our choices. Despite our fairly half-hearted commitments to the church, our straightness allowed us to have the ceremony that seemed natural and inevitable by the dominant standards of our Mennonite families.
As years passed, both my spouse’s and my social and professional circles grew progressively queerer, and with that came more critical thought about the role of Mennonite church affiliation in our lives. We were no longer attending church regularly, but somehow I couldn’t resist reading denominational publications, despite the rage they incurred in me. The Mennonite Church USA had imposed what was called a “moratorium” on any writing about the “issue” of LGBTQ people in the church within its denominational magazine, The Mennonite. But the more I read, the more I came to recognize the established codes for disparaging LGBTQ justice work: admonitions to resist the influence of “the world,” or “the culture around us”; suggestions that Mennonite focus on a “shared missional vision” rather than on “divisive issues”; disparaging comments about “secularism.” It was a complex hybrid of evangelical theology and the more moderate approaches of Mennonites who had no great problem with LGBTQ people but believed that the church had better things on which to focus.
“Leaving the Mennonite church was like leaving an abusive spouse,” a college friend wrote to me during this time, shortly after coming out as transgender. The Mennonite never allowed on its pages such frank assessments of what its church was
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doing to queer people. It is difficult to pinpoint when, exactly, I decided to be done with Mennonite church attendance, given my strange dabbling in Mennonite publications, but underlying that decision was the nagging contrast between the church represented on those pages and the church that my queer Mennonite friends described.
As it turned out, Mennonites had a narrative to explain the motivations of those of us who stopped attending. I knew its rough shape, but I encountered it explicitly in a book that I read as a primary source for my master’s thesis on Mennonite congregational singing.
The deforming influences of secularism have considerably weakened the faith and commitments of many in the church. In a time when people seek direct experience of the spiritual world, some have left their congregations in search of spiritual vitality elsewhere. Others have simply drifted away and succumbed to the lure of materialism and secularism.3
Ah, I thought. Okay. That’s where they think we’ve gone. That was the beginning of my fascination with Mennonites not talking about power.
Mennonites, community, and violence
I do not open with my experience in order to assert it as typical or universal of Mennonites. No such experiences exist. In fact, it’s the specificity of my experience that makes it informative, because so much of what follows in this dissertation consists of stories of Mennonites who discover how little they have in common with one another. In
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3 Marlene Kropf, Kenneth Nafziger, and John Bell, Singing: A Mennonite Voice (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001), 104.
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terms of social location, theological inheritance, ethnicity, political affiliation, and personal beliefs, Mennonites are far more disparate than many readers might expect from a group of people who exist in popular U.S. imagination primarily as an ethnoreligious sect. Yet most Mennonites hold strongly to the notion of community as a religious ideal, albeit one with perpetually contested definitions.
It is impossible to talk about Mennonite understandings of community without also talking about violence. Nonviolence—which has been called “nonresistance,” “pacifism,” or “nonviolent resistance,” depending on the era and prevailing Mennonite theories of political engagement—is a core theological precept for most Mennonites. The most visible manifestation of this nonviolent theological bent has been Mennonites' refusal to serve in militaries. This and other religious practices such as adult baptism (or “believer's baptism”) have, at various points in history, contributed to making Mennonites targets for state-sponsored, revolutionary, or vigilante violence. Historically, separatism into ethnically bound communities has been the primary Mennonite tactic for avoiding violent engagement with external forces. Thus violence, and the avoidance thereof, has been foundational for Mennonite notions of community.
What separatism as a tactic for violence avoidance neglects, however, is the violence that Mennonites commit against one another. The degree to which Mennonites are able to acknowledge this as a problem is, predictably, dependent on social location. Among those who have named the problem most directly have been advocates for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. For instance, in her introduction to a 1992
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book of feminist theological analysis,4 Mennonite theologian Gayle Gerber Koontz writes, “Historically most Mennonite peace theology and ethics has been questions of and arguments for Christian pacifism in the face of violence that was being justified by others.” Nonviolent ethics, then, developed in response to other Christians who ethics allowed for the justification of war. But domestic and sexual violence were another matter: Koontz argues that Mennonites share with other Christians both the experience of and the silence around such forms of violence, even (and perhaps especially) when the perpetrators are within their own churches. Ruth Krall, a clinician whose work on behalf of sexual violence survivors is well known in Mennonite feminist circles, puts it more starkly: “We do not see that our addiction to, internal tolerance for and denial of sexual harassment, sexual violence and domestic abuse have gutted the living peace witness of our denomination...We do not seem to collectively comprehend that the presence of affinity violations demands individual and communal accountability as the price of healing.”5
My college friend’s use of domestic violence as a framework for understanding of his relationship to the Mennonite church as a queer person was not glib or facile. As I learned in the course of researching this dissertation, LGBTQ Mennonites often experience church as violent and abusive. In naming it thus, LGBTQ Mennonites have become part of a subjugated knowledge base within the Mennonite church, made up of
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4 Elizabeth G. Yoder, Peace Theology & Violence Against Women (Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1992).
5 Ruth Krall, “The Elephants in God's Living Room," Volume Four: Bearing the Unbearable; A Collection of Conversational Essays (Enduring Space: Transforming Cultures of Violence One Person at a Time, One Moment at a Time, 2014), http://ruthkrall.com/downloadable-books/volume-four-bearing-the-unbearable-a- collection-of-conversational-essays/.
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the experiences and analyses of feminist women, people of color, people with disability, sexual abuse survivors, and others whose life experiences have led them to challenge dominant Mennonite definitions of violence. The title of this dissertation, “Pacifist Battlegrounds,” refers both to the long fight for LGBTQ inclusion in Mennonite churches and to the related ideological struggles among Mennonites over how to define violence, nonviolence, and community.
Mennonites and Anabaptism
The Mennonites I am writing about are not an ethnoreligious sect; they are a U.S. Christian denomination, Mennonite Church USA, that in terms of organizational identity and practices bears a resemblance to mainline denominations such as the United Methodist Church, United Church of Christ, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, albeit at a drastically smaller scale. At the same time, the denomination’s small size, horizontal ecclesiology, and sectarian roots give it some level of kinship with traditions that have a more fundamentalist past or present, such as Southern Baptists, Churches of Christ, and Seventh-Day Adventists. Mennonites trace their origins to the sixteenth-century European religious movement known as Anabaptism (also referred to by some as the Radical Reformation), which took adult baptism as its central tenet. Over time, Anabaptists also became known for a theology of nonviolence, adherence to principles of simple living, separatism, and a history of internal schism. For those invested in maintaining a viable Mennonite denomination amid constant threats of a conservative departure over LGBTQ issues, that history of schism is a source of insecurity and worry.
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Richard Niebuhr wrote in 1927 that Mennonites’ sectarian infighting had guaranteed their larger irrelevance;6 he was neither the first nor the last to make that critique.
Due to that history, Anabaptism has produced more groups and sub-groups than I can describe here. Within the United States, the Amish are probably the largest Anabaptist group; a number of smaller conservative Mennonite groups also exist outside of the Mennonite Church USA (MCUSA). In terms of size, denominational structure, and culture, within the United States, MCUSA is probably most similar to the Church of the Brethren (COB), another Anabaptist denomination. Mennonites have a history of ecumenical cooperation with COB as well as with Quakers, all of which identify within a North American tradition known as “historic peace churches.” COB members in particular have worked together extensively with Mennonites in the area of LGBTQ justice, primarily through the Brethren Mennonite Council on LGBT Interests, an ecumenical network that figures prominently in the story I tell in this study. It is also worth mentioning that while the Amish do not suffer from the same membership decline as does MCUSA, due to a high birthrate and separatist practices, Mennonites are a traditional refuge for ex-Amish, as well as for defectors from a number of other conservative, plain-dressing Anabaptist groups. Among multiple generations of LGBTQ Mennonites, I have met people from Amish or other sectarian Anabaptist backgrounds; like many other queer and queer-supportive Mennonites, they often have wavering commitments to MCUSA churches, as they wait to see if the denomination will become more or less hospitable to them. Their presence has always reminded me that the
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6 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources Of Denominationalism (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004).
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decisions that MCUSA makes in regards to its LGBTQ members has more far-reaching consequences in the Anabaptist world than its leaders acknowledge.
Central questions
The basic assumptions of this dissertation are three-fold. The first theoretical statement is that, from the historical-cultural location from which I am writing, binaries are a primary means through which people order the world. The second is that binaries generate violence. The third is that definitions of violence are contested.
My understanding of the first statement owes much to Susan Harding’s anthropological work on fundamentalist Christian vernacular as a discursive practice capable of what she calls “generative power.” Central to Harding’s analysis is her focus on the binary that molds popular understandings of fundamentalism and modernity; just as those who identify with modernity need “an occasion feast of Fundamentalists”7 to articulate and define their own subjectivities against a pre-modern Other, so do right-wing Christians need identifiably corrupt forces of modern secularity against which to define themselves. What is most important about Harding’s analysis for my purposes is her demonstration of the malleability of this dualism in the hands of fundamentalist preachers. Enabled by a “decentralized organizational structure,”8 fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell were able to rhetorically stretch and mold binaries to make the multivocal,
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7 Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 264.
8 Ibid, 274.
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hybrid, and permeable world of right-wing Christianity into “a compelling illusion of unity across myriad lines of theological and subcultural difference.”9
Few if any of the Mennonites I write about here would identify as fundamentalists along the lines that Harding describes (though many would identify as evangelicals, and their denominational culture bears the marks of encounters with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and other right-wing Protestant influences10). But Mennonites do use binary logic with a fluidity that scholars of the fundamentalist/modernist construct will recognize. In focusing on the impact of Mennonite dominant discourse in the lives of queer people, I saw this fluidity manifest most clearly in the binary of the individual and the community. Overwhelmingly, queer Mennonites found their identities and experiences mapped onto “individualism” in Mennonite speech. Because Mennonites are theologically wedded to the notion of “community” as the vehicle through which God’s will is mediated, charges of individualism bear a particular sting. In a similar vein, I repeatedly heard from anti-gay Mennonites the charge that LGBTQ Mennonites and their supporters placed undue weight on “personal experience” as a barometer for sexual ethics. When, in an interview, I once pointed out to one conservative leader that he had just referred to his own positive experience with heterosexual marriage and family as a
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9 Ibid, 274.
10 In asserting this, my intention is not to conflate evangelicalism and fundamentalism; Harding in particular challenges this conflation, while at the same time recognizing the ways in which these concepts and identities overlap and constitute each other. Nor is it my intention to suggest that evangelical influences on U.S. Mennonites were entirely or even primarily white. Latino and African-American evangelicals have arguably had a greater overall impact on U.S. Mennonites than have right-wing white-dominated movements like Moral Majority. See Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites. (For another discussion of the tense relationships and exchanges between U.S. evangelicals and fundamentalists, see Kathryn Joyce, “The Next Christian Sex-Abuse Scandal,” The American Prospect, accessed February 3, 2015, http://prospect.org/article/next-christian- sex-abuse-scandal.)
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justification for his disapproval of queer sex while at the same time claiming that LGBTQ advocates relied too heavily on personal experience, he chuckled and acknowledged my point. At the same time, perhaps because his own marital/sexual/familial experiences were well within dominant norms, he seemed able to unproblematically graft them onto something larger—and therefore more credible—than the realm of the individual or the personal.
In a denomination that declines in membership by the year, the individual/community binary also serves as a convenient mechanism for explaining the regular departure of Mennonite young people who were born, raised, and in many cases baptized within Mennonite churches and families. This may provide some context for why a thoughtless statement about secularism in a seemingly innocuous book about Mennonite congregational singing could hit an ex-Mennonite like me in the gut. In that context, “individualism” serves as a symbol for what is both wrong with and alluring about non-Mennonite society, often described in Mennonite shorthand as “wider culture,” “secular society,” “the culture around us,” or, more broadly, “the world.” While one version of this rhetoric is deployed to explain the action of those who leave church life entirely, I have heard related versions of the same binary used to interpret the decisions of Mennonites who join non-denominational or independent Bible churches that focus is on “personal salvation” over communal ethics.11 If the “wider culture” is portrayed as an entity that caters to the need of the individual as a thoughtless, self-obsessed,
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11 My ethical framework for interrogating the idealization of community owes a great deal to the work of Miranda Joseph, particularly in her insistence on investigating the ways in which communal formations can collude with capitalism. See Joseph, Against The Romance Of Community. See also Gerald W. Creed, The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries (School of American Research, 2006).
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inappropriately consuming pleasure-seeker, community can be then be defined as a countercultural alternative, which for Mennonites has great theological currency.
Over the course of my research, I came to see the mostly unacknowledged malleability of the individual/community binary as a primary factor inhibiting rigorous discussions of power among Mennonites. Because the binary itself held so much historical and theological meaning, it was hard to demystify it. I encountered my own tendency to participate in the idealization of community along lines that supported my politics; I found myself wanting, again and again, to defend the communal credentials of queer Mennonites. But I also came to see the binary as a tool to legitimate some communities, individuals, and experiences over others. Over and over, Mennonites left me asking, who is allowed to be an individual? Which expressions of individuality can be acceptably woven into “the community”; which ones cannot? How do bodies matter—for surely they do—in determining the answers to these questions? And finally, what is lost in the collective disdain of individualism? To whom does this disdain do violence? What are the ethical underpinnings that enable us to determine who, in the context of a particular communal formation, is allowed to have what Judith Butler calls a livable life? The individual/community binary does violence everywhere in U.S. society, but because Mennonites embrace it so explicitly, their experiences can, I hope, be instructive for those seeking to understand more generally how to dig for the hidden meanings within in.
As a researcher, I have wrestled throughout this process with how to navigate the contested terrain of defining violence. In Mennonite settings as in others, claims of violence are mapped on to particular political agendas. In a world in which marginalized collectivities must first prove their marginalization in order to advocate for and end to
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that marginalization, a legitimated claim of violence is inextricably linked to a legitimated identity. Throughout the time I have spent observing, writing about, listening to, and speaking with Mennonites on sexual politics, I have observed three relevant varieties of violence claims:
1) Claims of rhetorical, spiritual, structural, sexualized, gendered, or racialized violence referring to collective and historically situated experiences of marginalization.
2) Defenses against the above claims of violence that identify the claims themselves as a form of violence against those who might be implicated by them.
3) Appeals for an end of claims of violence that effect a standpoint of impartial reason to suggest that excessive claims of violence from partisan actors are doing violence against a shared community and that generally speaking, everyone is doing violence (theologically, this traces to the leveling claim that everyone is a sinner), and therefore, essentially, no one is doing violence that needs specific identification.
When I realized that violence was in fact what I was writing about, I felt overwhelmed by the task of assessing what claims of violence I should legitimate through my own authorial voice. In his ethnography Imagining Transgender, David Valentine outlines the problem as I encountered it:
How does one “take sides”—and more importantly, act—in disputes between different groups with divergent, if valid, analyses of what action is required? The demand that anthropologists act on behalf of their study population and against the facts of violence, then, is deeply complicated by the terms by which that
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population is defined, who defines it, and what strategies are seen as valid. Moreover, as I will discuss next, anthropological practices, even those motivated by good intentions, can themselves be seen as violent.12
Valentine does not make this claim in the context of refuting the demand that anthropologists should act against the facts of violence to their study populations. But the rigor with which he acknowledges the potential of his own potential to harm these women through his work has served as something of a guide for me. When I was completing my application for human subjects approval for this project, Ben Chappell, one of my ethnographer mentors, suggested that the way I articulated the ethical parameters of my project would undergird my methodology. In a similar vein, I eventually concluded that my understanding of what constituted violence was inextricable from my imperative as a researcher to do no harm. Not doing violence was the core imperative of my search for the right methodology; I have tried as best I can to let specific practices flow from that source. From the beginning, this has meant taking queer Mennonites as authoritative voices, not only on their own experiences, but also on the power structures that subordinate, violate, and oppress them. This is not the same thing as giving away all of my own interpretive authority. Nor is it an elision of the reality that queer people, like all people, have complex subjectivities and multiple social locations and are thus capable of doing violence themselves. It is rather a persistent turning towards the epistemology I learned primarily from Black feminism: oppressed people know more about power than powerful people do, and if the subject of one’s study is power, one cannot just listen to powerful people.
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12 David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 216.
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The potential travesty of embracing this maxim as a Mennonite writing about other Mennonites who deny their own capacity for violence has not escaped me. When I looked at Mennonite processes for “dealing with” the conflicts presented by sexual diversity, I saw repeatedly how easy it was for people concerned with peacemaking to convince themselves that once they embraced the appropriate dogma and methodology, they were delivered from the capacity to do violence. Academics doing work around social justice contend with the same dangers in our theoretical commitments. Any success I have had in avoiding such mistakes is largely due to the queer people who have surrounded and sustained me at every stage of this process: friends, colleagues, informants, mentors, and sometimes, more than one or all of the above. Their counsel, above all else, has helped me assess when I should speak and when I should listen.
This is also a study that sheds light on what it means to be moderate—not only in the electoral-political sense but in one’s general approach to power and conflict. While I do not explicitly take on this idea in terms of its representations in the U.S. body politic, the practices of Mennonites trying to build and sustain church-related agencies, schools, and other institutions are strongly related to those of administrators and managers in other institutions that are premised on social good. How, in such institutions, have moderating managerial practices come to be seen as reasonable, desirable, and the only way forward? How is it that institutions that claim diversity and inclusiveness at the core of their identities still continue to exercise power and manage resources in ways that reinscribe straight, white, able-bodied masculinity at the heart of what it means to be acting for the common good? What kinds of material, historical experiences lead marginalized people
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to experience diversifying, inclusionary practices as yet another form of silencing, of violence?
In many ways these questions trace us back to another layer of interrelated binaries: modern/pre-modern; reason/emotion; civilized/primitive; and perhaps most trenchant for present-day, neoliberal institutional life, civility/incivility. In understanding the impact of these discourses in their own institutions, Mennonites are often held back by their own most beloved theological dualism, that of church/world. At the simplest level, this split makes them susceptible to believing that power, privilege, and their effects are things that happen elsewhere, and that Mennonites have a particular bulwark against them. The overarching project of this dissertation is to demystify binaries, to illuminate the power relations that they obscure.
A few particular threads of theory guide my approach to these questions. One is Sara Ahmed’s work of examining how the diversity is enacted and managed in white-dominated institutional life.13 Related to this is M. Jacqui Alexander’s essay on white, masculine administrative behavior in the context of direct, anti-oppression mobilization by contingent faculty and students of color at the New School.14 Both of these sources have informed my interpretations of white Mennonite church leaders employing what many of my Mennonite informants call “divide and conquer” tactics that seem designed to foster division and infighting among marginalized groups within their denominational body. Haunting is another theoretical undercurrent in my study, informed by Avery Gordon’s work on the manifestations of hidden and repressed forms of social violence.
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13 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham; Duke University Press Books, 2012).
14 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
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As much as anything, the concept of haunting has guided me methodologically to pursue inklings and hunches, to listen for words almost but not quite said. My final chapter on sexualized violence is the fullest treatment of this methodological orientation.
Finally, this study also contributes to the growing body of ethnographic work on LGBTQ Christians. Works by Tanya Erzen15 and Michelle Wolkimir16 on ex-gay ministries have contributed to my understanding of conservative Christian sexual discourses, particularly their emphasis on narratives of addiction, captivity, and conversion. Dawne Moon’s ethnographic study of Methodist conflicts over gay and lesbian membership made me more attentive to the uses of pain and emotion in debates about homosexuality, as well as the politics of renouncing the political. Her work has also reminded me to exercise wariness when theological statements are presented as expressions of a united front.
A note on abortion
My dearth of analysis concerning abortion is worth a mention in this introduction, and many readers and scholars of conservative sexual politics will no doubt note its absence. The 1995 document that MCUSA recognizes as “foundational,” the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, mentions abortion in the following context: “We witness against all forms of violence, including war among nations, hostility among races and classes, abuse of children and women, violence between men and women, abortion,
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15 Tanya Erzen, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (Oakland: University of California Press, 2006).
16 Michelle Wolkomir, Be Not Deceived: The Sacred and Sexual Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
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and capital punishment.”17 While this may seem definitive, the reality is that no violation of an item on this list has triggered the kind of denomination-level conflict and disciplinary mechanisms that LGBTQ inclusion has done. This is not to say that the same MCUSA members who oppose LGBTQ inclusion do not also oppose abortion; without citable evidence, my informed speculation is that they do oppose it by a large majority. Letters condemning “violence against the unborn” and calling on Mennonites to take more definitive action in that direction are not uncommon in Mennonite publications, and have appeared there with some regularity for the past forty years. But by and large, denominational leaders do not speak of abortion in their public statements. There has been no denomination-wide, organized, opposing, political push to uphold and defend reproductive rights, or visibility campaigns on the part of Mennonite women who have had abortions. Within pro-LGBTQ-inclusion circles, I have observed that talk of abortion in organized forums is almost always a non-starter—not, I think, because everyone agrees, but because they suspect that they don’t, and would rather not find out just how deeply. The simplest answer to the relative invisibility of abortion as a political issue among Mennonites is likely to be shame coupled with conflict aversion. On an anecdotal note, my personal experience has been that Mennonites who are motivated to organize politically for or against abortion rights find non-Mennonite settings in which to do so.
Methods
While my above discussion about theories of violence addresses my concerns about methodology, I will briefly address the specific methods and scope of this study. In
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determining what I would study and where I would go, I held loosely to the idea of “multi-sited ethnography” put forth by George Marcus in his anthropological work, an approach that made more sense to me studying a political conflict within a national denomination than a one-location project. The events I attended included church services, regional Mennonite meetings, denomination conventions, and gatherings of Mennonite LGBTQ activist groups. My ethnographic work took me to sites of LGBTQ-inclusive congregations in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota; Washington, D.C.; Kansas City, Kansas; and across the Kaw River to Peace Mennonite Church in my own town of Lawrence, Kansas. Other destinations included Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Phoenix, Arizona; Chicago, Illinois; and Newton, Kansas. At most of these sites I did interviews, which I also conducted over Skype. All total, I interviewed thirty individuals: queer church members, movement leaders and activists, pastors, and denominational professionals. Substantial email and Facebook correspondences with my interviewees as well as with other executive denominational leaders, sexual abuse prevention workers, Mennonite academics, and queer Mennonite friends have shaped this work as well. Archival research in the Mennonite Library and Archives in North Newton, Kansas and the Church of the Brethren Archives in Elgin, Illinois have provided vital historical context. In addition, the online archives of Mennonite press publications have been indispensible and constant sources of updates on a research site that seems to produce new evidence on a daily basis.
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Chapter overview
The first chapter, “Naming the Violence of Process: Reframing a Pacifist Conflict,” looks at the processes that Mennonites call “discernment” and “dialogue,” and how LGBTQ Mennonites experience being the subjects of those processes. It asks the question, how do peacemaking processes come to be experienced as violent? How does privilege shape access to particular ways of being peaceful? This chapter also introduces a particular category of professional Mennonite, the “process broker”: one who helps to structure and facilitate dialogue and discernment in Mennonite churches and institutions. Through the story of the formation of Mennonite Church USA, I investigate the question, what are the consequences of process broking? In the context of a group of people with disparate theological beliefs and approaches to authority and governance, how do process brokers use language to promote the cause of denominational unity?
The second chapter, “Statements and Walls: Persons Associated With a Group Calling Itself Pink Mennos,” addressed the most recent manifestation of Mennonite LGBTQ advocacy, a mostly youth-led network called Pink Menno that stages activism at biennial MCUSA conventions. More generally, it looks at the role of denominational statements over the past thirty years of Mennonite history, arguing that while such statements are frequently used to hold back queer inclusion, their actual contents matter far less than the cultural/theological symbols into which LGBTQ people have been made. To place Pink Menno’s experiences in a historical context, this chapter also casts back to experiences of LGBTQ Mennonites at previous denominational conventions at which heterosexist statements were crafted and passed through delegate bodies. The core
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ambiguity that Mennonites have in relation to statements of belief permeates this chapter, which asks the question, how does power manifest in relation to that ambiguity?
In Chapter Three, “Strangers and Kin,” I examine the performance of authoritative white statements that attempt to pit queer people against people of color, particularly Latinos. The ethnographic context for the chapter is the 2013 MCUSA convention in Phoenix, Arizona, which Latino Mennonites almost entirely boycotted due to Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration laws and the danger of deportation for undocumented Mennonites. Within this violent political backdrop, I interrogate the convention theme of “Citizens of God’s Kingdom,” arguing that managerial church discourse, even while embracing diversity and anti-racism as institutional goals, is discursively reliant on the figure of beneficient white masculinity.
My final chapter, “John Howard Yoder is Dead: Sexualized Violence and the Haunting of the Mennonite Church,” adds another layer of context to LGBTQ Mennonites encounters with institutional violence and complicity, asking the question, what does sexualized violence have to do with the struggle for queer justice? Through a deep engagement with the story of Mennonite theologian and sexual predator John Howard Yoder, the most influential pacifist theologian of the past fifty years, I try to understand the scope of the damage done when sexual abuse and sexualized violence go unnamed, and sexual deviance is projected onto queerness. How do the institutional histories of heterosexism and sexualized violence intersect? What do these histories teach us about sex, violence, and peacemaking?
My Conclusion begins with an ethnographic account of queer Mennonites meeting to plan for their next phase of engagement with Mennonite Church USA.
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Finally, I discuss the future direction of this project, highlighting its potential to contribute to wider critiques of neoliberal capitalism through the lenses of sexual politics and community.
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