How A Persecuted Sixteenth Century Movement Championed Religious Freedom

Anna Jansz on the way to her execution. Etching by Jan Luiken from the Martyrs Mirror, 1685

The following was published as an op ed piece in today's Daily News-Record:

"If I want kinship with my Anabaptist ancestors, I know where to look: in prison."

- title of an article by Melissa Florer-Bixler in the January 2025 issue of The Christian Century

This January marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Swiss Anabaptist movement to which Mennonites and related groups trace their origin. Along with preaching non-violence and a refusal to engage in warfare, Anabaptists (rebaptizers) were influential in promoting the kind of freedom of religion we take for granted today. They simply acted on the conviction that following Jesus meant never using force or coercion, especially in matters of faith.

All of us who believe governments should never determine whether or what kind of faith we are to live by, or rule on what scripture texts or prayers are to be mandated in state funded schools or institutions, owe our gratitude to this once reviled and persecuted group.

For background, on a fateful night of January 21, 1525, a dozen or more like minded believers, mostly young adults, met in the home of Felix Manz, age 26, in Zurich for Bible study and prayer in defiance of a state enforced law forbidding religious gatherings held without official church approval.

The meeting proved to be a watershed event. In defying a law they believed to be wrong, members of the group baptized each other, a revolutionary act igniting the spread of  a free church movement that spread rapidly everywhere in both Catholic and Protestant jurisdictions in western Europe. Their courage also influenced groups like the Moravians, Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, Brethren and countless other later communities of faith. 

Today all major U.S. denominations, Catholic and Protestant alike, affirm and celebrate the freedom later enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To sixteenth century Christian nation states, this would have been considered heresy, an existential threat to Christendom itself.

Thus two church movements emerged in Zurich, the state supported Swiss Reformed (Protestant) church that met in spacious sanctuaries like Zurich's Grossmünster Cathedral, and an underground movement that met in homes, barns, caves, and other places to avoid detection and arrest. And since the baptism of infants was a part of every person being registered as a citizen of the state, not being officially christened affected many other rights, including land ownership and having ones marriage being recognized as valid.

In Melissa Florer-Bixler's recent article in the Christian Century she quotes from the Martyr's Mirror, a volume with over 1000 pages of accounts of Anabaptists martyrs, the words of Anna Jansz, who in the face of her execution for her faith wrote the following in a letter she left for her young son:

But where you hear of a poor, simple, cast-off little flock, which is despised and rejected by the world, join them; for where you hear of the cross, there is Christ. . . . Honor the Lord in the works of your hands, and let the light of the Gospel shine through you. Love your neighbor. Deal with an open, warm heart your bread to the hungry, clothe the naked, and do not tolerate having two of anything, because there are always those who are in need.

Menno Simons, a Catholic priest in Friesland who a decade later became an influential leader in the free church movement, lived with a price on his head and knew first hand the sacrifices made by those who risked their lives for their radical beliefs. In 1554 he wrote the following defense in a booklet called “The Cross of the Saints”:

… that we are disobedient to the magistracy in things to which they are ordained of God, this will never be found to be true—I mean in matters pertaining to dikes, roads, waterways, tax, tolls, tribute, etc.. But if they wish to rule and lord it above Christ Jesus… according to their whim, this we do not grant them. We would rather sacrifice possessions and life than knowingly to sin against Jesus Christ and his holy Word for the sake of any man, be he emperor or king.

Few of us may be prepared to be so bold in defending the right and the responsibility each of us has in matters of faith. But we are forever indebted to members of a movement in which adherents gave up everything to claim that right for generations to come.