Thursday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
“We are opposed to carnal warfare because Christ and his Apostles taught a defenseless doctrine both by precept and example.”
Eastern Amish Mennonite Conference Statement of Faith
With passage of the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917, Amish and Mennonite men in Ohio (and elsewhere) faced an extremely difficult test of their faith. Yield to the draft, don a military uniform (also contrary to their faith), agree to carrying a gun, and fire it when called upon to do so or resist the draft by refusing to fight or seeking “noncombatant” status.
Given their understanding of Jesus’ call to turn the other cheek and his submission to death on a cross (rather than raise his own army against the Roman Empire), the second option seemed truer to their faith. The problem was that President Woodrow Wilson had offered no clarity about what to do with conscientious objectors or those who were granted noncombatant status.
A little background. Wilson had in good part won re-election in 1916 on the promise that he would not take the US into that dreadful foreign war. By spring 1917, he was asking Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. He got it, and he had a problem.
The US standing army was way too small to make a difference in the Great War. It needed to be bigger—a lot bigger. It was Wilson’s hope that enough men would volunteer to meet the demand. But there were not. So the draft was put in place and, with the help of a major propaganda campaign by the US government, public opinion shifted to support US involvement in the war. Soon millions of Americans were sent off to war.
Given all that, it’s not surprising that local draft boards weren’t supportive of Amish and Mennonite men’s requests for noncombatant status. If they would not fight, were they really American citizens? Moreover, a lot of them had German ancestry and spoke the language. Won’t fight. German ancestry. Speak German.
How were these men to be understood? Men of faith? Cowards who used their religion to try to get a pass from seeing combat on the front? Traitors?
Those who were drafted despite their efforts to gain noncombatant status generally did not fare well. Understood as “pro-German traitors,” these men were court-martialed “with many of them serving prison time even after the war’s end.”* Men who ended up in prison along with men who were granted conscientious objector status or even those who got a farm furlough all were subject to verbal and physical abuse—some even to the point of death.
Stories like these are powerful reminders of the price many have had to pay for trying to follow Jesus—otherwise known as God’s “foolishness.” Following a savior who rides into Jerusalem on a donkey in order to get flogged and crucified is never an easy sell. And that is as true today as it was in 1917.
My prayer is that, if a time comes when I am faced with a dilemma like that—follow the world’s wisdom or God’s “foolishness”—that I will choose the latter. Do I have the strength to do such a thing as these men did? I have no idea. So, I keep praying and going to Mass and writing these reflections . . . in the hope that I will.
-Sue Trollinger
*These quotes and much of the specific information regarding conscientious objectors during WWI were taken from an excellent article by Trevor Rhodes in Echoes Magazine, a publication of the Ohio History Connection http://ohiohistory.org/.