Report on vaccine hesitancy among Mennonites ‘misleading’

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This article was published 04/06/2021 (1593 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Andrew Wall saw a new report this week about Mennonites in southern Manitoba and vaccine hesitancy, he cringed.

“It infuriated me,” he said of how it left the impression all Mennonites in that part of the province are against getting vaccinated.

Wall, a member of a Mennonite Brethren church in Winnipeg and an independent documentary filmmaker who focuses on the Mennonite story in Canada, said the report “was completely misleading.”

“It’s just a small number of all Mennonites in the province who feel that way,” he said. “They made it sound like all Mennonites are vaccine-hesitant.”

Conrad Stoesz, archivist at the Mennonite Heritage Archives in Winnipeg, agrees.

“One size doesn’t fit all,” he said.

“In the Winkler area alone, there are at least seven different Mennonite groups,” he said, listing them off — Mennonite Church Canada, Mennonite Brethren, Evangelical Mennonite Mission Conference, Old Colony, Sommerfelder, independent and more recent Mennonite immigrants from Germany.

Some of these groups are progressive, Stoesz said, while others are conservative. There are also differences in theology and leadership style, along with how they view involvement with society. Each has a different experience and history of relating to governments.

He added, “There is no single Mennonite authority that can tell all Mennonites what to do or believe.”

That doesn’t excuse the unwillingness of some not to get vaccinated, Stoesz said. He has Mennonite friends in rural Manitoba who are frustrated by the low vaccination rate among some area residents.

“They throw their hands up in the air and ask, ‘Why won’t they get vaccinated?’” he said.

While he concedes the vaccine hesitancy of some Mennonites is newsworthy, Stoesz said he wants Canadians to remember the many contributions Mennonites have made to Canadian society.

This includes organizations such as the Mennonite Central Committee, which last year celebrated 100 years of relief and development work, the Mennonite Disaster Service, which offers clean-up and repair work free of charge to survivors of natural disasters in North America, and the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, Canada’s leading international hunger alleviation organization. The foodgrains bank was started by the MCC working with Mennonite farmers.

Stoesz said realizes a short news piece can’t go into all the details and nuance about Mennonites but still thinks there should have been more information about the differences between the groups.

“Mennonites are a very diverse group of people, with different beliefs, practices and histories,” he said.

In Canada, there are 30 different Mennonite groups, according to the Mennonite World Conference, which facilitates relationships between the world’s 107 national Mennonite churches in 58 countries. About 81 per cent of the group’s 1.47 million members are in the global south.

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