Before I got the book I had read some reviews and interviews with Rhoda Janzen and was mystified by what I perceived as excessive conservatism in her upbringing. Janzen is about 20 years younger than I am and I hadn’t observed that kind of conservatism among the MBs in Fresno when I was living there in the 60s, which is around the time Janzen was born. My mother is not an ethnic Mennonite, but she lived in Fresno for 35 years as the wife of a FPU professor and academic dean, and she was an active member of an MB church there–albeit the “liberal” one. When I asked her about some of the things that puzzled me her response was, “Well, her parents are Canadian.” Whether or not she knows the history (I am sending it to her), she seems to have a visceral understanding of the psychological and behavioral differences of the 20th century immigrants to Canada.

My husband, whose ancestors also came to the US in the 1870s, had a more conventional and conservative MB upbringing than I did. I lived largely outside MB communities until I was 17 and had somewhat liberal parents. But my husband too was perplexed by the level of conservatism I described to him as I was reading the book. At one point I suggested to him that maybe Janzen’s experience was so much different from ours because her parents were closer to the immigrant experience. Now I can see that is probably the case.

Like you, the theme I understand the least in the book is mistrust of education. Everywhere MBs settled in North America they immediately began founding educational institutions. Two colleges and a seminary in just the US is a pretty good record for a small, marginalized denomination. I agree with you that there has been a mistrust of secular education. When my husband transferred from FPU to Fresno State College in the early 60s, his pastor made a point of keeping in touch with him to make sure he wasn’t being tainted by a worldly (his pastor’s word) institution. At that same time, however, it was understood that to be a professor even at a MB college like FPU one had to have a PhD, of necessity from a secular university. It is interesting to me that Janzen identifies her father as a theologian and conference leader, but not as a professor of theology and the president of FPU for 10 years.

My father, who would have been third generation in the migration study, rebelled somewhat like Janzen did. He left the MBs, married an “English girl” as it was called then, and got a secular education. In the end he came back to the fold, but, like your mother, was not unchanged by the world he experienced. I believe both he (and his children) and the MB church, which he had never left in his heart, were better for it.