Preface

Automobile enthusiasts in San Francisco taunted Horatio Nelson Jackson with a $50 wager in May 1903. Did he have the courage to drive a car from San Francisco to New York in three months, over thousands of miles of treacherous roads? A physician from Vermont, Jackson was up to the challenge. With bicycle mechanic Sewall K. Crocker and a bulldog named Bud, he set off in a 1903 touring car for a harrowing journey, hampered by endless repairs and scores of bumps and bruises. Despite the disruptions, the trio arrived in New York just in time to claim the title: America’s first cross-continental drivers.

Jackson’s cross-country drive opened America’s love affair with the car. Millions of Americans soon were driving the horseless carriages that Henry Ford and other automakers had begun cranking out of their assembly lines. The advent of high-performance cars and the interstate highway system in the last half of the twentieth century soon turned the coast-to-coast trek into a three-day trip. In 2003, a century after Jackson’s trip, U.S. households claimed more vehicles than drivers—some 204 million household vehicles for only 191 million drivers. Americans had fallen in love with the car. Indeed, there remains nothing more American than driving one. It had become the symbol of technological achievement, progress, mobility, and independence—the chief icon of American identity.

Not all Americans, however, embraced the car. On a Sunday morning in 1927, the love affair came to a screeching halt in a Mennonite church in Eastern Pennsylvania, when half of the congregation refused the communion wine offered by Bishop Moses Horning. The boycott of this holiest of Mennonite moments was, in fact, a boycott of the car, which Bishop Horning had finally sanctioned after years of debate. The controversy over the car led to the formation of the Wenger Mennonites, named for their first leader and bishop, Joseph O. Wenger.

This book tells the story of the Wenger Mennonites, Americans whose cultural habits sometimes appear un-American and who stand on the margins of mainstream culture. They speak a German dialect, shun cars and computers, wear distinctive dress, and finish their formal education at the eighth grade. Yet they have made selective accommodations to modernity over the years: though they forbid owning cars, for example, they do ride in them at times. We might expect a horse-driving group to be on the wane in the twenty-first century. Instead, the Wengers are thriving. The initial cluster of two hundred Wenger families in 1927 has grown to nearly 18,000 people living in nine different states. This rapid growth continues to dispel doomsayers’ predictions of the demise of Old Order societies.

These horse-and-buggy pilgrims are strangers in a postmodern world. In some ways they are premodern folksærejecting the car, the ultimate symbol of modernity, as well as the World Wide Web, the wily symbol of postmodernity. Clinging to rural traditions, appealing to ancient authorities, promoting humility rather than individualism, and spurning mass media and high school, these religious pilgrims have not acquiesced to many of the pressures of the modern world. But, as we will discover, they have selectively modernized some facets of their society.

The Wenger story has rarely been told, partly because the Amish, who are more populous and picturesque in their distinctive dress and beards, often eclipse the Wengers in the public eye. The Wengers represent a small portion of all Mennonites in the United States, but they are the largest of several Old Order Mennonite groups. And, apart from the Amish, they are the largest body of Pennsylvania German speakers in North America. Given their strong commitment to the dialect, the Wengers will likely play an essential role in preserving it.

The Wenger story is important not only because of their success on the margins of the modern world but also because they have preserved many religious rituals—rituals abandoned by droves of other Mennonites, who have absorbed much of the larger American culture. The Wengers have retained age-old rituals rooted in Swiss–South German Anabaptist life as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American Mennonite practices. In this sense, the Wengers offer a significant cultural site for studying the preservation of religious ritual in the face of modernity. Despite conserving many religious traditions, the Wengers do change their socioeconomic practices, albeit with caution.

Our story employs the tools of cultural analysis to capture the Wengers’ worldview and values. Cultural codes embedded in the structure and meaning of a language—in this case, Pennsylvania German—shape the way members of a society see and experience the world around them. These values and dispositions ensconced in the culture’s worldview guide a subgroup’s perception and response to the larger society. We are particularly interested in the web of meanings spun by Wenger culture over time, a web that enables its members to make sense of the world and their place in it. Thus, we have peppered the text with quotations from our interviews to allow the Wengers to tell their own story in their own voice.

We have not written a systematic history of the Wenger people, even though we have used historical materials whenever possible to show the historical context of current debates. We have focused on the areas of values, identity, ritual, and technology, overlooking many topics that would beg for coverage in a more comprehensive study. Moreover, rather than imposing one conceptual scheme on the Wenger story, we have used a variety of interpretive perspectives to understand the Wenger saga.

We have sought to tell the Wenger tale with a spirit of empathetic understanding, trying to see things from their perspective within their world. Two key questions have guided our investigation. How is this car-rejecting group able not only to survive but also to thrive in a postmodern world? And what, if anything, can those of us immersed in the mainstream of contemporary culture learn from these pilgrims on the margins?

We have organized the text into nine chapters. In the first chapter, we provide a sweeping overview of the Wenger community and its place in the larger world of Anabaptist groups. We explore the values, beliefs, and symbols of Wenger culture in Chapter 2 and then the historical roots of Wenger identity in Chapter 3. The social architecture of the community is the subject of Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 describes religious rituals. We focus on life passages in Chapter 6 and on work in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 highlights the role of technology and social change. In the concluding chapter, we explore the Wengers’ relationships with other religious groups as well as their engagement with the postmodern world.

Although the official name of the group is the Groffdale Conference Mennonite Church, we refer to them as Wengers, because this is what they call themselves and how they are known among their neighbors. Following Wenger usage, the term church refers to the community of believers, not to a building. A church district entails the congregation of people who meet for services at a particular churchhouse. We use the terms district and congregation interchangeably throughout the text. The terms ministers and ministry refer to all three ordained leadership roles (bishop, preacher, deacon). Boy and girl, according to Wenger usage, refer to both children and adolescents. Wenger consistently use counsel meeting, not council meeting, in their English translation of Rot. We use a variety of words—non-Wengers, outsiders, moderns—to refer to people outside of Wenger society, terms that should be clear as they appear in the text. Apart from two standard German words (Gelassenheit and Ordnung), we occasionally use Pennsylvania German words in the text as reminders that daily discourse in Wenger life is in a German dialect. Although some dictionaries of Pennsylvania German have been compiled, the dialect is primarily an oral language; its words, sounds, and spellings vary considerably among cultural groups. Pennsylvania German dictionaries do not include all of the unique Wenger usages, so we consulted several Wengers for the proper spelling and translation of dialect words that appear in the text. (See Appendix F for a listing.)

Social scientists and philosophers engage in lively debates about the distinction between modern and postmodern societies—debates that this book does not seek to unpack. In any event, the beginning of the Wenger story in 1927 is rooted in a rejection of some aspects of the modern era; however, now, in the twenty-first century, the Wengers find themselves living in an increasingly postmodern world. Modernity is, of course, a slippery term that we use in two ways in the text: to describe the historic changes produced by the Age of Enlightenment, and to describe contemporary society. We sometimes use the term moderns as a broad label for members of contemporary society and modern to designate contemporary forms of social organization in American society. Postmodern, in our usage, refers to the emergent forms of culture and social organization in the twenty-first century.

In order to protect the anonymity of those who talked with us about their lives and community, we have, with a few exceptions, not identified them. We have occasionally used pseudonyms. Within the context of Wenger culture, members are admonished neither to take credit for achievements nor to seek publicity, lest it lead to pride. We have sought to respect their requests for anonymity by not identifying them by name unless their story is already public knowledge.

Chapter 1

Who Are the Wenger Mennonites?

A Horse-and-Buggy People

Martha Shirk, the mother of seven school-age children, lives on a small produce farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where her family raises vegetables to sell at their roadside stand and at a public produce auction. Shirk’s kitchen is equipped with electricity but not with an air conditioner, microwave, or television. The Shirk family travels by horse and carriage to a simple Mennonite churchhouse for Sunday services conducted in Pennsylvania German.

In the Finger Lakes region of New York, Janet Zimmerman teaches in a one-room private school. Her twenty-five pupils come from eight families in her local community. She knows their parents well because all of them are members of her church. Although she never attended high school, Janet teaches all eight grades. When the pupils “graduate” from eighth grade, they will work in apprenticeships in homes, farms, and businesses operated by their parents or other church members.

Eli Hoover is a farmer in Morgan County, Missouri, where he raises corn and other crops for his herd of dairy cows. Eli farms with steel-wheeled tractors, but he uses mechanical milkers as well as other modern farm equipment. In addition to operating their dairy, his family raises strawberries and asparagus for a local produce market. Eli’s son Reuben operates a small bicycle repair shop that caters to many of the youth in his church who use bicycles instead of cars.

Martha, Janet, and Eli are members of an Old Order Mennonite group known as Wenger Mennonites—named for their first leader, Joseph O. Wenger. The group’s official name is the Groffdale Conference Mennonite Church, because Wenger was a preacher at the Groffdale churchhouse in Lancaster County where the group held its first services. The Wengers are sometimes called “horse-and-buggy Mennonites” or “team Mennonites” because their horse and carriage form a team that provides daily transportation. Although the horse and buggy are widely used for local travel, the Wengers also hire vans driven by outsiders for long-distance trips and business activities.

Not only are the multiple labels—Wengers, horse-and-buggy Mennonites, team Mennonites, Old Order Mennonites, Groffdale Conference Mennonites—somewhat confusing, but the Wengers are also often mistaken by outsiders for Amish or other Old Order Mennonite groups who also use horse-drawn carriages.

When the Wenger Church formed in 1927 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, it numbered about five hundred members. Today, the Wengers claim some eight thousand members (baptized adults) and forty-nine congregations in nine states. When children are included in the count, the number swells to nearly eighteen thousand. Sizable families and strong retention have produced robust growth in the twentieth century. Indeed, the Wenger population, growing at about 3.7 percent a year, doubles every nineteen years. Lancaster County, the parent Wenger community, claims one third of the members, but migration to other areas has increased steadily since 1949.

The growth of the Wenger Church, along with the cost and scarcity of farmland in eastern Pennsylvania, has prodded many families to move to other states. Between 1968 and 1998, for example, 45 percent of the families in one Lancaster County congregation migrated to other states. Slightly over half of the Wengers live in five Pennsylvania settlements, but new settlements in other states are booming, as shown in Table 1. A member living in Lancaster County explained, “Almost every family has children who have moved to other areas; there is a lot of excitement about moving.”

Despite the spread of the Wengers to other states, their practices are remarkably similar across the country. Their cultural template, replicated in new settlements, produces fairly uniform practices from New York to Missouri. Ordained leaders from all the communities gather in Lancaster County twice a year for a ministers’ conference. These semiannual meetings harmonize regulations and maintain fellowship among the forty-nine congregations, which are tied together by culture, custom, and the decisions of the ministers’ conferences.

Unlike the Amish, who worship in their homes, the Wengers hold worship services in churchhouses—starkly plain buildings devoid of electricity, carpeting, pulpits, musical instruments, stained-glass windows, and steeples. Although the Wengers have electricity and telephones in their homes, they shun radios, televisions, video players, and computers. Farmers use steel-wheeled tractors to pull modern machinery on their small family farms.

Wenger clothing, plain and simple, is not as distinctive as that of the Amish. Wenger men do not wear beards, for example. Both Amish and Wenger women wear capes (an extra layer of fabric over the upper torso), prayer coverings, and bonnets, but clothing styles differ: Amish women wear plain-colored fabrics, while Wenger women wear dresses with modest prints. The color of their horse-drawn buggy, the core symbol of Wenger identity, also separates them from the Amish. The Wengers drive black carriages, while their Amish neighbors, at least in Lancaster County, drive gray ones. Like the Amish, the Wengers operate private schools and speak Pennsylvania German, commonly known as Pennsilvaanisch Deitsch (Pennsylvania Dutch).

Anabaptist Roots

The Wengers trace their lineage back to the Anabaptist movement, which emerged in southern Germany and Switzerland in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The early Anabaptists were young radicals who were chafing at the pace of the Reformation. They pleaded for religious reforms to move faster and to break more sharply with established Catholic patterns. Impatient for change, some of the reformers baptized each other as adults in 1525 in Zurich, Switzerland. This defiant act of civil disobedience laid the foundation for an independent church, free of state control.

Already baptized as infants in the Catholic Church, these free-church advocates were called “Anabaptists” (rebaptizers), because their adult baptism was a second baptism. Adult baptism was a capital offense in sixteenth-century Europe, because it threatened to dissolve the marriage of civil and religious authority that had developed over the centuries. Infant baptism not only conferred membership in both Catholic and Protestant churches but also granted automatic citizenship, which gave authorities the power to tax and conscript. The age of baptism symbolized a central issue of authority in church-state relations. Who held ultimate authority over religious matters—the church or the state?

In the Anabaptists’ view, the authority of the Scriptures towered above civil edicts. Turning their backs on traditional Catholic teaching, evolving Protestant doctrine, and the laws of the Zurich city council, the young upstarts developed their own interpretation of Scripture based on the teachings and life of Jesus in the New Testament.

Known as radical reformers, many Anabaptists paid dearly for tearing asunder the church-state fabric that had been woven together over the centuries. Thousands of them were tortured and killed by religious and civil authoritiesæburned at the stake, drowned in lakes and rivers, starved in prisons, or beheaded by the sword. Many Anabaptists fled to remote areas for safety. Stories of the bloody persecution are recorded in the Martyrs Mirror, a 1,200-page book first compiled by Anabaptists in Holland in 1660.

Memories of the persecution linger in Wenger minds today and temper their relationships with the larger society. The Martyrs Mirror is found in many Wenger homes. Indeed, an Old Order historian says, “The Martyrs Mirror stands next to the Bible” in their community. Preachers often cite martyr stories in their sermons, and lay members recount them as well. A favorite one is the saga of Hans Haslibacher, a Swiss Anabaptist martyr beheaded in 1571 in Bern. A poem by an Anabaptist prisoner describing the execution says that, after hours of torture, Haslibacher dreamed that three divine signs would accompany his beheading: his head would jump into his hat and laugh, the sun would turn crimson like blood, and the town well would fill with blood. All three predictions came true, according to the poet. The poem was later sung as a hymn in numerous Anabaptist communities, and even today the tale of Haslibacher keeps the memories of persecution alive across the generations.

Many Anabaptist groups eventually became known as Mennonites through the influence of Menno Simons, a former Catholic priest who became a Dutch Anabaptist leader in the mid-1500s. A few Mennonites arrived in the Americas as early as 1683, but most of the Swiss–South German immigrants came ashore in the eighteenth century. Because of William Penn’s warm welcome, Pennsylvania became a favorite haven for Mennonites and other persecuted religious minorities. Eventually, Mennonites fanned southward into Maryland and Virginia, as well as westward into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and beyond.

The Amish also trace their lineage to the Anabaptist movement of 1525. They were part of the Swiss stream of Anabaptism until 1693, when they formed their own group under the leadership of Jakob Ammann, a Swiss Anabaptist leader who moved to the Alsace region of present-day France. Sharing common theological roots, the Amish and Mennonites branched into separate bodies in 1693 before embarking to the New World. There, Mennonite and Amish immigrants often settled near each other as they searched for fertile soil for establishing new communities.

Mennonites in the Garden Spot

Lancaster County, with its limestone soil, fertile farmland, and favorable climate, is often called the “garden spot” of the world. The skills and hard work of Mennonite farmers have helped rank the county first in the nation in agricultural production among non-irrigated counties. In the early 1700s, Mennonites from various areas of Germany and Switzerland settled in the area that would eventually become Lancaster County. Seeking religious freedom, political stability, and fertile soil, Mennonites founded settlements east and south of the future city of Lancaster. By 1717, some seventy-five families with more than five hundred adults and children had purchased hundreds of acres of land along the Pequea Creek. About fifteen miles to the northeast, immigrant communities also sprouted in the Groffdale area and the adjacent Weaverland Valley.

In 1717, Hans Groff, a Swiss-German Mennonite, bought approximately 1,300 acres and settled his family near a large spring a few miles west of the present-day town of New Holland in Lancaster County. This area eventually became known as Groffdale. About three years later, Hans Weber purchased five hundred acres for his sons along the Conestoga Creek, a few miles east of Groffdale, in a valley that soon became known as Weberthal or Weaver’s Valley and, eventually, Weaverland. The Mennonite communities that sprouted in the Pequea, Groffdale, and Weaverland areas gradually expanded into other areas of Lancaster County during the eighteenth century.

Mennonite churches in the Lancaster area were linked together through the Lancaster Mennonite Conference. The word “conference” carried two meanings: first, a loose network of congregations in common fellowship, and second, a fall and spring ministers’ conference for leaders from all the congregations. The ministers’ conference established common understandings, expectations, and regulations for the ministers and congregations of the Lancaster Conference.

Expectations for how leaders in the Lancaster Conference should “keep house”—i.e., maintain order—in their congregations were not written down until 1881. Nevertheless, many common Mennonite practices during the nineteenth century included the following:

• Plain and simple churchhouses. For Mennonites, the body of believers, not a building, constituted the church. Reflecting their rejection of Catholic cathedrals and ornate Protestant sanctuaries in Europe, Mennonites gathered for worship in unadorned churchhouses, without pulpits, steeples, stained-glass windows, or organs.
  
• Lay leadership. Mennonite leaders were called from within their own ranks through a process known as “casting the lot.” Leaders were selected from a pool of candidates nominated by the congregation. Ministers received no theological training and served for life without formal remuneration.
  
• Nonresistance to evil. Following the teachings of Jesus, Mennonites rejected the use of force and violence. They called this lifestyle “nonresistance,” meaning that they would not use force to resist evil. Not only did they typically boycott military service, but they rejected retaliation in daily social relationships as well. Even filing a lawsuit was forbidden because it used the force of law.
  
• Nonconformity to the world. Shaped by religious persecution in Europe, Mennonites taught that the church should not conform to the larger society, which used force and glorified the power of the state. Mennonites prayed for and respected government leaders, but they shied away from participating in politics beyond the local level. They believed that God had called them to live as strangers and pilgrims in the world.
  
• Submission and humility. Members were taught to submit to the church’s authority and to conduct their lives with modesty and humility. These virtues of Mennonite life underscored the power of the church over the individual. The church held the highest authority, followed by the family and then the individual. Although dress standards were not typically codified in writing, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mennonites usually wore plain, simple clothing after they joined the church.