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In:Varieties of German in Contact Settings: Studies in honor of William D. Keel
Edited by B. Richard Page and Michael T. Putnam
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 10] 2025
► pp. 93–114

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Chapter 5
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Community development among recent Mennonite immigrants in Kansas

 | St. Olaf College
Published online: 27 November 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.10.05vo
Abstract
Since the 19th C, many “German” groups settled in Kansas. Since the 1970s, so-called Russian Mennonites migrated to the US mainly out of Old Colony settlements in Mexico and/or Canada that continued to follow the Old Order. Part of this Old Order is a doctrine of separateness from worldly matters, entailing a two-kingdom theology in which church and state are recognized as separate entities and held to different moral standards. Previous research for Mennonite communities in the US showed a paradigmatic shift towards a theology of one lordship under Christ in which one moral standard holds for all matters. In this paper, I provide qualitative data to show that this theological shift co-occurred within a larger shift of social verticalization.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mennonites in Kansas
  • 3.A shift in the paradigm of the Two-Kingdom Theology
  • 4.Great change in (immigrant) US communities
  • 5.Data and speakers
  • 6.Analysis of interview data
    • a.Apoliticism as evidence for a continuation of separateness
      between the two Kingdoms
    • b.Responses categorized as apoliticism, but implication of theological shift
    • c.Responses categorized as politicism as evidence for theological shift
    • Justification as a signal of the former Separatism Dogma
  • 7.Conclusion: Shift on multiple levels
  • 8.Future perspectives
  • Notes
  • References
  • Online resources
References (24)
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Online resources
https://www.mennoniteusa.org/who-are-mennonites/history/
http://plautdietsch.22web.org/lexicon/index.htm (for spelling convention of Plautdietsch language data)
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