Horse-and-Buggy Mennonites: Hoofbeats of Humility in a Postmodern World

375 Pages·2006·7.2 MB·English

by  Donald B. Kraybill

horse-and-buggy mennonites
pennsylvania german history and culture series,
number 7
Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society,
Volume 40
editor
Simon J. Bronner
The Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
editorial board
C. Richard Beam, Millersville University
Aaron S. Fogleman, Northern Illinois University
Mark Häberlein, University of Bamberg, Germany
Donald B. Kraybill, Elizabethtown College
Kenneth McLaughlin, University of Waterloo, Canada
A. Gregg Roeber, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park
John D. Roth, Goshen College
Hans Schneider, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany
Denise A. Seachrist, Kent State University, Trumbull
Richard E. Wentz, Arizona State University
Marianne S. Wokeck, Indiana University—Purdue University, Indianapolis
Don Yoder, University of Pennsylvania
previous titles in the series
Margaret Reynolds, Plain Women: Gender and Ritual in the
Old Order River Brethren, edited by Simon J. Bronner
Steven M. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land:
Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic
Jeff Bach, Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata
Corinne and Russell Earnest, To the Latest Posterity: Pennsylvania-German
Family Registers in the Fraktur Tradition
David L. Weaver-Zercher, editor, Writing the Amish: The Worlds
of John A. Hostetler
Don Yoder, The Pennsylvania German Broadside: A History and Guide
X
horse-and-buggy mennonites
hoofbeats of humility in a postmodern world
donald b. kraybill and james p. hurd
The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania
Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kraybill, Donald B.
Horse-and-buggy Mennonites : hoofbeats of humility
in a postmodern world / Donald B. Kraybill, James P. Hurd.
p. cm. — (Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society; v. 40
Pennsylvania German history and culture series ; no. 7) (Pennsylvania German
history and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-271-02865-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 0-271-02866-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Wenger Mennonites.
2. Groffdale Conference Mennonite Church.
I. Hurd, James P., 1941– .
II. Title.
III. Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society (2001) ; v. 40.
IV. Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society (2001). Pennsylvania
German history and culture series ; no. 7.
GR110.P4 A372 vol. 40
[BX8129.O43]
974.8’00431 s—dc22
[305.6/89]
2005036337
Copyright © 2006
The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by
The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of Ameri-
can University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper.
This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing 50% post-consumer waste, and
meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.
X contents
List of Tables and Diagrams vi
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
1 Who Are the Wenger Mennonites? 1
2 The Fabric of Faith and Culture 31
3 Mobility and Identity 63
4 The Architecture of Community 90
5 The Rhythm of Sacred Ritual 123
6 Passages from Birth to Death 151
7 Making a Living Together 185
8 Technology and Social Change 208
9 Pilgrims in a Postmodern World 235
Appendixes 267
Notes 290
Selected References 333
Photo Credits 346
Index 347
X tables and diagrams
table 1 Estimated Wenger membership and population by state 3
table 2 Religious reference groups for Wengers living in Lancaster
County (Pa.) 23
table 3 Estimated adult membership of Lancaster County (Pa.)
Anabaptist-related groups 25
table 4 Social and cultural restrictions 37
table 5 Demographic profile of Wengers in the Martindale district 107
table 6 Profiles of Wenger settlements by state 111
table 7 Wenger household surnames 158
table 8 Occupational profile of Wenger adults 187
table 9 Types of small businesses 198
table 10 The drift from Old Order ways to mainstream
Christianity 233
diagram 1 European Anabaptist roots of the Lancaster (Pa.) Mennonites
and Amish 5
diagram 2 Formation of Old Order Mennonite groups in North America,
1872–1939 12
diagram 3 Major Mennonite branches in Lancaster County (Pa.),
1812–1946 19
diagram 4 Wenger churchhouses in Lancaster County (Pa.) 92
diagram 5 Location of Wenger congregations in North America 99
diagram 6 Wenger baptisms in all settlements, 1975–2005 106
diagram 7 Typical seating arrangement in a Wenger churchhouse 127
diagram 8 Wenger-related Mennonite divisions, 1893–1993 214
X 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 chal-
lenge. With bicycle mechanic Sewall K. Crocker and a bulldog named Bud,
he set off in a 1903 Winton 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. 1
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.2
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.3 Americans had fallen in love with the car. In-
deed, there remained nothing more American than driving one. It had be-
come the symbol of technological achievement, progress, mobility, and inde-
pendence—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 commu-
nion wine offered by Bishop Moses Horning. The boycott of this holiest of
Mennonite moments was, in fact, a boycott of the car, which Bishop Horn-
ing 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.
preface
This book tells the story of the Wenger Mennonites, Americans whose
cultural habits sometimes appear un-American and who stand on the mar-
gins 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.4 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 folks—rejecting 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 es-
sential 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 re-
ligious 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 preserva-
tion 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 mean-
viii
preface
ing of a language—in this case, Pennsylvania German—shape the way
members of a society see and experience the world around them. The values
and dispositions ensconced in a culture’s worldview guide its perception and
response to the larger society.5 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 his-
torical context of current debates. We have focused on 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 perspec-
tives to understand the Wenger saga.
We have sought to tell the Wenger tale with a spirit of empathetic un-
derstanding, 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 contempo-
rary 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 sym-
bols 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 sub-
ject 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 en-
gagement 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 congrega-
tion interchangeably throughout the text. The terms ministers and ministry
refer to all three ordained leadership roles (bishop, preacher, deacon). Boy
ix