Continuity and Change Among Canadian Mennonite Brethren

G.A. Rawlyk is a history professor at Queen’s University and the
author of Champions of the Truth: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and the
Maritime Baptists.

This is more than yet another bland, opaque sociological-historical study of a group of Canadian Mennonites. Peter Hamm has written a thought-provoking book about the possible symbolic and dialectical relationship between what he calls “sacralization” — or faith enhancement — and “secularization” — doubt enhancement — in any Christian group. In the first main section of Continuity and Change, Hamm, using empirical data about the Canadian Mennonite Brethren gathered in 1972, discusses five key components of “sacralization.” These are boundaries, cohesion, identity, socialization, and integration. In the second part of the book, Hamm examines how education, urbanization, occupational change, and upward mobility merge in the “secularization process.”

It is Hamm’s contention that the dialectic between “sacralization” and “secularization” among the Canadian Mennonite Brethren produced far more than a profound “Identity Crisis.” Rather, he argues quite persuasively that the tension between the two processes shapes a renewed and revitalized Christianity for most Mennonite Brethren.

If the Hamm thesis is applied to the Canadian religious experience in general, the authorized version of the past and present is seriously questioned. My hunch is that Hamm is right and that the Canadian historical establishment is wrong. But only further serious studies of evolving Canadian religiosity will transform my “hunch” into something more substantial.