“Faith is our homeland”

“Faith is our homeland” gives spiritual belonging a meaning that does not depend on remaining in a particular place. In the novel, the expression joins the narrator’s memories of family and worship to the women’s collective reasoning about whether faith requires them to stay in Molotschna Colony or leave it. Their answer is not that belief has become irrelevant: they argue that carrying their faith elsewhere may be the more faithful choice.

Memory and Portable Belonging

The expression emerges from the narrator’s private act of remembering while the women sing for Miep. Unable to set down the lyrics, the narrator worships silently and recalls both parents, childhood, and faith. The sequence makes religious belonging part of an intimate inheritance, rooted in family memory but not confined to a recoverable home. The narrator’s conclusion—that faith can serve as a homeland when there is no homeland to return to—turns departure from pure loss into the possibility of carrying something essential forward.

This recollection gives the expression a personal register alongside its communal one. Faith is not presented only as doctrine or as the authority of a religious institution; it is also what the narrator remembers and inhabits. The movement from parents and childhood to faith makes the phrase a compact account of continuity amid displacement, without suggesting that leaving will be easy or that the women know what awaits them outside the colony.

Faith and the Decision to Leave

The women’s debate gives this portable sense of faith a practical test. The remaining men, apart from those too old or infirm to go and the narrator, have gone to the city to post bail for the imprisoned attackers, hoping the men can return to Molotschna Colony while awaiting trial. Peters says that if the women do not forgive them, the women will have to leave for an outside world they know nothing about. They have only two days to organize a response. Forgiveness is therefore entangled with belonging: the women are told that forgiving the men will secure everyone’s place in heaven, while refusal carries the threat of exile.

Against that pressure, Agata Friesen argues that staying would put the women on a course toward violence and contradict Mennonite pacifism. She says that remaining would risk turning the colony into a battlefield and make the women complicit in a situation that violates their faith. Her reasoning makes leaving an attempt to avoid violence, not a rejection of religious duty.

Agata Friesen develops the argument through the obligations she believes faith places on the women: protecting themselves and their children, bearing witness, and practicing pacifism, love, and forgiveness. If they stay, she argues, any forgiveness offered under pressure would not be genuine. Leaving, by contrast, could let them pursue those values and teach them to their children, even against the expectations of their fathers. The expression thus holds together an inward allegiance and an outward decision: faith remains a source of direction as the women contemplate separation from their community.

Who May Interpret Scripture

The debate also concerns who has the authority to define religious obligation. Salome Friesen points out that the women cannot read the Bible and therefore cannot know precisely what it says about obedience to men. Their belief that wives must submit, she argues, rests on what their husbands have told them the Bible decrees. The question is not simply whether to follow scripture, but whether the women have been denied the means to examine the claims made in its name.

Agata Friesen describes the decision about the children as a collective one, made according to the women’s understanding of their faith and of love and peace. She brings maternal instinct together with intellect and spiritual conviction rather than treating them as competing authorities. Her intervention connects faith as homeland to a community the women make through shared judgement: religious belonging travels not only in private memory but also in the commitments they undertake together.

Departure Made Concrete

The phrase’s significance becomes material as the planned departure takes shape. At the meeting, Agata Friesen asks whether the women agree to leave that night after dark, so they will not be seen as they pass the Chortiza Colony and Hiakjeke Colony. Their choice turns faith from an abstract source of comfort into a basis for coordinated action under time pressure.

The narrator describes preparing a map wrapped around a large block of cheese and covered in brown paper, with the safe placed beneath the back seat of Greta Loewen’s buggy. Onions, soap, and pieces of wood are packed as well; the wood can provide traction if the wheels become mired in mud or kindling for a fire. These provisions do not erase the uncertainty of departure. They show instead how the women’s resolve must travel through maps, food, practical supplies, and the relationships that sustain the group. In this context, “Faith is our homeland” expresses neither a promise of safety nor a claim that place does not matter. It names the conviction the women seek to carry with them when remaining at home, under the terms imposed on them, would imperil the values they understand as their faith.