Persecuted by Both Sides, and What Descended from It

Anabaptists were executed by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike, which is unusual and revealing. Rebaptism was already a capital offence under old imperial law, and the refusal of oaths and of military service was read as sedition by every government of the period, so a movement that both magisterial reformers and the Catholic hierarchy regarded as a threat to public order had nowhere to be tolerated.

The seizure of Munster in 1534 and 1535 by a militant group who declared it the New Jerusalem, and the atrocities on both sides of its siege, gave opponents an image they used against the whole movement for centuries, and the great majority of Anabaptists were pacifists who repudiated it. What survived did so by withdrawal and migration.

The Mennonite, Hutterite and Amish traditions descend from these communities, and their subsequent history is largely a history of moving on when toleration ran out. The wider inheritance is broader than the denominations. The principle that a church should be a voluntary association which the state neither funds nor governs was a minority position in the sixteenth century, held mainly by people being executed for it, and it is now the constitutional arrangement in a large part of the world.