Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
The automobile
Refused as property, used as a service: the car is the cleanest demonstration that the Ordnung judges ownership and social effect, not machinery. The full register entry
Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish
Resisted
Car ownership is refused under the Ordnung because it dissolves the settlement’s geography: a congregation must live within visiting distance, and the car makes exit cheaper than endurance. The same logic admits the hired car and the tractor governed by district rule — the unit of analysis is ownership and its social effect, never the engine.
- Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner & Steven M. Nolt, The Amish (2013)
Evangelical
Embraced
Progressive Mennonite bodies adopted the car with the rest of America while arguing about consumerism; the Mennonite Church’s twentieth-century debates were about wealth display and war taxes, not the machine itself — a within-family divergence the Amish case usually hides.
- Mennonite Church USA historical materials on automobiles and simplicity