Mennonite Pacifist Precept

The Mennonite Pacifist Precept is the religious principle at the center of the women’s argument over whether to leave Molotschna Colony. In the face of assaults, threatened retaliation, and a demand that women forgive the accused men or leave, Agata Friesen presents nonviolence not as passive endurance but as a reason to depart. The precept makes leaving a contested act of faith: the women must decide whether separation from the colony can better preserve peace, protect their children, and make forgiveness a genuine choice.

Doctrine Under Pressure

The crisis exposes a conflict between professed religious principles and the conditions in which the women are expected to live. Molotschna Colony is self-policed. After Salome Friesen attacks one of the accused men and a male relative hangs another, Peters and the elders call the police and have the accused men taken to the city. The other men go to post bail, hoping the accused can return while awaiting trial. Peters tells the women that when the men return, they will have an opportunity to forgive them; if they refuse, they must leave for an outside world they know little about. They have only two days to organize a response. In this arrangement, forgiveness is bound to continued membership in the colony, making the demand a test of whether its religious language serves peace or enforces compliance.

Agata’s case begins from the thought that Philippians instructs believers to consider what is good, just, pure, and excellent. She concludes that pacifism is the answer. She argues that any violence is unjustifiable and that remaining would put the women on a direct course toward violence, whether perpetrated by them or against them. If they stay, she warns, the colony may become a battlefield, and the women would betray the central tenet of their Mennonite faith. Her reasoning makes the precept active: it requires attention not only to whether a person strikes another, but also to whether a chosen situation draws people toward violence.

Leaving as a Peaceful Choice

Mariche Loewen challenges this reasoning from the consequences of departure. Staying and fighting, she argues, might eventually achieve peace for the children while keeping the colony intact and maintaining separation from the outside world, another important religious commitment. Agata grants the force of that concern but rejects the idea that faith requires women to remain alongside men who inspire violence in their hearts and minds. The disagreement is not simply between religion and escape. It concerns which course can sustain the values the women say their faith demands.

Agata later develops the argument through obligations to God, to themselves, and to their children. Their duty, she says, is to protect the creatures God has made, including themselves and their children, and to bear witness to their faith. Staying risks pacifism, love, and forgiveness because the women acknowledge that some of them want to kill their attackers. Any forgiveness offered in those circumstances, she argues, would be coerced rather than genuine. Leaving, by contrast, would allow them to pursue those values and teach their children to place them above their fathers’ expectations. The precept thus becomes both a constraint on retaliatory violence and a standard by which to judge the pressures imposed on the women.

The debate also turns on the authority to interpret religious teaching. Salome Friesen points out that the women cannot read the Bible and that men interpret it for them. She argues that their belief that wives must submit to husbands rests on what their husbands have told them the Bible decrees. Her hypothetical example of a husband claiming scriptural authority for violence against his wife and children makes the danger of untested interpretation plain without resolving the women’s dilemma for them. The conversation places the pacifist principle beside a practical question: who gets to explain what faith requires, and whose conduct is tested against that explanation?

Faith Put into Practice

Ona Friesen asks whether Mariche really means to stay without fighting, pointing to her difficulty standing up to Klaas Loewen’s aggression and protecting her children. The exchange shows how an abstract commitment meets unequal power within a household. Agata’s argument, meanwhile, does not treat maternal care as a rival to religious duty. She describes the women’s decision to influence their sons as instinctive: they are mothers deciding collectively, according to their understanding of faith, love, and peace, what is best for their children. She adds that their animal instincts have joined their intellects and souls. In her account, thought, care, and spiritual commitment reinforce one another rather than compete.

The women’s decision to leave gives this interpretation practical form. Agata asks whether they agree to depart after dark so they will not be seen when passing the Chortiza and Hiakjeke colonies; the women nod. The plan involves uncertainty beyond those colonies, but departure is treated as a deliberate course of action, not merely an abstract declaration of belief. Supplies are prepared for the journey: a map is wrapped around a block of cheese, the co-op safe is placed beneath the back seat of Greta Loewen’s buggy, and onions, soap, and pieces of wood are packed for muddy wheels or kindling. These details connect the argument over pacifism to the work of keeping the group and its children safe as it moves into an unfamiliar world.

The precept’s significance lies in the reversal it makes possible. The women are threatened with exclusion if they do not forgive, yet Agata argues that forgiveness under that pressure would not be authentic. Staying may preserve the colony’s separation from the outside, but, in her view, it risks betraying nonviolence and teaching children a different lesson from the one the women profess. By choosing departure, they claim the right to practice their faith through protection, restraint, and care, even when doing so means leaving the community that has defined their religious belonging.