Nonresistance and Nonconformity to the World

Michael Sattler convened the Swiss Brethren at Schleitheim in February 1527 to settle what set the new Anabaptist congregations apart from both the Roman church and the magisterial reformers who still relied on the state to enforce true religion. The resulting confession, seven brief articles, made nonresistance and separation from the world tests of membership rather than matters of private conscience. Article IV forbade fellowship with the wicked, meaning any church that used the sword or coerced belief, and called believers to gather instead in a visible, disciplined body separate from the surrounding Christendom.

Article VI went further, holding that government itself, ordained by God to punish evil outside the perfection of Christ, was nonetheless closed to a true believer: a Christian could not serve as a magistrate, bear arms, or use force even in self defense, because Christ's own example and the Sermon on the Mount required suffering wrong rather than inflicting it. The same article forbade the swearing of oaths, reading Christ's command in Matthew 5 as a plain prohibition rather than a rule about frivolous oaths. Sattler was captured within months of the confession and executed by burning in May 1527, and dozens of the confession's early holders died the same way in the years that followed, so the document that fixed Anabaptist nonresistance in place was itself sealed by the nonresistant deaths of the people who wrote it. It became the doctrinal floor beneath the entire Anabaptist family, restated in Menno Simons' own writings a decade later and never seriously revised by the traditions that descended from either wing of the movement.

Every major Anabaptist descendant body still names nonresistance and nonconformity as its own, but the doctrine has never dictated a single practical shape. Mennonite conferences range today from Old Order communities that dress plainly, avoid state entanglement, and decline to vote or serve on juries, to Mennonite Church USA congregations largely indistinguishable in daily life from other Protestants while still teaching pacifism as church doctrine and supporting conscientious objection to military service.

The Hutterite colonies took the same premise toward full community of goods, reasoning that nonconformity to the world extends to private property itself. The Amish, who split from the Swiss Mennonites in 1693 under Jakob Ammann, read the doctrine as requiring a far more visible and continuously renewed boundary, expressed through the Ordnung each church district maintains rather than through the doctrine of nonresistance alone. What holds the family together is the shared refusal, unbroken since Schleitheim, to accept that Christian discipleship and the sword can occupy the same hands, and the shared conviction that a church which blends into the surrounding society has already compromised something Schleitheim considered non negotiable. Persecution across four centuries, from the Swiss cantons to Reformation-era Netherlands to Soviet Russia, only confirmed for most Anabaptist communities that separation from state power was not an accident of history but a doctrine worth suffering for, even as they disagreed among themselves on exactly how far separation should reach into ordinary daily life.