You may remember last month when we blogged about Mark Tooley’s essay in The American Spectator entitled “Mennonite Takeover?” I got a lot of feedback about that post–mostly on Facebook and via e-mail.
Sheldon Good, the Assistant Editor of the Mennonite Weekly Review, has recently weighed in on this supposed takeover. Good notes that Tooley is right about the fact that Anabaptists are no longer a persecuted minority, that they are becoming mainstream, that they have often emphasized their status as the “victim,” and have rejected support for empire building.
But he suggests that Tooley is wrong in assuming that neo-Anabaptists “demand pacifism,” are part of the political left, or demand an “expanded, coercive state.”
Read the entire essay here.
But he suggests that Tooley is wrong in assuming that neo-Anabaptists “demand pacifism,” are part of the political left, or demand an “expanded, coercive state.”
But he objects weakly—if not sophistically—that not all Anabaptists are pacifists; admits they're into “social justice,” which by definition demands an “expanded, coercive state”; and as for his leftism, makes his demurral on The Huffington Post, an unapologetic organ of the left.
Why not just come clean? He's a Democrat who will never vote Republican. Why the smokescreen, and pretense of non-partisanship?
Well, we know the answer to that one, don't we, John? It's all in the game. The left is just more slick about its pretenses.
Tom: Or maybe his a non-partisan Anabaptist who has voted Republican. I actually know a lot of Mennonites who fall into this camp.