Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba by Janis Thiessen (review)

Mennonite histories have long neglected labor and class relations, and labor histories have long neglected the impact of religion. This gap in the literature, identified by Canadian historian Janis Thiessen, makes clear the need for books such as her compelling study of three Mennonite-owned companies in Manitoba. While Mennonites are a relatively small group in North America, Thiessen’s work is not just a study of this ethnoreligious community; it is also a strong analysis of how theology, so often dismissed as an operating factor in modern business, can be powerfully deployed in service of what Thiessen calls corporate mythology. By creating a theological justification for their management hierarchy, Mennonite business owners molded theology into a tool for profit. But clearly Mennonites are not the only business leaders who have crafted theology to fit capitalist needs. Manufacturing Mennonites could prove to be a model for other scholars examining the relationships between religion and corporate culture.

While Thiessen’s book is most easily categorized as a social history, her heavy reliance on oral interviews is evidence of the impact that oral historians’ approach to historical veracity has had on the profession of history as a whole. Citing the work of Alessandro Portelli, Thiessen justifies her use of oral history against the traditional charges of interviews as “anecdotal” and “subjective,” writing, “History … is not the dry recollection of facts: it is the emotion-laden memories of historical actors” (13). Perhaps nowhere is this more relevant than in the history of what Thiessen and others call “lived religion”—that is, the ways in which religious theology and faith shape, and are shaped by, everyday life. Clearly, Thiessen’s overarching focus on Mennonite corporate mythology arose in large part from the religious analysis that her interviewees applied to their work experiences.

How did this corporate mythology develop? In a somewhat unconventional move for a social history, Thiessen begins Manufacturing Mennonites with a chapter on the twentieth-century Mennonite intellectual elite, a group of prominent Mennonite academics who strove throughout their careers to shape the religious identity of North American Mennonites as a whole. Their names, household ones in Mennonite circles and unknown to almost everyone else (with the possible exception of John Howard Yoder), matter here not because they were entirely successful in shaping the worldviews of the Mennonite workers and corporate bosses that Thiessen writes of later but because their widely distributed interpretations of Mennonite identity became dominant in Mennonite communities. And thus Thiessen’s subjects had to confront and interpret these ideas for themselves.

Thiessen illuminates the paradoxical relationship that Mennonite theology has had with social justice: nonviolent theology can lead to challenging the injustice that hegemonic powers commit, but it just as often functions as a justification for staying out of such confrontations, with the belief that any challenge would itself constitute an indefensible use of force. This latter interpretation was particularly successful in thwarting union activity within Mennonite companies, as Thiessen’s analysis shows. What comes through most strongly here is the malleability of theological ideas in real-world practice. Thiessen identifies three Mennonite theological principles, emphasized by the Mennonite intellectual elite, that could offer serious challenges to top-down management culture—yieldedness, nonresistance, and neighborly love—and then, throughout the following chapters, demonstrates how successfully the Mennonite corporate elite in Manitoba appropriated those qualities to support their paternalistic management philosophy. By infusing hierarchical power relations with religious significance, these Mennonite business leaders created their corporate mythology.

To name this practice as mythology is to call attention to its constructed nature, and Thiessen’s willingness to do so is particularly refreshing to me as a fellow scholar of Mennonite background writing about Mennonites. Mennonite insider scholarship often has a decidedly apologist bent, with underlying theological motives clearly visible in projects that aspire to be sociological or historical. In many ways, Mennonite scholarship struggles under the legacy of the academic elite that...