Post 4-Poverty and Wealth--The Anabaptist Enigma

What makes conservative Anabaptists so financially successful?

A couple months ago I sat with some 450 other people in Halsey Mennonite's gym and listened to reports on the various ministries of CAM-West.

Based in Ohio and organized by the Beachy Amish in Holmes County, Ohio, Christian Aid Ministries has become an enormous charity. They funnel the vast resources, generosity and efficiency of conservative Anabaptists into a central organization and then distribute aid all over the world. They send homemade comforters to North Korean tuberculosis centers, gather truckloads of almost-expired medicine and send it to clinics, pack food parcels for emergency aid, and dig wells in Kenya.

They package and distribute thousands of seed packets so people can grown their own food, rebuild after natural disasters, teach women in Eastern Europe to sew, and slip quietly into places like Yemen and Iraq to offer emergency aid.

And a lot more besides, in eye-popping numbers.

CAM-West is a branch of CAM, founded a few years ago. Mennonites in the West had lots of willingness and resources, but we are a long way from the CAM warehouses in the East.

So now the North Korea projects are centered here, and also the assembling of thousands of hygiene kits for Syrian refugees and food parcels for Eastern Europe.

I sat in that crowd of Mennonites, all deeply engaged in the reports, and recalled the Atlantic article about wealth inequality in America.

I thought: By most measurements, we ought to be poor. True, many of us are white and our families have been here for generations, but there's a significant percentage of Hispanics and other non-Caucasians, and we are rural and uneducated. I doubt that half this crowd has finished high school.

And yet, I knew there were lots of deep pockets in that room—farmers and business owners and landlords and contractors. I knew most of them were willing to donate in impressive numbers if they were convinced it was for a worthy cause—hence, the rapt attention to the reports from bearded gentlemen on the platform.

How does that work, and what is it about Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and other derivatives) that turns the American economic charts upside down?

I am not an economist, having inherited my dad's mystified view of anything financial. But I'm trying to learn, and I've observed a few things.

[I have much more knowledgeable friends, such as Merle Burkholder, who are welcome to weigh in with comments.]

Some time ago I read Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

She is a professional woman who went undercover and took various minimum-wage jobs to see if and how a person could get by on minimum wage in America. The short answer is definitely No, it just can't be done with any quality of life.

Ms. Ehrenreich details the harrowing lives of waitresses, cleaning ladies, motel maids, and others. She shows the snowballing effects of poverty and how short-term solutions derail long-term goals. If you don't have money, you can't afford a deposit on an apartment, so you end up in a motel. You can't cook in a motel room, so you have to buy prepared food. There might be cheap rent a long way out of town, but then you have to figure out transportation back and forth. You're working two or three jobs so you smoke cigarettes for the energy boost. And so on.

What struck me over and over in the book is that the only measurement of wealth that she looked at was money and property. From that perspective, there is no possible way to have one person, working for low wages, have their needs met. If there's a child or two, it becomes even more impossible. 

As I read, I kept thinking, "WHERE are these people's PEOPLE?" It seemed like everyone was bobbing around in their own little bubble, trying to take care of food, clothing, medical care, transportation, and everything else entirely on their own.

Once in a while, Ehrenreich offhandedly mentions someone who, for example, didn't have to pay child care expenses because her mother watched the children. But the author never looks at that factor in depth, and to me it seemed like she kind of resented when someone had their mom babysit or their uncle fix their car, like they weren't quite playing by the author's rules.

So of course I would mentally rearrange their lives. Those three waitresses should live together in one apartment and try to carpool. They could take turns staying home to watch all the children, cook rice and beans in the crock pot (from Goodwill) and do laundry for them all.  If there was a neighbor who could fix the car, maybe one of them could give haircuts or cook something in exchange. If one got sick, the others could take her shift.

Or SOMETHING! If they would only help each other!

But they didn't ask me, obviously.

This is my spitballed explanation of the Anabaptist economy:

As a denomination and subculture, we have embraced frugality and hard work and hands-on skills, but mostly I think we recognize that people and relationships are of great value. It's not that we don't like money (trust me) but we know that people are even more valuable. So we live in clustered communities and have lots of children and go to church and turn out by the hundreds for weddings and funerals.

Paradoxically, this system has resulted in financial wealth.

The basic requirements for a job are not education but gumption and connection. In this area, it's easy for a young person to get a job. You can drive a combine for a farmer during harvest, teach at various church schools, sack seed for Paul or another seed cleaner, build mini-barns for whats-his-name on Peoria Road, or work at Grocery Depot, the Mennonite-owned discount grocery.  If you call Loren at Grocery Depot and say you're Paul Smucker's daughter, you'll be hired. He won't ask if you have a high school diploma and might not even ask for references, but he'll expect you to work hard.

If you do a good job at a construction business, you can work your way into a better position and eventually a business of your own. And then you hire your children and nieces and nephews and the guy who came out for harvest but wants to stay on in the fall, and eventually he marries your daughter and expands the business.

It's not a perfect system, as demonstrated by our family's experiences, which were likely attributed to a low gumption level. But on a macro scale, the system works.

However, there must be more to the robust Anabaptist economy than simply valuing people, because other subcultures such as Native Americans also value community but have different economic outcomes. 

Why do you think Anabaptists have done well enough to finance CAM's huge budget?

Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts in the comments, which I will post if you sound humble enough.

You might be wondering why our family didn't get more financial help from the church community. Tomorrow: how Anabaptists help, and how they helped Paul and me find our way out of poverty.