ABSTRACT: Silent in the Land: Mennonites, Global Migration and the Search for Home
This paper explores the notion of home and belonging among Mennonite communities who have migrated across the world. From the roots of Mennonite identity amongst radical religious movements of the sixteenth-century Reformation to modern-day communities in the deserts of Mexico who look back to these early modern origins, the question about what makes Mennonites belong, what makes them feel at home is a crucial one. They have often learnt to be the ‘silent in the land’, a community that withdrew in the face of opposition and persecution into their ways and beliefs, but who have also sought and carved out homes in many places as they fled or migrated, moving from the Netherlands and Germany to Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and other Central and Eastern European countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mennonites settled in various locations after negotiating deals that guaranteed their acceptance but often chose to migrate once more when circumstances became difficult and they were no longer tolerated. In the 1700s and 1800s, they began to leave Europe for the Americas, alongside other non-conformist Protestants. Mennonites have expressed a sense of belonging in a global world in numerous ways. They have transposed beliefs, rituals, and theologies. They sing songs that date back to a time when martyrs burned on stakes. They have built genealogies that allow them to trace family trees back 300, 400, even 500 years. They have kept records of membership and church histories, carried them across the Atlantic on crowded passenger ships and salvaged them from fires in post-war Berlin or the rubble of bombed-out buildings. And they have maintained networks and connections across a diaspora, despite huge differences in lifestyle and location. The search for a home, however, also has a darker side. One group’s desire to make a place their home might conflict with other communities, and ideas about belonging necessarily exclude others. This paper explores the notion of belonging and home amongst a non-conformist Christian church whose origins date back to the 1500s, but it’s also a story common to human existence about what makes us belong and how our desire for belonging both sustains us and cause us pain.
Author Bio
Kat Hill is an author & researcher based in the Highlands of Scotland. Her work focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in various contexts from non-conformist religious communities such as Mennonites in Europe, America and the Global South to the mountain refuges of the Scottish Highlands. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and her second book, Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter was released with William Collins in Spring 2024. It has been shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.
