Repressed Mennonites in Little Black Dresses

Repressed Mennonites in Little Black Dresses July 22, 2015

The image of Mennonites in popular culture is typically flattering. They are often seen as upright, conscientious, trustworthy, hard-working, frugal characters who can be forgiven their lack of patriotism because of their biblical earnestness. To some they have even become quintessential, pioneering Americans. This despite the fact that many Mennonites themselves seek to distinguish themselves from a theologically vacuous American Dream.

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The Anabaptists of Munster

This respectable reputation, however, is not universal. As Steve Carpenter shows in Mennonites and Media, Mennonites sometimes have been depicted as a depraved, eccentric, and duplicitous people. Take, for example, the debacle of Munster, which was used by Catholics, John Calvin, and Martin Luther to tarnish the reputation of Anabaptists in the sixteenth century. In 1534 followers of Bernhard Rothmann flocked to the “New Jerusalem” of Munster and established a theocracy. During a siege of the town by Catholic opponents, polygamy was established and a dissenter was beheaded, his genitals nailed to the city gate. Few Mennonites, as you can imagine, lay claim to this heritage. Some scholars continue to classify any Reformation outliers who are not Lutheran or Reformed using a grab-bag category of Anabaptism. For example, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950) describes all Anabaptists as “an eccentric people who immaturely allowed themselves to be swept up in the wild current of mere emotion—a waiting on the spirit somehow gone wrong.”

The sultry Mennonite in Heaven’s Prisoners

This theme continues in James Lee Burke’s crime novels, especially Heaven’s Prisoners (1998). The main character’s second wife is Annie Robicheaux, a “Mennonite Kansas girl with curly gold hair . . . and the most electric blue eyes I’d ever seen.” She “came from a background of what farmer pacifists that was so pervasively eccentric that she couldn’t recognize normality when she saw it.” And yet she left her old life and her mother, a quiet, heavy-set Mennonite woman who had never been in an airplane, to move to New Orleans where she became a “thirty-something woman fond of seducing her older husband.” It’s the story, a common one if you’ve ever read Amish romance novels, of traditionalists escaping the repressed sexuality of their home communities.

Carpenter’s book, which tracks the portrayal of Mennonites from sober-minded humanitarians to sex-crazed nymphs, is more encyclopedic than analytical. But that’s not really the author’s fault. These portraits of Mennonites say more about the authors than their subjects, who comprise an incredibly diverse religious body. They range from Amish in black capes to rogue Mennonites in little black dresses; from hellfire fundamentalists to LGBTQ advocates; from simple-living liberals to millionaire conservatives grown wealthy from a powerful combination of the Protestant work ethic and the wages of whiteness.


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