Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites (for those of you who don’t know, this would be the group from which I hark) typically take a pretty strong stand against any involvement in the state’s politics, noting that Jesus said ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36). Experiences of being fiercely persecuted at the colluding hands of the church and state during the sixteenth-century didn’t encourage Mennonites to adopt a more integrationist model. In the twentieth century, of course, many Mennonite groups have changed their positions on these issues, and have become firmly enmeshed in the politics of earthly homelands. But the Kleine Gemeinde is a more traditional group that has resisted this trend (though my sense is that there sometimes was a bit of surreptitious voting going on).
Anyway, it’s sometimes amazing how far individuals can go from their backgrounds (I suppose some will think that my pursuit of a doctoral degree in philosophy is rather far itself). Cornelius Dueck, of the same community in Belize in which I was born, is now head of a new political party, the National Reform Party, in Belize that aims to shoulder aside the two dominant traditional parties. The party’s website is http://nrpbelize.org/. From growing up in a community that forbids voting to being the head of national political party …
A couple of observations. First, one might be forgiven for thinking the party looks more like a right-wing American Christian party than something that one would have expected to result from Mennonite values. Apparently one of their platform items is the reinstitution of capital punishment. Another is an emphatic pro-U.S. foreign policy and an equally emphatic anti-Chavez policy. The latter is fine with me; the former seems a bit more problematic. They also made a point of displaying an Israeli flag at the party’s launch. One notes that the peculiar eschatological views of certain conservative Christians in the U.S. are no longer restricted to influencing American politicians.
Mr. Cornelius Dueck, of course, is no longer a member of the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonite community. Indeed, he’s served for some time as pastor of one of the splinter groups serving disaffected members of my former community in Belize. Incidentally, most of these groups are heavily influenced by some group or other in the circus that constitutes American evangelicalism (‘circus’ here is not meant to imply that no members of the circus are sane, respectable groups that ought to be taken seriously), so perhaps the party’s platform is not entirely surprising. What I find curious is that the bio of Mr. Dueck on the party’s website is rather equivocal about his relationship to the Spanish Lookout Mennonite community. If your only source of information was this bio, you might well conclude that he is a prominent leader in the community, respected for his great contributions to the community and for his reforming efforts. But I suspect that the Kleine Gemeinde take on this would be rather different! But I suppose a story of abandoning a religious community to pursue a life that flies in the face of the community’s values would look out of place on the website of a conservative, Christian party.
Oh, in case you’re interested, the Mr. George Dueck listed as one of the six members of the Core Group that organized the party is my uncle. Perhaps I can move back to Belize and pursue a career in politics if philosophy turns out to be too unprofitable.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer