Pacifist Battlegrounds: Violence, Community, and the Struggle for LGBTQ Justice in the Mennonite Church USA

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the movement for LGBTQ inclusion within the Mennonite Church USA, a Christian denomination of just under 100,000 members. Mennonites are part of a nearly five century Christian tradition known as Anabaptism, known for an ethic of nonviolence. Yet Mennonite communities and institutions have been and continue to be sites of intense patriarchal and gendered interpersonal violence. While LGBTQ Mennonites and their supporters have been engaged in visible advocacy and grassroots organizing for the past forty years, they continue to struggle for recognition and acceptance within a denomination that mirrors many other U.S. Christian groups in its sharp divisions over sexual politics. Mennonites’ polity tends towards congregational rather then hierarchical arrangements, and church policies are determined and debated at congregational, regional, and national levels through processes known as “discernment.” Discernment is seen as a peaceful approach to settling communal conflict. But LGBTQ Mennonites often experience such processes as abusive and violent. Thus Mennonite conflicts over LGBTQ inclusion are also struggles over how violence should be defined. This study draws on interviews, oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival evidence from the past four decades, arguing that LGBTQ Mennonites and their allies have played an integral role in subverting and revealing the hidden abuses of power enabled by Mennonite communal discourses. It brings together a feminist and queer theory-based analysis of discursive violence with a critique of de-historicized multiculturalism in institutional life.