1978 Anabaptist Prophets

1978   Anabaptist Prophets. Pittsburgh Opera, Le Prophète (The Prophet) at the Met, Candide; Associated Church Press, William H. Masters, Wesley Pippert, Evangelicals, Sojourners visit MPH, Doug Hostetter, Ben and Dorothy Cutrell, Privileging Youth Culture, Lorne Peachey, Two peace sermons at Scottdale Mennonite.

I’m not sure when I first heard of prophets or opera, but as in so much of my education, my first interest may have come with a book. Let’s start with opera. When Rodolf Bing left the Metropolitan Opera in New York after 22 years as general manager, he wrote his memoirs in 5000 Nights at the Opera (1972).  I read a review, got a copy and totally enjoyed his story of managing musicians, theater and this larger than life art form. The climax of his story, as I remember it, was his bringing to the Met the temperamental soprano Maria Callas, probably the greatest high soprano singer of mid-century. The anti-climax was how he finally had to leave her go. In his telling, the Met as an institution was greater than the individual artist. He felt that given Callas’ unusual needs and character, he would have needed to sacrifice the institution for his greatest singer.

Actually, I heard some opera when a company or two stopped by Malone College, and during Spring of 1968, Gloria and I with friends Wayne Yoder and Linda Ulm heard the Met bass Jerome Hines sing at our senior banquet. As a child when I heard operatic voices, I also heard the comment: Geb da Bulli Millich. (Give the little bull some milk.) I suppose Hines also had interest to me because he was a member of the Salvation Army and was as likely to be seen in a soup kitchen as a concert hall. I later heard him as an Anabaptist prophet (below) and in 1979 as the Pittsburgh Opera’s Don Quichotte. But Bing’s memoir fascinated me for the music and drama on and off stage, and when we moved to Scottdale, we began to attend the Pittsburgh Opera, then in the refurbished Heinz Hall. The opera was under the direction of the Richard Karp who had begun the opera in the forties and was now an elderly man, soon to be replaced by his daughter Barbara.

I remember our first Pittsburgh Opera of the “The Flying Dutchman” by Wagner; we attended with Mervin and Arlene Miller. The orchestral music was thunderous and the lonely voice of the doomed sailor in the open night sky and seascape.  It was a total unreality of music with huge voices thundering out the songs, often with great melodies, tenors and basses going even higher and lower than the Southern male quartets who had earlier charmed me. They wore bright costumes and often died to beautiful strains of the violins. Local connections also gave some interest such as when the Mezzo-soprano Mildred Miller sang in the Mozart operas; I especially remember her in “Così fan tutte.” I had earlier heard her sing an evening of German Lieder when we were at Bowling Green. Aside from the music, there were the stories, even if folkloric and stereotypical. We had enjoyable performances of Bizet’s “Carmen,” with the singable melodies of jealous lovers, evoking a long-gone Spanish life and death.     

The story I knew best and rediscovered in the seventies was of the sixteenth century Anabaptists, and sure enough in the Spring of 1977, I heard Jerome Hines again, this time singing as one of three foreboding low-voiced Anabaptists. Le Prophète (The Prophet) was Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera of the rise and fall of the Anabaptists’ peasant uprising when they tried to set up an Old Testament Davidic Kingdom in the city of Münster. I had a publishing meeting in New Jersey, so I took a train in to New York and the Met. Besides Jerome Hines, the performance had other notable singers such as Marilyn Horne, Renata Scoto and James McCracken, the latter singing the title role of John of Leyden. Horne was the tragic Leyden’s mother whose low soprano brought authentic compassion and sorrow as the story of her son unfolded.

I bought the recording and would still play it at times if I had a 33 record player. Meyerbeer’s grand style of opera however has fallen out of favor and probably will not appear on many stages again. I later ordered a CD set on Amazon, only to receive blank copies so I’ll live with the memory. I saw probably the only major staging of this opera during my life time, and may have written the only Met opera review for our church publication the Gospel Herald. Anyway, after a decade of opera going in the seventies, by the eighties we went less. Why, dear reader, I’m not sure. One might think of our little children for whom opera had little interest. But even after the children left home, we were no longer the regulars. It may also have been my practical-minded Gloria who one time suggested that I might sleep more comfortably at home. I generally slept through most of the second act, not unlike my response to a good sermon.  One might as well hear recordings, Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, or watch Live from the Met on TV—where it’s more comfortable for sleeping. For the most part, that is what I have done.  

The Broadway musical is a twentieth-century American popular adaption of the nineteenth-century European opera. So a coda on this opera phase would be my fascination with all Anabaptists who showed up in the classical literature (outside the Martyr’s Mirror) such as the Anabaptist Jacques in Voltaire’s short novella Candide. The youthful Candide is an innocent discovering the world and his guide Pangloss believes everything is for the best. They meet an Anabaptist Jacques who knows better and turns out to be Voltaire’s version of a tragic but virtuous Dirk Willems. Anyway, in the late nineties when Hannah’s boyfriend Anson Miedel and I traveled to New York, I took him to a Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide—thinking this musical would be a friendly introduction to Anabaptism. To my disappointment the Anabaptist scenes did not make it into Bernstein’s Broadway Candide, nor did Anson seem that impressed with the rest of the show. On the way back to our room, we had better fellowship at a sports bar where we caught a basketball game.

In the meantime, religiously the Evangelicals were on the rise. There was President Jimmy Carter, of course, but I think the first time I realized that the Evangelicals had become the main players in the  American Christian world was at the Associated Church Press meetings in St. Louis, Missouri in April.  Although the organization was largely editors of publications from of the traditional Protestant denominations, one could see several groupings emerging. The old line liberals at this meeting were the majority, quite professional about their theological and journalistic categories, trying to meet the approval of the secular press' standards. They were concerned about world conditions and raised important questions about structures, politics and organizational arrangements. Their cultural success seemed in direct proportion with their financial demise, a loss of readership. Often we awarded a magazine awards one year, and the following year it ceased publication.

For the old line, the outstanding speaker was William H. Masters of the Masters and Johnson human sexuality research team from St. Louis. Masters had sharp eyes and looked straight ahead or into our eyes with nary a sign of emotion. He personified objectivity while telling us of persons unable to copulate correctly in the fifties and sixties.  Masters said the present generation in the seventies has learned to copulate better and on an equal gender basis. He talked about homosexuality too which was emerging as a topic, but I had the impression that many of the editors enjoyed him especially because he was unsympathetic to religious orthodoxy which presumably inhibited casual breeding. He positioned traditional Christian morality against his clinical sexuality. 

On the other hand, there were the young evangelicals who had zeal for personal piety and sound morals and perhaps less optimistic about government, especially its centralized forms. At this meeting, their speaker was Wesley Pippert, the United Press International reporter assigned to the White House. Pippert spoke of growing up in rural Iowa when business, dairy, and clothing stores were small and independent. In the meantime, store chains have become large, and they can give a bribe to the Nixon for Presidency campaign. Pippert was short and stocky with a wide mouth and a powerful jaw. He did not speak easily but seemed to look deeply for words deep inside himself. But his strength and energy were contagious, and I was impressed by his concern for truth and for justice. He was also the husband of the author Rebecca Manley Pippert who was active with the Intervarsity program and evangelism. Pippert seemed to me the future of Christians in journalism.

If this kind of decentralized and local community oriented evangelicalism had an appeal to many Mennonites, probably to most heartland Mennonites, another smaller group of young evangelicals were closer to us at Mennonite Publishing House. Our publication version was the Sojourners community in Washington D.C. and their journal, also called Sojourners.  Our editors at Mennonite Publishing House considered them to be colleagues and soul mates in the Anabaptist Christian cause. Our book publishing editor Paul Schrock’s daughter Carmen was an assistant to the editor Jim Wallis, and Sojourners openly cited the Anabaptist story and theology as a part of its spiritual heritage. Among of their contributing editors were the Mennonite theologians John Howard Yoder and Ron Sider.

I was a member of a committee which would plan occasional leadership meetings of the management, editorial and marketing people for all-day discussions. We invited in members of the Sojourners’ editorial team, and two people came, one being Wes Michaelson, who had earlier been an aide to Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield (1968). One was impressed by their advocacy approach to journalism, their Christian call of the importance of serving the poor and needy, and how optimistic they were regarding government programs to respond to these needs.

Regarding their publication, they had a strong public relations and fundraising division as a part of the magazine. It struck me at the time that they had a similar agenda to some of our editors but had a fund-raising arm to meet their budget, but we were trying to do a similar project among the most politically conservative religious group in the USA and Canada. Most of our readers may have privileged meaningful work, local efforts, and church communities as a response to the poor and the needy. And we had no fundraising arm to our publishing; it is perhaps understandable why our year-end reports were increasingly having negative figures.

Sojourners was also publishing Mennonite authors, and one was Doug Hostetter who wrote an article on visiting Cuba “After the Debris Is Cleared.” Hostetter distinguishes between charity and rights for a church and government as a kind of division of labor. He takes Vietnam and Cuba before and after their revolutions, with appreciation for the new communist regimes. Hostetter’s hope was dialogue to "learn more of the God who calls his people both to liberation during a time of oppression and to faithfulness during the sojourn in the new land.”  

The Hostetter article stayed with me for a long time, mostly for its honesty in describing the degree to which a Mennonite had come to associate the new land of revolutionary socialism and communism with the Kingdom of God. For Hostetter and his cohorts, the Vietnam War was the defining experience of their politics, theology and worldview. In this reading America was the apocalyptic beast, the main vehicle of oppression in the world and all other countries were morally equivalent or mostly better, depending of course on the degree to which they had achieved a socialist or communist ideal of justice.

I was especially fascinated how in one generation the son and daughter of the best known Mennonite radio preacher B. Charles Hostetter (The Mennonite Hour) who had taught an evangelical Mennonite understanding of the gospel would have traded this gospel for a bowl of socialist political porridge, what was called prophetic religion. Hostetter’s sister Pat Hostetter Martin had also become a vocal left-wing political evangelist during these years; her husband Earl Martin having gained some fame for staying in Vietnam for a period of time after the American troops pulled out. By this time the Vietnamese refugees and what were called the boat people were arriving in our Mennonite communities in good numbers, and their stories of re-education camps and Ho Chi Minh’s Marxist nationalism were hardly re-assuring that the Kingdom of God had arrived in Southeast Asia.      

This variety of prophetic religion was being embraced at the Mennonite Publishing House. We had day-long leadership discussions to gather the thought life of the institution which at that point still had about one hundred employees at Scottdale. First there was the predictable; there would be a debate between a theoretical Anabaptism headed by Jan Gleysteen and an evangelical Mennonitism headed by Maynard Shetler, both traveling over well worn-territory. Many of us mainly identified with Gleysteen, even if he was considered somewhat of a high maintenance free-loader. Our publisher Ben Cutrell came to the defense of the practical-minded Shetler and his Baptist wife Alice.

Ben came from the George and Frances Nissley Cutrell family, who arrived at Scottdale in 1908, hence knew printing well, but was also a financial manager (studied at Carnegie Mellon). He had been brought to Mennonite Publishing House as an organizational leader, replacing the traditional preacher businessperson Abraham Jacob (A.J.) Metzler. Cutrell fit the bureaucratic image of steady temperament, allowing his managers do their work, evoking their loyalty, and understanding delegation and division of labor. He was complimented by his wife Dorothy Stutzman, of Louisville, Ohio, who was a passionate idealist and ran the Scottdale Provident Bookstore for a while and also was editor of the book review service called the Provident Book Finder. Ben and Dorothy late in their careers took a New Guinea sabbatical helping a Christian publisher and bringing back a charming idealization of native non-Western cultures and enlightened about the flaws in American society. This third world idealization, basic to prophetic religion, was now combined with an earlier fascination with youth culture and what we called futurism. 

So back to 1978. Our committee asked Ben Cutrell to lead one-day discussions on publishing in the future. He had read books, somewhat in the Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) mode and related them to publishing, most of which escapes me thirty years later. What I do remember is that he talked of how we should learn from our children; they are the future and he was hopeful about their international and caring character. His son was now living among the peasants in Haiti with no vocation one could see, and his daughter was a social worker and supporting government politics which would fund more social workers. Clearly, the social services were a growth industry for young people, but whether the project should be given such a church preference became questionable to me.

I think I had my first awakening of some misjudgment when I was teaching a junior high age Sunday school class at the Kingview Mennonite Church near Scottdale. We were studying the book of Acts in the New Testament and looking at contemporary examples of this kind of communal and equalitarian Christianity. I innocently told the youths to look at their older now twenty-something hippy brothers and sisters for such models of prophetic religion. Their response was one of concerned disbelief and some embarrassment of my naiveté. I had the clear impression that these youngsters would as likely have labeled their older siblings as models of individualistic and selfish Christianity. I am of course here unfairly picking out certain families for examples, but I do believe that the Scottdale Mennonite community had a heightened love affair with what Newsweek used to call the youth culture, a kind of on-going religious appropriation of The Greening of America and The Making of a Counter Culture. In fact, I know of few religious groups which embraced the word counter culture as we did as Mennonites; our Scottdale Mennonite publications leading the way. 

Exhibit number one was the Mennonite Publishing House’s With magazine which was begun in 1968 and edited by Lorne Peachey. This was the monthly youth magazine replacing the weekly Youth Christian Companion begun by my old antiquated tennis friend Clayton F. Yake. Peachey was the anti-Yake of another generation who now projected an independent and anti-establishment posture. Yake had grown old with his readership and knew who was buying his subscriptions, and Peachey was ready to cut loose from these oldsters and appeal directly to the high school youth. Whatever merit Peachey’s approach had regarding readership, it also made sense in terms of what was called a generation gap and don’t trust anyone over thirty zeitgeist. He gave a new focus to the content and style. He made the magazine slick and hip and addressed formerly taboo subjects such as petting, masturbation, and draft dodging.

Peachey was bright, responded quickly, and reflective like a mirror. No one would accuse Peachey of over-appreciating the complexity and dilemmas of the biblical and Mennonite tradition. My hunch is that whatever offense With brought to some congregational leaders had less to do with the actual content than with this editorial tone and style; the prophetic style was to provoke. In any case, the church elders who paid the bills soon tightened the purse strings, and the kids themselves had other priorities for their money. Very quickly the subscriptions dropped sharply from the earlier Youth Christian Companion as the traditionals and evangelicals dropped out. This selectivity seemed to enhance Peachey’s reputation even further as a prophet; financially, the youth paper turned from a net revenue generator in the 1950s to a highly subsidized publication by 1970s.

By the mid-seventies the publishers, perhaps in an act of contrition, named Richard Kauffman, a former pastor and thoughtful soul, as editor of the magazine. But by that time the magazine’s radical identity was firmly established. Peachey meanwhile had moved on to editing the community magazine Christian Living, similarly managing to sharpen (as in reduce) its readership to family (the prophetic family, of course) and those who appreciated his polarizing style.

Dear reader, I know you are thinking that I’m being too critical, and I agree with you. It was another time and period and my colleagues were all doing the best they could. Furthermore, I was young too during those years, and I benefited from this privilege we gave to youth culture. I was given forums to write and speak precisely because of my youth, non-preacher demeanor and shaggy hair.  And I believed much of the popular counter culture peace and love and live simply so others can simply live credos. I still love the songs “Last night I had the strangest dream….  I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.”  

By the end of the year I was preparing two sermons which Scottdale Mennonite Church invited me to give. One was from the Gospels, Jesus and Peace, and the second was from the Epistles on the Gospel of Peace, noting also our church’s history on pacifism and nonresistance and the singer Graham Nash’s “Cathedral.” As I review the sermons, I see the Scriptures and history were the basis however, so I’ll end with one of those Scripture which I quoted of our Christian hope:

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”     

Most of this chapter comes from my 1978 journal “Notes on Life” and my personal files. The Meyerbeyer Anabaptist prophets comes from “Münster Opera at the Met,” Gospel Herald (March 15, 1977, 226). Doug Hostetter’s article, “After the Debris Is Cleared” appeared in Sojourners (September, 1978, 20-23). The two Scottdale sermons are in my files and were given on January 14 and 21, 1979; final Scripture quotation is Revelation 21: 3-4, NRSV.