Reformed Mennonite - Literary Portrayal

Literary Portrayal

Reformed Mennonites have been depicted in a variety of literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Leo Tolstoy, in his book The Kingdom of God is Within You, praised the religious pamphlet Non-Resistance Asserted by Reformed Mennonite member Daniel Musser.

Helen Reimensnyder Martin harshly portrayed the Reformed Mennonite Herrites and other Pennsylvania Dutch groups in her novel Tillie: a Mennonite Maid (1904), a novel which provoked cries of misrepresentation from those who resented her depictions. Early in the story a young girl of Pennsylvania Dutch, but not Mennonite, background, joins a Reformed Mennonite group after listening to a funeral sermon, but is excommunicated within a few years for allowing curls of hair to peek from her bonnet. The chapter depicting the funeral scene makes much of the Herrite prohibition of attendance at funerals of other faiths; to accommodate them, two separate funeral sermons are preached, and the conclusion of the first sermon by a Reformed Mennonite minister is the signal for the Reformed Mennonites to depart.

Newbery Honor-winning Kathryn Lasky's novel Beyond the Divide is ostensibly about a fourteen-year-old Amish girl heading west with her father in 1849 after he has been shunned by their community for attending a funeral outside the faith. The depiction of the faith mixes Reformed Mennonite, Amish, Mennonite, and even Quaker customs, but the funeral incident reflects both Reformed Mennonite practice and Tillie: a Mennonite Maid.