Mary Douglas Meets Peter Hoover and the Pure Church Movement

Theory Alert: This piece doesn’t include any heart-warming or scandalous anecdotes from my family’s past or titillating glimpses into Mennonite beliefs or practices. Rather, it dives into theoretical questions about how we look at Mennonite history and culture. If you are theory-averse, it might induce mild altitude-sickness.

In their 1982 book Risk and Culture, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky use American Amish and Hutterite communities to illustrate two modes of what they refer to as “voluntary egalitarian” social organizations. I know this because my old friend and colleague Peter Atkinson sent me a copy of the book after reading my account of the history of Mennonites as presented on this site. He thought I was in need of some theory.

Mary Douglas was a ground-breaking social anthropologist who used the methods of structuralism to analyse different types of social formations, their fears, their values, and their strategies for survival. She invented a heuristic that she called grid-group analysis (later Cultural Theory) to get at the relationships between forms of social organization and the cultural beliefs they adopt. (I don’t know, alas, who Wildavsky is exactly or why he is listed as an author.)

In Risk and Culture, Douglas and Wildavsky are analyzing the upsurge of interest in and organization around the environment—the birth of environmentalism—in 1970s USA. They use the example of the Anabaptists and their varying socio-cultural strategies as a means of elucidating the environmental organizations and their surprising successes and predictable failures. I am not particularly interested in the early environmental movement in this piece, but I think the analysis of the Anabaptist movements is pretty enlightening.

Douglas and Wildavsky argue that Western society/culture embodies two central streams: the hierarchical-bureaucratic and the individualistic-market modes of social organization.

The bureaucratic mode is inherited from medieval feudal culture, in which society is held together through a hierarchy of positions: everyone knows his or her place, allegiences, and responsibilities. Problems are seen as technical, solutions as procedural, and decisions are made by committee or faceless functionary. Following traditional patterns and procedures is seen as the primary means for addressing both internal and external threats. This mode is embodied in our governments, large corporations, and mainstream churches and expressed in all manner of social interactions.

The market mode was emerging at precisely the same time as Anabaptism did. In this mode, everyone is an autonomous individual, responsible for her- or himself, participating in a market in which everything is a transaction, a deal between relative equals. It is the market that ensures the best outcomes, that serves as the solution to every conflict. There are winners and losers, but that is down to the individuals’ behaviours in the markets. This is capitalist culture, as we know it, but it manifests itself not only in business but in all sorts of organizations and relationships.

The bureaucratic and market streams have formed a sort of symbiosis in western culture, each one supporting and, at the same time, opposing the other, reigning in its excesses and so making its survival possible. We know this symbiosis as the nation state, with its fundamentally individualistic market economy regulated and underwritten by the bureaucratic institutions of government and corporations.

But from the very beginning, these social organizations of the “center” were countered by a “border” or “nonconformist” socio-cultural formation: the voluntary-egalitarian mode of the Anabaptists and other radical groups. These formations rejected both the defined hierarchies of feudalism and the individualism of the new market economies. They refused the new political formations that were emerging, both Catholic and Reformed-Protestant states.

The Anabaptists rejected the notion that one’s position in society should be determined by birth, asserting that all people are born equals and that their participation in any society should be a conscious voluntary choice. They therefore rejected infant baptism, which was at once a rejection of all churches and a rejection of the state, since the church at that time was the registrar of the state, the recorder of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths. They went further to reject participation in the military, the swearing of oaths, and other forms of allegience to the church-states.

At the same time, they rejected the individualism of the new capitalist economy that was emerging. In its place they championed a radical voluntary brotherhood, in which all members were pledged to support their brothers, where competition and any form of economic stratification within the community were denounced and weeded out.

All of this was voiced and inscribed in religious terms, as a movement to purify the church, to promote radical discipleship, and so on. But it was, of course, at the same time radically political, an attempt to institute and sustain a new socio-cultural regime, in which every relationship, every value, every goal, and every strategy was transformed. In the 16th century, religion was nothing if not political and vice versa.

From the very beginning, this minority culture on the fringe of—and in opposition to—the dominant socio-cultural formation faced several serious threats: it would be hunted down and destroyed by the dominant powers; it would be infected by the values and social practices of the dominant culture; it would be diminished by defections to the outside world; or it would be torn apart by internal strife and conflict. Douglas and Wildavsky suggest that these threats defined the values, belief systems, and social practices that the Anabaptists deployed to ensure their survival.

While, over 200 years, the powers of western Europe did their best to stamp out the annoyance of these groups that challenged everything they stood for, the Anabaptists found ways to keep their heads down and to play competing powers against each other. Because of the Black Death, the constant wars, and the rapid urbanization in western Europe, states were always in need of manpower to grow food; with their reputation as hard-working farmers, the Anabaptists found welcomes in Moravia, southwestern Germany, Prussia, Ukraine, and eventually America. The persecution took its toll, but it kept them strong and focussed. It marked their boundary clearly and minimized the dangers of infection and defection.

But the Anabaptists found specific cultural means to counter the threats of infection and defection as well. First defense were the strong doctrines and constant preaching about the corruption of the outside world and the spiritual need to guard the purity of the community. God and the Devil were thus marshalled to define the boundary and strengthen resolve. Humility, simplicity, hard work, thrift, self-discipline, equality, and especially dedication to the brotherhood were the chief virtues, while pride, ostentation, competition, and individual assertion were the sins (along with all of the usual sexual and social taboos of the Bible). An entire world of values and relationships was constructed to promote the persistence and strength of the community.

Because everyone had an equal interest in maintaining the community, everyone was expected to participate equally in policing the boundaries. If a brother (or sister) was seen to be falling short (or standing too proud), it was one’s duty to speak to them, to help them see their error and repent. If they rejected one’s council, one was to bring a brother along to speak to the erring party; if that didn’t work, one was to take it to the ministers; if there was still no repentence, the sinner was banned from communion with the community. The stated function of this elaborate procedure was to bring the sinner back into the fold.

The Dutch Mennonites (following Menno Simons) practiced not only the ban (excommunication), but also strict avoidance (shunning). No one, including siblings, parents, children, or spouse, was to associate with the excommunicant (or any outsider, for that matter) in any way. The Swiss and Alsatian Mennonites and some other groups did not practice avoidance, but in 1693 (as I’ve indicated elsewhere) a group following Jakob Ammon and subsequently known as the Amish separated from the others because they believed that shunning was Biblical and thus necessary.

And that raises another threat to the community: irresolvable internal conflict producing schism. Douglas and Wildavsky argue that this is a persistent and unavoidable problem for the purely voluntary-egalitarian social form. Because everyone is equal, there is no final arbiter in disputes, and because membership is voluntary, anyone can leave if and when they so choose. Policing the boundaries helps to reduce the importation of controversial practices or ideas and the likelihood of people defecting. But when it comes down to purely internal disputes (the interpretation of the Bible, for example), it is one man against the other.

The high value placed on humility, mutual respect, and gelassenheit (yieldedness to God and the brotherhood) are intended to reduce the conflict, to provide an encouragement to compromise,  but all too often, humans being humans, no compromise can be found, and separation is the only possible settlement. With schism, of course, comes excommunication and, where practised, avoidance. Hence, there is always instability at the heart of an Anabaptist community that sticks to its core principles and values.

Exacerbating this instability are fundamental problems related to generational expansion and turnover. First of all, only the membership of the first generation is purely voluntary. Subsequent generations are socialized into the community from the moment of birth and so can never experience the same feeling of joining the community as their parents. Although they are required to decide whether to become members in their late teens, it is not the same as coming in from the outside, as making a radical change with the commitment. The second generaton’s attitude to the community will never be identical to that of their parents, and the temptation of the outside world, because it is unknown, will always be greater, creating numerous opportunities for fracture.

Also, because of its separation from the outside world, its denunciation of the dominant economy, the community has to provide employment opportunities for all of its children. Because they are commited to an agricultural life, they have to avoid labour-saving technologies to maximize labour demand, and they have to either divide their farms into smaller and smaller plots for their children (like southern share-croppers) or generate enough wealth in each generation to buy farms for the children.

Following the former solution, dividing farms up, results in increasing numbers of people trying to subsist on the same land base, thus decreasing the standard of living of the community and producing further stresses. As this internal stress over how to provide for an expanding community within a fixed land base increases, the temptation for young people to jump ship in order to make a better life also increases.

The second solution, generating enough surplus wealth to purchase farms for the children, is difficult because it requires a fairly large involvement in the dominant market economy. That wealth-production can lead to inequality, which is itself a threat to the brotherhood. Furthermore, using labour-intensive practices puts the community at a disadvantage in the competition with outsiders who invest in productivity-enhancing technologies, reducing the amount of wealth that can be produced. And competition for new farms drives up the price of land, producing pressure for change.

The Hutterites, as Douglas and Wildavsky point out, have solved many of these problems by adopting a communal lifestyle. All property is owned in common. New members are required to give all they have to the community in return for an equal share of all sustenance and wealth produced. Should anyone leave, they give up all claim to the commune’s property, a strong incentive to stay in. The work of the community is fully organized, with managers overseeing the different areas of work and the others assigned according to their skills and aptitudes.

When the Hutterite community reaches a specified number of members, it splits in two. The community buys new land and provides all of the buildings and equipment required for the second colony. The people divide themselves into two groups, not knowing until the last moment which will be chosen, by lottery, to move to the new colony. The two colonies are then independent of each other, though still associate and support each other as necessary.

The Hutterite colony, then, is a hybrid of voluntary-egalitarian membership and hierarchical-regulatory organization. It provides true equality of opportunity and outcomes through communal ownership, it has built-in mechanisms for decision-making and dispute-resolution in its management structure, and it regularly divides itself along self-determined lines. As such, the Hutterite model has shown far greater stability than the Mennonite/Amish model of private ownership and voluntary adherence to community expectations and responsibilities.

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Up until now on this website, I have tried to be as objective as possible about the beliefs and practices of my Mennonite ancestors and relations, have tried not to take sides in any of the schisms. However, I have written that I believe the excommunications, the schisms, and the shunning are inhumane and anti-spiritual. I must admit, I do not like my cousin-not-far-enough-removed David W Martin. I do blame him and his cronies for the heartbreak they introduced into my family and the damage it has done.

But Douglas and Wildavsky have helped me to see that all of these questionable practices and all of these nasty outcomes are built into the very structure of the Mennonite community and the culture that has evolved to support it. And the more closely a group of people tries to follow the teachings and confessions of the early Anabaptists, the more likely this division and hurt and pain is to ensue. (The same can be said for the Plymouth Brethren, perhaps to a lesser degree, for their basic structure is identical to that of the Mennonites; they just use slightly different strategies for maintaining the community.)

It is only by loosening the lifestyle rules, practising tolerance and humility and respect for insiders and outsiders alike, introducing some sort of hierarchy for binding dispute resolution, using excommunication very judiciously, and throwing out shunning completely that the Mennonite community can avoid some of these faults, some of the pain. I believe this is what the Conference Mennonites and the Old Orders have managed to do.

Purists, of course, argue that those measures amount to abandoning the true Anabaptist faith. And that brings me around to Peter Hoover.

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Peter Hoover came to my attention about the same time as Douglas and Wildavsky did. On two occasions in one day, Peter came up when I was Googling for answers to questions that arose. It was a Sunday when we were visiting Mennonite cemeteries to find some of my lost ancestors.

When we came to the site of the old Orthodox Mennonite meeting house in Wellesley township southwest of Wallenstein, I was shocked to see that it was no longer there, that it had obviously burned down not too long ago. Google took me to an article in the Woolwich Observer that covered the fire that destroyed the meeting house in the summer of 2019. Attached to the article was a long comment from Peter Hoover reminiscing about the centrality of the building to his childhood.

We then went to the first David Martin meeting house and cemetery east of Wallenstein. There I found that the headstone for Bishop David W Martin’s wife, Mary Cress, has only the name “Cress,” followed by the usual dates. I found this very odd. I knew she did not come from a Mennonite family, but she had been the faithful wife of the bishop for many years. Why would he not have her first name carved into her stone? I Googled again, and there again was Peter Hoover with a lot of information about Mary Cress, but not what I was looking for.

So then I had to Google Peter. I knew I had seen his name on a number of articles in the Global Anabaptist and Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO), and I was pretty sure he was from the Hoover family associated with the David Martin and Orthodox churches. What I found is that he and I are second cousins, our mothers Leah and Sarah first cousins. His grandfather is my grandfather Peter’s older brother Manoah, his grandmother Selina my grandmother Lovina’s cousin.

Peter’s father, Anson Hoover, was a leader of the group that exited the David Martins in the 50s and eventually became the Orthodox Mennonite Church. Anson was the first minister in the group, and he was the Anson Hoover who led the exodus from that church in 1974. He left or was excommunicated (depending on whose perspective you’re hearing) from the splinter group in 1976 and joined the Conservative Mennonites.

Peter’s brother, David, started a small and short-lived Mennonite communal group near Linwood sometime in the 70s, before rejoining the Orthodox church. Peter himself has spent most of his life searching for and trying to help create a “Pure Church.” He and his family have lived at various places in the USA and Canada, in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in New Zealand, and in Tasmania, always in some sort of Anabaptist community. He was ordained a Mennonite minister in Mexico in the 1980s, and he assisted in establishing two Hutterite colonies in Minnesota. In 2006, Peter and a group of those Hutterites established the Rocky Cape (later Detention River) Christian Community in northwestern Tasmania. The most recent word, from late fall 2019, is that he has been ousted from that community and is back in the USA.

In snooping around the web in an attempt to put together a better picture of this cousin, I came across an article entitled “The Pure Church Movement,” which was published in The Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies in 2016. This piece opened my eyes to a more complex set of dynamics in the history of the Mennonites in Waterloo County.

Hoover argues that beyond the conflict over how much the church should assimilate with the external world, there has long been another conflict over church purity and religious zeal that focusses on the issue of church discipline: the ban and shunning. This conflict is between the establishment—which promotes a comfortable routine of traditional rules guiding church practice through an emphasis on compromise and conflict-avoidance—and the zealots—who promote a constant self-examination and dialogue in light of the New Testament and early Anabaptist writers in pursuit of an ever purer form of religious expression and practice.

The zealots don’t simply envision a battle between the community of brothers and “the world,” but also a battle between current community complacency and the ideals of the orginal Anabaptists and the apostolic New Testament Church. The church, then, is in need of constant renewal, constant hyper-surveillance for any sign of contamination or spiritual laxity, in its pursuit of the Pure Church ideal.

Hoover finds this movement or emphasis across the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Hutterites. He sees its beginning in the late nineteenth century, when a portion of the Anabaptist world embraced the revivalism of the Great Awakening, while another portion (the Old Orders) maintained the old religious traditions of North American Anabaptism. He argues there was a third group who rejected Protestant Revivalism, but thought that there was in fact a great need for revival, in the form of a return to “pure” Anabaptism and “true” discipleship.

He writes: “All Pure Churches hold the Scriptures and early Anabaptist writings in the highest regard. All of them practice a highly developed church order with a discipline that is severe, frequently used, and followed by avoidance (shunning) that is total. All of them keep their fellowship pure by avoiding social interchange with other churches and fellowships they deem apostate—nearly all groups refusing to attend any worship service, including the funerals or weddings of family members, outside the group.”

Another characteristic of Pure Church groups that distinguishes them from the Old Order is their tendency to make “frequent and drastic changes. . .if they felt it would bring them closer to early Anabaptism and the principles of Scripture.” They have a focus on personal repentance, spiritual life, and personal accountability for their behavior. “Not static but outward looking, mission-minded, and adventurous, members of the radical Pure Churches have pioneered many settlements in North, Central, and South America.”

They tend to be very plain: “all men from their adolescence wear beards … nearly all groups use horse drawn vehicles and most avoid automobiles as well…. Most keep electricity out of their homes. Among the Pure Churches are some of the most primitive lifestyles” among Anabaptist groups. They do not work outside the community, and their children attend parochial schools. “Entire groups continually work together to buy more farmland, often in large tracts, so all families can have land on which to provide for themselves.”

Hoover traces the movement from the 1890s and the Reformed Amish Christian Church of Pennsylvania and Tennessee. In Waterloo County, he sees its beginnings with Daniel Brubacher’s group and the David Martin group, which broke away from the Old Order in 1911 and 1917 respectively, then merged in 1917 and split again in 1920. A group from the Rainham and South Cayuga congregations in Haldimand County (including the Hoover and Sherk families) also left the Old Order and joined the David Martins in the early years.

What follows then is a complicated history of small groups splitting off from other groups, merging with still other groups, associating with groups in the USA, absorbing other groups, and so on. There seems to be an increasing inter-mingling of Swiss and Russian Mennonite, Amish, and Hutterite people and ideas. Key figures, many from the extended Hoover family, connect all of these groups in one way or another.

In the end, Hoover sees two main surviving streams in the Pure Church movement. The first he characterizes as similar to the Old Orders, pretty traditional but incorporating more severe discipline into their practices. In Waterloo County, this stream is represented by the David Martins. The second stream is more radical and more willing to change its practices as it strives for ever purer spiritual life. In Waterloo county this is represented by the Orthodox Mennonites, but it includes communal groups in the USA and Central and South America.

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When you take a second look at Hoover’s history of the Pure Church movement, you realize that it is a pretty biased view: the Pure Church movement, when it comes down to it, seems to include any community that his family has been involved in or had an influence on.

One might ask, for example, why groups like the David Martins are included when he suggests that they have settled into an Old-Order-like traditionalism. If they are in, why not include the Old Orders, who were the first to halt and reverse the drift into assimilation that the main body of the church was accepting? I suspect that Hoover would argue that it is because the Old Orders were simply maintaining the dead North American Menno traditionalism, while the Dave Martins were chasing a revival of original Anabaptist purity. He might argue that the difference was the “severe” form of disipline practised by the Daves. (I, on the other hand, might suggest it is because the Old Order is the tradition his family rejected and Dave Martin the bright new future they chose.)

But how severe does a groups’s disciplinary practices have to be to qualify? Even the main body of the church (before the Old Order schism) excommunicated Solomon Eby and Daniel Brenneman (the so-called “New” Mennonites) in 1874, and the Old Orders effectively excommunicated almost everybody south of the Waterloo-Woolwich line in 1889. Is it the practice of shunning, then, that defines the red line of severity? From what I can gather, some of the disagreement between the Daves and the Orthodox and amongst the various factions of the Orthodox was over shunning, or at least the severity of shunning to be practised.

Perhaps it is simply their fervor over such issues, rather than any specific position, that defines them as Pure Church, some quality or quantity of spiritual/religious zeal that identifies a Purist.

But this is just quibbling, I realize, a diversion that will get us nowhere. One thing that strikes me as significant is the issue of leadership. In most cases, the groups Hoover identifies as Pure Church are either named for their leader or are closely identified with a leader: the Daniel Brubachers, the David Martins, the Elam Martins, the Anson Hoovers, the Peter Brubachers, and so on. These are all groups that follow—usually take their identities from—a leader. This stands out in a tradition that values equality and humility and service so highly, and it points toward the sorts of things that Douglas and Wildavsky identify as structural weaknesses and possible survival strategies of voluntary-egalitarian social organizations.

The real value of Peter Hoover’s analysis, I think, is that it introduces another viewpoint into the discussion of Mennonite history: the perspective of the so-called “ultra-conservatives,” the view from what can easily be dismissed as the unstable lunatic fringe. This is precisely where the instability of the community is most visible.

I think that this perspective, combined with Douglas and Wildavsky’s structural analysis, perhaps points toward a new history of Mennonites in Waterloo County (and elsewhere). This would be an analysis that focusses on the sociological sources of community instability and conflict that drove schisms and adaptations. It would focus on issues of generational turnover, leadership succession, and external social and economic pressures, and it would treat the controversial ideas and practices and the schisms and mergers themselves as strategies for defining and maintaining group identity.

Such an analysis might be able to identify the differing social strategies (ideas, values, practices) that have enabled the large abiding groups (the Conference churches, the Old Orders, the David Martins, and the Orthodox) to survive as long as they have.

But this post has gone on much too long already. That history will need to be pushed into the future.

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Sources:

Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky. Risk and Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. 1982.

Hoover, Peter. “The Pure Church Movement.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 6(1):73-99. 2018.