Mennonite Meccas:

Understanding North American Mennonites as an Ethno-Religious Community 

Introduction

My grandfather passed away a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, I wasn’t with him when he passed as I was traveling in Turkey at the time with some friends. When we held his funeral, it was at the First Mennonite Church in Bluffton, Ohio. That’s where he had gone to church since the early 1960s. He was born into the Mennonite faith and stayed with it his entire life.

His entire side of the family is Mennonite going back hundreds of years. And that’s what I want to talk about today: the Mennonite denomination, a Protestant tradition, but also something more than just a religious category. I want to talk about Mennonites as an ethno-religious community.

Background

When I say I go to a Mennonite church here in Pittsburgh, people often ask me what a Mennonite is. And honestly, I kind of struggle to explain it. It’s an Anabaptist, Protestant, Christian denomination that originated from German-speaking and Dutch-speaking areas around the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. It was named after a guy called Menno Simons, a Dutch fellow who helped organize the movement.

Essentially, the Mennonite idea is… well, firstly, they call themselves a “peace church,” meaning they’re pacifists who don’t participate in war. I’ll speak on that later because it’s caused some issues for them at different points in history. They also promote living a humble lifestyle, such as staying close to the earth, being values-first, very service-oriented, and rooted in community.

And the other key thing to know is that there are only 2.13 million Mennonites in the world, according to the Mennonite World Conference. 

Defining an Ethno-Religious Group

An ethno-religious group is a community that’s defined not just by shared religious beliefs but also by shared ancestry, culture, language, and history. Probably the most widely cited example would be Jewish communities, where the lines between culture, ethnicity, and religion often blend. Other examples might include the Druze in the Middle East or Yazidis in northern Iraq. It’s not just what people believe—it’s also who they are, where they come from, how they live, how they marry, what language they speak, how they raise their kids.

North American Meonites as an Ethno-Religious community

Another key thing about Mennonites is that it was actually part of the original creed of the church—for many, many generations, hundreds of years—that Mennonites basically only married other Mennonites. You had a community with a specific set of values, essentially intermarrying across generations. It created a distinct cultural identity, tied not just to religion, but to ancestry, language, and shared way of life.

And another interesting thing is that many Mennonites moved to the New World, places like Ontario, Canada, and especially Pennsylvania and the Midwest of the U.S., to avoid religious persecution in Europe. Given their pacifist beliefs and refusal to fight in wars, they didn’t exactly fit into the political and military demands of Europe at the time, which was, frankly, always at war. That didn’t make them too popular.

So they came to the New World to farm and live quietly. That’s where you get the group known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. Despite the name, these people weren’t Dutch, but German-speaking. A lot of them were Mennonite, Amish, or part of related Anabaptist groups.

So these people were German-speaking in Pennsylvania and in the U.S. for many generations. I can see it in my own family history, where the first people came over in something like the late 1600s, and they were German-speaking for a long time. That persisted up until around the time of the First World War, maybe the 1930s or so, when suddenly it wasn’t so popular to be speaking German in the U.S., what with two world wars involving Germany.

So if you start to list it out, you’ve got: a specific set of beliefs, specific ways of dress, and even their own dialects. And they weren’t speaking what we think of now as standard German—High German, or Hochdeutsch. They were speaking a version of Low German, Plattdeutsch. That doesn’t mean lower in quality, it just refers to the geography. They came from the Low Countries and the lower parts of Germany down near the Rhine River.

And a little phenomenon that’s not really so well known, because these populations aren’t really present anymore after the Second World War, is that there used to be German-speaking communities throughout what is now Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. These were people who, like so many others in the 1800s, migrated out of what is now Germany, Poland, Austria, and surrounding areas.

People might not know this, but German ancestry is actually the largest ancestry group in the United States. That’s because so many Germans were leaving Europe during that time period. Some came to the U.S.—and some went east into Russia, where they settled as farmers.

Some of those eastern communities were Mennonites. So you have what are called Russian Mennonites, German-speaking Mennonites who lived for generations in what’s now Russia and Ukraine. And in the United States, you had Pennsylvania Germans—also known as Pennsylvania Dutch—who were part of that same broader wave of German-speaking settlers, many of them Mennonite or Amish or similar.

But Mennonites weren’t just German-speaking and they weren’t just in Pennsylvania. They settled throughout the Midwest—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas—and also up in Ontario, Canada. These weren’t isolated pockets; they were part of a broader network of communities that shared language, values, and a way of life.

And the point of all this is to say that there’s a shared communal experience, a shared dialect, and a shared set of beliefs and values. So to me—even though it’s technically a Protestant denomination—it looks very much like an ethno-religious group.

And pretty much I think most people are aware of another Anabaptist group that shares, you could say, a common history and, to a large extent, common ancestry with the Mennonites, and that’s the Amish. They very clearly demonstrate everything I’ve been talking about so far: shared language, beliefs, dress, and culture. What a lot of people may not know is that many Amish communities still speak dialects of Plattdeutsch (Low German).

A Global Community 

And that brings me to another phenomenon: Mennonites haven’t only settled in North America. They’ve formed communities in different parts of the world.

For example, my mother was actually born in a South American country called Paraguay. Her parents were there with their church. My grandpa was a botanist helping Mennonite farmers down there with plant diseases and arrid adapted farming, and my grandma taught at the school. Even though they were originally from the Midwest US. That community lived out in the Chaco Desert, farmed the land, and still spoke Plattdeutsch. Those communities still exist throughout Latin America, and in other parts of the world as well.

In fact, according to the Mennonite World Conference, about two-thirds of all Mennonites today live outside North America. Very few are left in Europe. The majority now are in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

It’s also worth noting that the Mennonite church is, in some ways, evangelical. It is a Christian church, and it has grown beyond its German-speaking origins. Today, many, probably even the majority, of Mennonites worldwide are not descendants of those original families who left Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many are people who joined the church later, drawn by its theology, its emphasis on peace and service, or its community life.

As I mentioned earlier, another very important part of the Mennonite identity is nonviolence. They’re a peace church—pacifists. That commitment to peace is not just a theological stance; it’s shaped a lot of their history. It’s a big part of what led them to spread so far out across the world. They were often looking for places where they could live in peace, farm the land, and stay out of the cycle of wars and conscription that dominated European history for centuries. That search for refuge, for simplicity, for quiet service—it’s written into the migration stories, into the settlements, and into the spiritual DNA of the Mennonite community.

Mennonite Meccas in the United States

I call this article Mennonite Mecca is because that’s kind of an inside joke within the Mennonite community in the United States, that certain small areas in rural parts of the country have very high concentrations of Mennonites. Places like Newton, Kansas, or Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I didn’t know that was a broader community joke. I thought it was just an inside joke in my family—until I heard someone at my church introduce themselves as being from “one of the Menno Meccas” in Lancaster County.

These are places where you’ll find several Mennonite universities like Bethel College, Bluffton University, and Eastern Mennonite University. These areas aren’t holy cities in the religious sense, obviously. It’s just that they’re important centers of community. And yes, we jokingly refer to them as Mennonite Meccas, a bit of a play on the idea of Mecca being a center in Islam, not because we see them as sacred, but because they’re where the culture is thickest.

Cultural Charecteristics

A few weeks ago, one of my pastors made a joke about how the real Mennonite sacraments are four-part harmony singing and potlucks. There’s truth in that. Mennonites love their hymns. Singing is a big part of how the community gathers and holds space together. A lot of the music is done in four-part harmony, and it's beautiful—something I didn’t grow up with, since I wasn’t raised in the church myself and only came into it as an adult. But I’ll say it: they sing really, really well.

And then there’s the potluck. It’s not just about everybody bringing food. It’s symbolic of something deeper. It’s about shared contribution. It’s about being part of something together—everybody brings what they can, and no one is above anyone else. That post-egalitarian spirit runs deep in Mennonite spaces. It’s less about hierarchy and more about mutual care. You show up, and you bring something, and that makes you part of it.

And there are all kinds of different types of Mennonites. The church I go to is more of a progressive, liberal, reformist Mennonite church. If you just saw folks from our congregation on the street, you wouldn’t necessarily know they were Mennonite, because they dress like everybody else, use smartphones, drive cars. But some of my more distant relatives still wear bonnets and plain clothes. There are also other Mennonite groups that avoid certain types of technology altogether and dress in distrinctive "plain dress."  It’s really a spectrum—from those who live similarly to the Amish, using limited technology and still speaking Plattdeutsch, to those who are fully modernized and more theologically liberal. But across that whole range, there’s still a common thread: peace, humility, community, and a deep sense of shared identity.

Conclusion

So when I talk about Mennonites, I’m not just talking about a religion. I’m talking about a people—spread across continents, speaking different languages, worshipping in different styles, but carrying a shared thread of peace, humility, and community. Whether it's potlucks in Pittsburgh, hymns in Bluffton, or Low German in the Chaco Desert, it’s all part of the same long story. One I’m still learning how to tell—and how to live inside.

Referance

Arakelova, V. (2010). Ethno-Religious Communities: To the Problem of Identity Markers. Iran & the Caucasus, 14(1), 1–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25703828 

Membership, map and statistics. Mennonite World Conference. (2025, June 9). https://mwc-cmm.org/en/membership-map-and-statistics/

Salmons, J., Tabisz, C., & Putnam, M. T. (2015). Heritage German in the United States. National Heritage Language Resource Center. https://nhlrc.ucla.edu/nhlrc/article/150269

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