Finally! A religious story that is not about escape

Aug 19, 2020 by

by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:

The standard liberal template for depicting minority religious communities is escape. As typified by the Netflix series Unorthodox, the narrative tracks a young person breaking free of tradition and superstition to discover themselves in a world of expansive liberal self-fulfilment.

A new BBC documentary, Inside the Bruderhof, surprised me by inverting the trope. It follows Hannah, an 18-year-old raised in the Bruderhof community at Darvell in Sussex. Hannah is embarking on a year in London, in order to explore other ways of living and make an informed decision about whether or not to commit to a Bruderhof life.

It’s not a trivial decision. In The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher advises Christians in our increasingly post-Christian world to give up seeking political and cultural power and focus on religious life in community. Rooted in the radical Protestant Anabaptist tradition, the Bruderhof are ahead of Dreher by some 100 years.

Members hold everything in common: houses, cars, even the clothes they wear. They have no money of their own. Sex roles are segregated, ambition is constrained by the work available within the community, and members have no choice about where they live in the 23 international Bruderhof communities.

But this is not a cult, or a group smothered by traditionalism. Anabaptists believe religious commitment should be made consciously as an adult, and like the Amish, Bruderhof families encourage their offspring to try life outside the community before committing to adult Bruderhof membership.

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