Goshen College: Hurting the Church Bit by Bit



Goshen College president, Jim Brenneman, recently announced that the Mennonite college will begin to play the National Anthem at their sporting events. The move to overturn 114 years of resistance to the war song came in response to local pressure and press after 300 people — mostly non-Mennonites — contacted the school after hearing about its refusal to play the anthem on a national talk show. Several local newspapers had also criticized Goshen’s position, citing that other Mennonite colleges including Bethel College, in North Newton, Kan., and Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio, play the Star-Spangled Banner.

After the flurry of public attention, Goshen College set up a committee to deal with the issue while Brenneman halfheartedly defended the college in a public letter, saying:

Our practice of not playing the national anthem at our sporting events has been a practice of the college since its inception 114 years ago rooted in the nearly 500-year-old confessions of faith of the Mennonite heritage and in the simple New Testament expressions, “Jesus is Lord” and “God so loved the world.” Such an expansive reign and love includes a deep love for our own country, to be sure, but also for the whole world.

Yet his strong words defending their abstention in one paragraph were quickly subverted as he assured readers that Mennonites are just as patriotic as anybody else.

I believe all of us who are citizens of the United States love and honor our country profoundly and are grateful for the blessings of U.S. citizenship. We fly the U.S. flag on campus, annually read the Constitution, honor the Fourth of July as a national holiday by not working, pray for our leaders, and, many of us vote. Some of us pledge allegiance to the flag, sing the national anthem and are veterans of war. Others choose to be conscientious objectors to war, stand silently when the flag is saluted and choose not to sing the national anthem. In honoring the differences, we honor the best of our country.

So it should come as no surprise that in February 2010, the college demonstrated its real feelings about the 500-year old Anabaptist tradition of nonconformity when they publicly announced that they will not only play an instrumental version of the national anthem at some sporting events, they will also muddy the theological waters further by praying afterward. To make matters worse, the statement frames the act of cowardice in terms of an exciting new adventure in peacemaking: “Playing the anthem offers a welcoming gesture to many visiting our athletic events, rather than an immediate barrier to further opportunities for getting to know one another.”

This is part of a larger vision for reshaping Goshen College that Brenneman brings as president. Citing J. Lawrence Burkholder, Brenneman gave a chapel message in which he hoped to move Goshen from “a culture of dissent” to “a culture of assent.” Blatantly misrepresenting the Anabaptist tradition from which he came, Brenneman stated that the early Anabaptists who died resisting such things as military service, church/state union and jingoistic songs like the national anthem were “perfectionists” who were on the side of dissent rather than the institutions who could put their beliefs into wider practice. They were part of “dissent standing outside the systems of the world” and for this Brenneman derisively called them “naysayers.”

Thus the “moral ambiguity” that Burkholder first brought up as reason for Mennonites to move into positions of power and fly U.S. flags, has also become a reason to reject Anabaptist history and tradition, even the “simple gospel statements” in favor of a supposedly more “realistic” and “wider” social ethic. Brenneman named his speech “Getting to Yes and Amen! The New GC ‘School of Thought’”——a fitting title for a manifesto that declares Goshen’s goal to train its students to be toadies and sycophants for the establishment. Every “yes” entails some “no” and the Anabaptist tradition’s no to these anthems has been a “yes” to peace. What is this “yes” a “no” to, other than a caricatured version of Anabaptism and Christianity?

Unfortunately, baptizing “yeses” and “amens” to empire is becoming another Mennonite tradition as our leaders sell-out their tradition to evade the necessary conflict that comes with being faithful disciples. As Tim Nafziger recently wrote:

…there seems to be a pattern of leaders of Mennonite institutions citing Burkholder’s work as they move their organizations towards the mainstream and away from distinctive Anabaptist ways of being. In a chapter in Building Communities of Compassion: Mennonite Mutual Aid in Theory and Practice, GC Professor Keith Graber Miller writes about how former Mennonite Mutual Aid president Howard Brenneman met regularly with Burkholder for breakfast as he gradually took MMA from being a mutual aid organization to being just another insurance and investment firm with Mennonites as a target market. For more on this see Peacewashing MMA.

Currently, the Mennonite church is being damaged by more and more leaders who “say yes!” to flags, war songs, government, capitalist greed, the cops, military in their congregations, and so much more. Yet they conveniently forget that meaningful change happens when people get together and start marching, start causing trouble, start revolting and start saying “enough is enough.” The peace department at Goshen College teaches about this history. Will their students find the courage to practice nonviolent civil disobedience at Goshen College itself? Will the wider Mennonite church and others who claim an Anabaptist identity boycott institutions like Goshen College? Or will we continue supporting those that spurn our rich tradition of faithful dissent and resistance in exchange for a crumb of the American pie?

-Andy Alexis-Baker

Update: Please consider signing the letter of resistance and/or contacting the college and Mennonite Church USA (the college’s institutional home) directly:
Goshen College’s phone number: 1 (800) 348-7422.
Jim Brenneman (President): president@goshen.edu .
Executive director of Mennonite Church USA: Ervin Stutzman: (574) 523-3092


Update II:
On the heels of Goshen College’s recent decision to play the national anthem, a local Mennonite high school is now revisiting its own policy on not playing the national anthem according to an article in yesterday’s Elkhart Truth. They are reconsidering with the help of Goshen College administrators. http://www.jesusradicals.com/the-anthem-sink-hole/


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