So he says on his blog in reflections of a conference in which he shared as a guest speaker, the “Christian Ministry in a Red and Blue World” conference (part of the Anabaptist Vision and Discipleship Series) at Hesston College. Any who have read his The Myth of a Christian Nation will understand why he would be welcomed by an Anabaptist crowd. For those who haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Here is a particularly astute point he made on his blog post based on what he’s learning of the Mennonite church:

But there was another very interesting thing I learned about the Mennonites: they’re in trouble. I heard this from a number of people, including John Roth. One man literally wept as he told me how he’s been grieved seeing Mennonites abandon their core vision of the Kingdom and core convictions over the last several decades. They’re loosing their counter-cultural emphasis and becoming “Americanized” and “mainstreamed” (as various people told me). Consequently, many Mennonite leaders are getting involved in partisan politics in a way that goes against the Mennonite tradition. While Evangelicals tend to be co-opted by Right Wing politics, these leaders are being co-opted by Left Wing politics. They’re basically defining Kingdom social activism as supporting radical democratic policies. Yet, three fourths of Mennonites are Republican. Hence there’s growing tensions between the leadership and the body of the Mennonites.

I think another book that is relevant to this concern is Hauerwas’ Resident Aliens, even though he is not officially a Mennonite either. In my view, the co-opting of Anabaptist denominations by any political party is a travesty.