CONFLICTS WITH THE LAW Mennonites, Hutterites, and Doukhobors
Mennonites, Hutterites, and Doukhobors who emigrated to Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries faced challenges with federal and provincial laws that sometimes conflicted with their desire to practice communal living, educate their children in their own schools, and remain true to their nonviolent beliefs by avoiding military service.
Mennonites and Hutterites, with origins in Switzerland and Italy at the time of the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s, and Doukhobors, originating in Russia about 1700, have much in common, including pacificism, a strong belief in the Bible, preference for communal living (Mennonites less so than the other two groups) and a long history of persecution that forced them to migrate many times.
Russian Connection
Another commonality is their long residence in Russia, a country many families from these three groups moved to at the invitation of Czarina Catherine the Great in the 1770s.
Mennonites take their name from Menno Simons (1496–1561) a former Catholic priest from Friesland (Netherlands).1 After his transfer to Witmarsum, he met some of the Anabaptists who had come from Switzerland, preaching and teaching “believer’s baptism” (as opposed to infant baptism). He also began reading the Bible, which he had never done before. After experiencing a religious conversion, he rejected the Catholic Church in 1537 and he was ordained as an Anabaptist minister the next year. Within a short time he became an influential Anabaptist leader and by 1544, the term Mennonite or Mennist was used to refer to the Dutch Anabaptists.2
For most of his remaining life, Simons was on the move because he had a price on his head, hated by Catholics and Lutherans alike for what were considered heretical views. He died of natural causes at the age of sixty-five.
Jacob Hutter, founder of the Hutterites, was born in Moos, Tyrol County (present-day Italy) about 1500, became a hat-maker and joined the Anabaptist movement in Klagenfurt (present-day Austria), soon forming several small congregations.
He fled to Moravia (Czech Republic) in 1533 because Anabaptists in the Tyrol area were being severely persecuted by Hapsburg authorities. For a while, Anabaptism flourished under Hutter’s leadership, with several congregations adopting “the early Christian practice of communal ownership of goods, in addition to their Anabaptist beliefs of nonviolence and adult baptism.”
