Europe in the Age of the Reformation

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The Anabaptists

Fear of the Believers

All of these factors made the Anabaptists the most universally-feared and persecuted of all the Protestant sects. Princes feared the consequences of their political radicalism. To the Catholics, they represented all their worst predictions of what happens when uneducated people try to interpret the Word of God without the guidance of priests. For Lutherans and Calvinists alike, the Anabaptists were the worst sort of reformers: the kind that had gone astray, had gone too far, and who endangered everything good the reformers were hoping to accomplish. Even those who were not religious or political activists feared the Anabaptists as corrupters of social order.

This accounts for the persecutions, but what accounts for the movement itself? There were tens, even hundreds of thousands of Anabaptists in various parts of Europe, and more who sympathized without joining them.

The attraction, of course, were those very beliefs that so repelled most of Europe. Many were attracted to the strict and vigorous idealism of anabaptism, and their message of true Christian fellowship in the last days. Sympathizers might not accept the tenets, and yet be impressed with the piety of the Anabaptists, their knowledge of the Bible, and their simple style of life.

It's to the believers we turn now. There are scores of threads in the narrative of this movement, for every little enclave had its particular beliefs and its particular history. Out of these many threads, I shall extract only a few here.