Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mews, Ryan

Titel

Religious Upheaval in a South Dakota Mennonite Community, 1874-1940

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In 1874, multiple colonies of German-Russian Mennonites and Hutterites entered the Dakota Territory to settle into tightknit religious communities. These Anabaptists sought to escape religious persecution and assimilation in Russia but found themselves influenced by American religious groups. Their history of isolationism caused these groups to draw lines between their congregations that kept them small but allowed them to interact with new ideas in different ways, but caused them to redefine their German Mennonite identity. One such influence erupted from the Presbyterian Church called fundamentalism that encouraged evangelical works in America and sought to combat modernism in religious institutions. In this thesis, I argue that four South Dakota Mennonite congregations: Salem-Zion, Salem, Bethesda, and Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Churches interacted with fundamentalism and evangelicals in different ways during a religious upheaval from 1920 to 1940. Fundamentalism influenced these congregations through outside ministers and through the local Freeman Junior College, who embraced fundamentalism due to financial and local pressures. Because of these different approaches, some congregations succeeded in enlarging their congregations and others suffered from membership losses. I argue that adaptability and geography played a role in how much fundamentalist evangelicals influenced these congregations as they slowly accepted American culture. By 1940, this religious upheaval cooled due to religious divides, a string of bad evangelicals, and acceptance of a conservative fundamentalism that eschewed militancy that convinced the Mennonite population of Freeman-Marion to step away from evangelicals. This shift differed from other Mennonite congregations in America, who interacted with evangelicals until 1960 and continued to debate their usage. However, Freeman-Marion Mennonites did accept new religious ideas that filtered into their congregations as they interacted with American Protestants.