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

In 1941 Roland H. Bainton memorably christened Anabaptists the “left wing of the Reformation.” While the phrase surely carried a different meaning at the start of the Second World War than it does today, it is not uncommon to see it invoked as evidence of the Mennonites’ long-standing commitment to social justice. However, many of the larger questions central to today’s “left” – including those surrounding class and labour – have rarely been seriously addressed within the field of Mennonite studies, just as the role of religious beliefs is often ignored or treated simplistically in studies of labour relations. As such, Janis Thiessen’s new study, Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba, is a welcome addition to multiple fields.

Manufacturing Mennonites is divided into eight parts, including an introduction, a brief personal conclusion, and six chapters exploring particular aspects of how Mennonite religious thought has interacted with labour, unions, and business in Manitoba. Thiessen’s thesis is neatly summarized at the close of the introduction, where she submits that Mennonite “ethnic identity and religious identity have shaped and been shaped by class relations” and that “twentieth-century North American Mennonites … have largely chosen not to use their religious tradition to either question or develop alternatives to the existing economic order.” After conducting a detailed examination of three of the largest Mennoniteowned businesses in Manitoba – the printing company Friesens, the window manufacturer Loewen, and the furniture manufacturer Palliser – Thiessen concludes that, “far from presenting a challenge or critique, Mennonite religious understandings in twentieth-century Manitoba served to reify capitalist economic and social relations.”

Thiessen’s study works self-consciously across a number of fields, aiming to contribute to – and, just as importantly, to bring into dialogue – the fields of oral history, lived religion, social and labour history, and Mennonite studies. Chapters 2 and 6 offer largely conventional but useful historical overviews, as Thiessen makes able use of her impressive access to the companies’ documents to survey their evolution from small family businesses into major international companies, along with their ambivalent engagements with unionization drives during the 1970s. The first chapter surveys what Thiessen calls the “Mennonite intellectual elite” of the twentieth century to argue that the Mennonites’ widespread theological emphasis on the related concepts of yieldedness, non-resistance, and neighbourly love encouraged workers to submit meekly to their employers’ authority. Thiessen advocates for a reconsideration of the writings of J. Lawrence Burkholder against the more prominent work of Harold S. Bender and John Howard Yoder, equating the latter two “in practice” because of their shared “rejection of involvement in civil society” – an equation that leads her to the provocative (and sure to be contentious) conclusion that they “seemed willing to abandon the world’s downtrodden, as well as the unethical brokers of global power, to their respective fates.” The chapter usefully traces the evolution of Mennonite thought regarding social responsibility and, along with the opening pages of the third chapter – in which Thiessen outlines how business leaders shape their own interpretation of their religious heritage into what she calls a “Mennonite corporate mythology” – marks the study’s most sustained critical intervention.

If the multidisciplinary approach is the ground for much of the study’s success, the challenge of drawing on fields with competing notions of evidence is a source of several of its limitations. Thiessen’s insightful reading of Loewen’s “Reflections” advertising campaign, for example, employs a cultural studies approach to make a series of provocative claims about the overlap between religion and ideology in Mennonite business practice more generally, several of which seem to go beyond the scope of the evidence at hand. Thiessen maintains an admirably nuanced appreciation of the conflicting interests of employers and employees in the Mennonite context throughout much of the study, but at places like this there are methodological tensions that appear to stretch this commitment – along with the argument – a little thin. Nonetheless, Manufacturing Mennonites is an original and well-written contribution...