A Heresy for the Protestants: The Anabaptists

The purported reason for the Reformation was the desire among certain groups of Christians to recreate the original and uncorrupted Early Church. And yet, whether we are talking about the emergence of the Lutherans or the Calvinists, we are seeing movements largely constituted of prosperous, educated merchants and urban professionals. In short, these two religious revolutions were fueled by the nascent middle class of the Early Modern Period. But what about the urban working class and the peasants of the countryside? Many of these folk were equally fed up with the abuses of the established Church and its dogmatic ratification of a class system ("The Three Estates"), as though it had been ordained by God as much as the inflexible differences in physiology between man and woman. When it comes to the question of the would-be Protestant group known pejoratively (and inaccurately) as the "Anabaptists" (i.e., "those opposed to baptism"), we discover one of the key moral failures of the Reformation, because the Anabaptists found themselves rejected by Protestant and Catholic alike, though certainly the Anabaptists fulfilled all the theoretical notions of a legitimate Protestant movement. As hinted above, their name is a misnomer. Anabaptists actually believed in the sacrament of baptism, perhaps even more strongly than any other Christian sect. In fact, they took their cue from the Judaic cult of John the Baptist himself, where baptism is a rite of spiritual transformation and commitment administered when a person is in the fully knowing state of adulthood. To perform baptism upon a baby (as prescribed by Catholics and all other Protestant groups) was considered by the Anabaptists to be a wasted effort. According to their doctrine, infants and children have not yet reached the state of complete moral cognizance. Anabaptists were not hung up on the dogmatic (and superstitious) idea that baptism must be performed as soon as possible after a child is born. This precept stemmed from the belief that in order to prevent the infant soul from passing into the cosmic no-mans-land of Limbo, if it should die before reaching the age of seven, when it would receive the sacrament of Christian Confirmation. In Anabaptist belief, babies and children were viewed as spiritually innocent in the eyes of God, and so had nothing to fear in terms of either Limbo or damnation. But there was something far more distinctive about Anabaptists with respect to other Protestant movements: they consisted mostly of the working classes and rural tenant farmers. Their leaders sought an alliance with Martin Luther for protection against the Catholic powers, who viewed Anabaptists and Lutherans alike (both of them German religious movements) as mortal enemies. To the dismay of the Anabaptists, Luther rejected them. As for the Calvinists in Switzerland, that Protestant movement held the belief that the saved were those favored by God with prosperity. So why should this be an impediment? Individual Anabaptists could be prosperous peasants and artisans. However, the Predestinationist Calvinists rejected the Anabaptists because of their communal economic streak. The Anabaptists, like other Protestant movements, aspired to be like the Early Christians, so another distinguishing feature of their sect was what they borrowed an idea from the recorded organizational practice of Early Christian communities: mutual assistance to whomever was in need within the congregation. For Calvinists, this was cheating God of His Will to judge each person according to his individual merits, and mete out prosperity or financial misfortune accordingly. So there you have it: Switzerland was not a refuge either. On the other hand, Luther needed the support of the nobility and the wealthy merchants, and if he welcomed the socialist-minded Anabaptists into the fold, the wealthy members of Lutheranism would withdraw support because of their psychological need for a system of socioeconomic differentiation. Equality in Heaven perhaps, but they could not entertain the idea of equality on Earth. Rejected by all sides, the Anabaptists had nothing to do but fight. In their struggle, they even managed to temporarily gain control of an entire city, and elected a shoemaker to be its mayor. But in the end, they lacked the resources to win. Some went underground, paying lip service to whatever official faith held sway in whatever German province they found themselves in. These would bide their time and eventually settle in the new world where they would find refuge in the Quaker Colony of William Penn, where they became known as the "Pennsylvania Dutch". Others would settle in England and win adherents there, especially during the reign of the Puritans, but their beliefs would often prove too radical even for the Puritans, who imprisoned any one of them who became too vocal about social revolution. One of these radicals was the preacher, John Bunyan, who wrote (while incarcerated) one of the greatest religious allegories in the English language: The Pilgrim's Progress (a book that would become as essential reading among the common folk in America as the King James Bible itself). Of course, in England, they asserted a more accurate form of name for their movement, and called themselves, "the Baptists". Yet how many Baptists today would be surprised to discover that they share a common religious heritage with the Mennonites and the Amish!