The Radical Reformation

In January 1525, in a house in Zurich, a small group of men who had been working with Zwingli baptised each other as adults. They had concluded that the reform was stopping short of its own principle: if scripture is the standard, and scripture shows baptism following a confession of faith, then baptising infants is not a minor irregularity but a mistake about what the church is. The consequence they drew is what made the movement radical. A church of baptised believers is a voluntary body, entered by decision, and it cannot be identical with the population of a parish or the subjects of a prince. From that followed the other positions associated with the Anabaptists: that the church should be separate from the state and not enforced by it, that discipline should be exercised by the congregation, and, in most streams, that Christians should not swear oaths, hold magistracy or bear arms.

The Schleitheim articles of 1527 set out that programme concisely. Diarmaid MacCulloch stresses that the radicals were not a single organisation and disagreed with each other extensively, and that the label covers spiritualists and anti Trinitarian rationalists as well as Anabaptists. What they shared was the judgement that a reform which left the parish, the magistrate and infant baptism in place had not gone to the root of the question.

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.