History conference looks at conscientious objection

When Canadian Major General La Fleche asked a delegation of Mennonites negotiating an alternative service program in the Second World War, “What will you do if we shoot you?” Jacob H. Janzen replied they could not be scared that easily.

He had “looked down too many rifle barrels” for that, Janzen said with some emotion; he had, in fact, twice faced a firing squad.

“This thing is in our blood for 400 years and you can’t take it away from us like you’d crack a piece of kindling over your knee. We believe in this!”

Conscientious objectors building the road in Jasper, 1941. Photo courtesy of Mennonite Heritage Centre

Janzen’s words were recounted – and received with applause – at “War and the Conscientious Objector,” a history conference held Oct. 20–21 at the University of Winnipeg. The two-day event featured a full program of interesting and diverse papers illuminating the strength of historic Mennonite convictions about nonresistance, particularly in Canada during the Second World War. More than 10,000 Canadian men served as COs at that time, on farms, fighting forest fires, planting trees, and more.

Running through the well-attended conference, however, was an undercurrent of anxiety: if “this thing” had once been thick in the blood, it might not be so any longer.

“I’m afraid many Mennonite churches [today] would not identify with this principle,” commented Harry Loewen, professor emeritus of the University of Winnipeg, who attended.

The conference addressed topics such as models of conscientious objection (absolutist or pragmatic, separatist or integrationist), government reactions, and women’s responses to the war. The three major Mennonite groups in Canada (the Swiss Mennonites, the 1870s Mennonites, and the 1920s Mennonites) wished to present a united front, but reacted somewhat differently to the national challenges of war, because of their own particular histories.

It was also noted (though their motivations and experiences were not given a paper at the conference) that close to 40 percent of eligible young Mennonite men enlisted in the military.

Mennonites were not the only conscientious objectors, however. Papers by several scholars about the Second World War history of the Doukhobors (Koozma Tarasoff), Jehovah’s Witnesses (Jim Penton), Quakers (Tamara Fleming), as well as those influenced by the social gospel, gave a broader context to the experience of Mennonite COs. Keynote speaker Thomas Socknat, professor at the University of Toronto, further broadened the context by placing conscientious objector history into peace movements in Canada.

The meat

Tom Yoder Neufeld

A session on the theological basis of conscientious objection halfway through the conference was, as one person put it, “the real meat.” Tom Yoder Neufeld of Conrad Grebel College showed that the distinctive peace position, historically a “reflex” rooted in an ethos of separation, ethnicity, obedience, and “an unsophisticated use of Scripture,” faces major challenges today because of a changed ethos and only “dim memory” of conscription.

Yoder Neufeld called for a theology, not only of conscientious objection, but “conscientious engagement” in peacemaking. Among its ingredients would be a “plain theology of peace” anchored in God’s grace, deep roots in the community of the church, and reminders “when not to bend the knee.”

David Schroeder, professor emeritus of Canadian Mennonite University, said, “We’re not called to make history come out right. [That’s] what Christ has already done. We’re called to be the church and to be Christian in the world.”

The event’s strongest contribution, perhaps, was its stories. Some were narratives that were so raw, moving, even guileless (like the account of four Hutterite men imprisoned and brutalized for refusing to serve, interspersed by a performance of songs they sang to encourage one another, or young Christian Kjar’s story of recently joining and then leaving the U.S. Marines) that they could only be absorbed, for further contemplation.

Others, like Sam Steiner’s account of being a draft dodger during the Vietnam War, probed at tensions or ironies around the practice of conscientious objection. Contemporary situations needing peacemaking also emerged, including concerns about the hawkish views of Franklin Graham, who was holding an evangelistic festival in Winnipeg the same weekend.

The conference was hosted by The Chair in Mennonite Studies of the University of Winnipeg and sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Historical Society of Canada, and Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society.

—Dora Dueck