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Mennonite Visions of Community and Identity W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1993 Harmony and Dissonance: Mennonite Visions of Community and Identity Elizabeth Jane Chowning College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, Religion Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Chowning, Elizabeth Jane, "Harmony and Dissonance: Mennonite Visions of Community and Identity" (1993). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625796. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-syf3-8g89 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HARMONY AND DISSONANCE: MENNONITE VISIONS OF COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the American Studies Program The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Elizabeth J. Chowning 1993 This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Approved, April 30, 1993 John H. Stanfield, Sociology v / R^bert A. Gross. erican Studies g Victor A. Liguori, Sociology TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv LIST OF FIGURES v ABSTRACT vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER II. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS 8 CHAPTER III. THE MENNONITE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 22 CHAPTER IV. MEMORIES AND LEGACIES: THE NEWPORT NEWS COLONY 43 CHAPTER V. COMPETING VISIONS OF THE MENNONITE FUTURE 68 CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION 81 ENDNOTES 86 APPENDIX A: METHODOLOGY APPENDIX B: MARTHA APPENDIX C: KATE APPENDIX D: JACKIE APPENDIX E: THE PASTOR APPENDIX F: JIM AND DAWN REFERENCES VITA iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my advisor, Professor John H. Stanfield, for his guidance and support. In suggesting the Newport News Mennonite community as a possible topic for an oral history, he helped introduce me to exciting themes and methods in social science as well as a wonderful group of people. His enthusiasm for the project was inspiring and the freedom he gave me to explore it was invaluable. I also wish to thank Professor Robert A. Gross for his careful reading of the manuscript. His perceptive comments were extremely helpful. Professor Victor A. Liguori’s ethnographic perspective added a great deal to my understanding of the community I have studied. I thank all my readers for their responsiveness in reading and discussing this thesis. Finally, I give my heartfelt thanks to all the members of the Newport News Mennonite community. Everybody I spoke to was friendly and forthcoming. This includes many people whom I met briefly at church functions; they barely knew who I was but they took the time and trouble to answer my questions and offer their assistance. My six informants are very special people. They graciously welcomed me into their homes and responded enthusiastically to my questions. As a novice oral historian, I had many misgivings about asking potentially embarrassing questions. They eased my fears and offered their opinions freely. In fact, I was given so much information, I could include only a small portion of it in the thesis. What follows owes much to their generosity; its shortcomings, however, are my responsibility. LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Ritzer’s Continua 9 2. Ritzer’s Four Levels of Social Reality and Examples 10 3. The Social Construction of Reality, adapted from Berger and Luckman (1966) 12 v ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to explore an urban Mennonite community as it is experienced by its members. Using a combination of unstructured interviewing and participant observation methods, I have concentrated on the shared meanings that can be discovered in the conversational speech of group members. Employing transcribed interviews as a "cultural text," I look for evidence of how Newport News, Virginia Mennonites sustain community under modern urban conditions that discourage the modest living and daily, intragroup relations Mennonites have traditionally sought. My analysis focuses on micro- and macro-subjective phenomena, that is, subjective meanings made by social actors on individual, group and cultural levels. I therefore discuss the contributions of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism to the theoretical foundations of my approach, particularly the debt my analysis owes to Berger and Luckman’s (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. Berger’s (1967) The Sacred Canopy, and Cohen’s (1985) The Symbolic Construction of Community. Both as an introduction to my study of the local community and as a means of exploring the larger Mennonite culture, I discuss the group’s changing understanding of its history. Placed in the context of twentieth-century social pressures, Mennonite historiography can be seen as a vital part of an educated elite’s effort to define the group’s identity. Old symbols associated with the Mennonites’ sixteenth-century Anabaptist heritage are reappropriated for the reconstruction of the group’s mission. The history of the Newport News Mennonite colony offers many insights into the processes by which subjective meanings and objective (observable) structures are used to construct community. The stories of two women who grew up in the colony between the 1930s and 1960s contain countless examples demonstrating the subtle ways members were knit together in the effort to maintain protective boundaries around the group. Even though symbols (particularly those associated with community and identity) might have different meanings for individual members, their common use has served to link local Mennonites to their group. Now that the geographically-defined, homogenous Mennonite colony no longer exists, group members search for other means of preserving community. Their efforts have attracted many newcomers who were socialized into different cultural and religious traditions. Among these newcomers are individuals who work directly or indirectly for the military. In one sense, this situation is cause for celebration, for it provides members with opportunities to "have fellowship" with Christians who might not otherwise be exposed to the Mennonite belief in pacifism. However, growing ties with the defense community are seen by some as a threat to the continued vitality of the "Peace Witness" so central to the Mennonite faith. I discuss some indications that participants who come to local Mennonite congregations from other faith traditions may indeed bring with them attitudes about church-going that are incompatible with the "Anabaptist Vision," the radical "witness" with which the educated Mennonite elite identifies. I conclude that the local community and the Mennonite World to which it belongs are microcosms of human society; they offer opportunities to study questions about culture on a small scale. HARMONY AND DISSONANCE: MENNONITE VISIONS OF COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Because their traditional, rural lifestyle has been increasingly threatened by the encroachment of cities and suburbs in recent years, Mennonites have been valuable subjects for social scientific study. The average (at least, stereotypical) Mennonite community offers the opportunity to study on a small scale some of sociology’s classic problems or themes: industrialization, urbanization, and the transition from traditional community life (Gemeinschaft) to modern, impersonal associations (Gesselschaft). The community I have studied is not, however, the stereotypical Mennonite village sentimentalized by media images of plainly dressed, quaintly traditional people trotting away into Pennsylvania sunsets. That stereotype does have a basis in reality; communities resembling that ideal still exist. I find them interesting not simply because they are anachronistic, but primarily because of their symbolic value for group members and outsiders alike. Rather than seeking out a traditional or "Old Order" Mennonite community as a laboratory for the study of endangered or disappearing folkways, I wondered about the "modern" Mennonites who no longer live in remote villages and have already undergone the socio-economic transformations associated with the modern industrial world. I set out to conduct an oral history of urban Mennonites by studying community as it is experienced by its members. Gaining access to insider perspectives while trying to control my own biases as an outsider requires taking 2 3 some liberties with standard interviewing methods. Rather than preparing questions and guiding my informants’ responses (that is, "conducting" interviews), I attempted to have less-structured conversations. I began with the assumption that my informants’ stories would be more useful to me as statements of present-day attitudes than as strictly historical accounts. Being more interested in the implications of the past for the present than in trying to establish what "really" happened in one Mennonite community during the early and middle decades of the 20th century, I probed sparingly and listened carefully for the issues that seemed most important to my informants (see Appendix A for more information on this methodology). My emphasis on people’s experience of community led me to consider social meanings, that is, symbols and definitions negotiated by the group and used
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