Anabaptists: The Faith Born Under Persecution
Near Berlin, Ohio
The Amish faith traces its origins to an act of religious defiance in sixteenth century Switzerland. In the year fifteen twenty five, in the city of Zurich, a small group of reformers took a step that both the Catholic Church and the mainstream Protestant leaders of the Reformation considered outrageous: they baptized one another as adults, on the basis of their own conscious faith. In their view, infant baptism, which had been universal in European Christianity for more than a thousand years, was meaningless, because an infant could not choose to follow Christ.
This single theological position made the movement's members criminals under both church and civil law. Authorities called them Anabaptists, a word meaning rebaptizers, using it as an insult. Across Switzerland, the German states, and the Low Countries, Anabaptists were executed, imprisoned, expelled, and driven from their homes for more than a century.
Thousands died for the conviction that baptism required a conscious adult decision. The survivors formed close-knit, self-protective communities, often hidden in remote rural areas. They developed a theology of separation from the larger society, of mutual aid within the community, of simplicity as a spiritual value, and of refusing to swear oaths or take up arms.
Those convictions, forged in generations of persecution, became the bedrock of what would eventually become both the Mennonite and the Amish traditions whose descendants now fill the hills of Holmes County.
