Hutterite Beliefs and Colony Life

1. Who the Hutterites Are

The Hutterites are an Anabaptist Christian people who live on communal farms called colonies across the Canadian prairies and the northern plains of the United States, holding every asset in common and taking no personal wage. They take their name from Jakob Hutter, a Tyrolean hatmaker who organised the Moravian communities in the 1530s and was burned at Innsbruck in 1536. Their formal name for themselves is the Hutterian Brethren, and their communal practice dates from 1528, five years before Hutter took charge of it.

A Hutterite is recognisable at a distance by plain dress: dark trousers and suspenders and a beard after marriage for men, a long dark dress and a head covering for women, with a spotted headscarf worn in some of the branches. Hutterites speak Hutterisch, a German dialect with Carinthian roots, among themselves, read Scripture and preach in an older form of standard German, and learn English at school. They use modern production technology far more freely than the Old Order Amish or Old Order Mennonites, running large mechanised farms and manufacturing shops while restricting personal media and private consumption.

Population and colony counts for the Hutterites are published by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College and by the colonies' own directories. Those sources place the population in the tens of thousands across several hundred colonies, with steady growth over the past century driven by large families and colony division rather than by conversion. This page gives no single headline figure because published counts differ and are revised as colonies branch.

Why This Page Exists Separately

Hutterites are routinely folded into a general account of plain people and lose the one thing that distinguishes them. The Amish, treated in our guide to what the Amish actually believe, keep separation from the world through family-based farms and businesses that individual households own. Hutterites keep separation through common ownership, which is a doctrinal position rather than a lifestyle. That difference is the subject of this page, and it is also the reason Hutterites and Catholic religious orders can be compared seriously, which is rare among the churches of the Reformation.

2. What Hutterites Believe

Hutterite doctrine is Anabaptist doctrine with community of goods added as a binding article. Hutterites confess the Trinity, the Incarnation, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the last judgment and the life of the world to come, and they say the Apostles' Creed. Peter Riedemann's confession opens by expounding the creed article by article, which is worth knowing because Hutterites are often described as though they held some novel theology. On the doctrine of God they hold what the ancient Church held.

Believer's Baptism

Baptism follows a personal confession of faith and a request for membership, so infants are not baptised. Hutterites baptise by pouring, typically in the person's early twenties, and baptism carries the whole weight of membership: the baptised person accepts the discipline of the community, renounces personal ownership, and becomes eligible to marry and to vote in the assembly of members. Sixteenth-century Anabaptists were killed for this practice, since rebaptism was a capital offence under imperial law, and the Hutterite martyr accounts collected in the Chronicle are read in the colonies still. Our guide to baptism and what it does sets out the Catholic doctrine that Anabaptists rejected, and our guide to the Anabaptist movement as a whole covers the sixteenth-century argument in detail.

The Lord's Supper

The Lord's Supper is observed once a year, in the Easter season, with the exact day varying by branch and colony, and it is understood as a memorial and a sign of the unity of the body. Hutterites explicitly reject any change of substance in the bread and wine. Riedemann treats the Supper as the seal of a community already made one in life and goods, which is the point where Hutterite eucharistic teaching connects to Hutterite economics: bread made from many grains and wine from many grapes is read as a figure of the members who have given up separate property. Catholic teaching on the Real Presence, set out in our guide to the Eucharist, is a genuine and unresolved disagreement between the two bodies.

Salvation, Discipleship and the Ban

Hutterites hold that faith shows itself in obedience, and they resist any account of justification that leaves conduct untouched. Discipleship, Nachfolge, means following Christ in the concrete: giving up possessions, refusing violence, telling the truth without oaths, submitting to the community. Members who fall into serious sin are placed under the ban, which means exclusion from the Lord's Supper, from the assembly and from ordinary social eating for a set period, with restoration expected once repentance is shown. The Hutterite ban is less severe in its household effects than the Amish Meidung, since a Hutterite under discipline continues living in the colony. On the underlying question of faith and works, our guide to faith and works sets out the Catholic position, which agrees with the Hutterites that living faith produces obedience and disagrees with them about baptism, the sacraments and the Church.

Separation from the World

Separation is structural for Hutterites. A colony is deliberately rural, self-contained in food, schooling, work and worship, and organised so that a member has little occasion to be anywhere else. Hutterites do not evangelise door to door, they marry within the community, they generally decline public office, and they read the world outside as organised around self-interest in a way that the Gospel refuses. Riedemann grounds this in the whole New Testament language of two kingdoms, and the practical consequence is that Hutterite growth comes almost entirely from Hutterite children.

3. Community of Goods: The Hutterite Distinctive

Community of goods is the article that separates Hutterites from every other Anabaptist body, and they hold it as a command rather than a counsel. A baptised Hutterite owns no land, no house, no vehicle, no business share and no income. The colony owns everything as a corporate body, work is unpaid, and the colony supplies food, clothing, housing, schooling, dentistry and medical care according to need. There is no wage, no personal bank account and no private savings, and personal possessions are limited to clothing, books, gifts and the tools of a trade.

The Hutterite Argument, Stated in Its Own Terms

The Hutterite case runs in three steps and deserves to be heard as its own writers make it. First, creation: Riedemann argues that God gave the earth to humanity in common, that light, air and water are still held that way, and that private ownership entered with the fall as a form of grasping. Second, the incarnation and the Church: Christ restored what was lost, and the Jerusalem church in Acts 2 and Acts 4 shows what a restored community looks like in practice, so the sharing described there is the normal shape of Christian life rather than a passing episode. Third, love: Hutterites read 1 John 3:17, which asks how the love of God can remain in someone who has material possessions and closes his heart against a brother in need, as making common ownership the only consistent answer.

Peter Walpot, who led the Moravian communities from 1565 to 1578, wrote the Great Article Book in 1577 and made community of goods one of its five chief articles alongside baptism, the Supper, separation and the sword. Walpot's argument is that a Christian who keeps private property keeps a claim that competes with the claim of Christ, and that the surrender of ownership is the practical form of the surrender of self. Hutterites have never treated the arrangement as a strategy for efficiency. They treat it as obedience, and they have paid for it in exile and execution for five centuries.

What It Feels Like From Inside

Members describe the practical effect in terms of security and constraint together. Nobody in a colony is poor, nobody is unemployed, nobody faces old age without care, and no family carries a mortgage or a medical bill. The same structure means that a member does not choose his own trade freely, does not move house, does not decide how to spend an afternoon's earnings, and lives his entire life within a group of about a hundred people who know everything about him. Hutterite writers are candid that community of goods requires the surrender of preference as much as the surrender of property, and that this is the harder half.

4. Moravia, 1528: Where the Hutterites Began

The Hutterite movement began in the spring of 1528 on a road out of Nikolsburg in Moravia, when a group of Anabaptists who had been expelled from the town spread a cloak on the ground and laid their possessions on it to be held and distributed in common. The Hutterite Chronicle records the incident as the founding act, and the group's own account presents it as an improvisation under pressure that turned out to be the will of God. They had almost nothing and were walking into the unknown, and they decided that whatever they had would belong to all of them.

The Quarrel Behind the Expulsion

The expulsion came out of a dispute among Anabaptists at Nikolsburg over the sword. Balthasar Hubmaier, a doctor of theology who had become an Anabaptist, had taken refuge under the lords of Liechtenstein at Nikolsburg and taught that a Christian magistrate could bear the sword and that Christians could pay a war tax against the Ottoman advance. Hans Hut, who disputed with him at Nikolsburg in 1527, held to complete nonresistance and refused the war tax, and after Hut's death that party was led by Jacob Wiedemann. The two parties were nicknamed the Schwertler, sword people, and the Stäbler, staff people, since the second group carried a walking staff and no weapon. When the Stäbler were expelled in 1528, they walked out under Wiedemann and formed the community that became the Hutterites. Hubmaier had already been burned at Vienna in March 1528.

Moravia as a Refuge

Moravia gave Anabaptists a shelter that almost nowhere else in Europe provided. The local nobility were tolerant, partly from Hussite memory and partly because Anabaptist tenants were skilled, sober and industrious, so lords protected them against imperial pressure for economic reasons as well as religious ones. Communities multiplied, and the Moravian Bruderhöfe became working settlements with mills, potteries, cutleries and breweries, and produced work of a quality that gave Hutterite craftsmen a reputation across central Europe. Hutterite doctors and midwives were employed by noble households, and Hutterite ceramics survive in museums as Haban ware.

The refuge was conditional and it did not last. Ferdinand I, brother of the Emperor Charles V and later Emperor himself, pressed repeatedly for expulsion, and raiding parties, informers and executions ran alongside the tolerated periods. The first Hutterite generation lived with the knowledge that a man sent back into Tyrol as a missionary was unlikely to return.

5. Jakob Hutter and Peter Riedemann

Two men gave the movement its name and its confession. Jakob Hutter, a hatmaker from the Puster valley in South Tyrol, became an Anabaptist in the late 1520s and organised the underground congregations of Tyrol before moving to Moravia. Peter Riedemann, a Silesian shoemaker, wrote in prison the confession of faith that Hutterites still treat as their doctrinal standard.

Hutter's Work and Death

Hutter arrived in Moravia and took leadership of the community at Auspitz in 1533, at a moment when the Moravian groups were quarrelling and dissolving. What he brought was organisation: a single disciplined structure with appointed servants of the Word and servants of temporal need, a strict application of community of goods, and a shuttle traffic of missionaries between Moravia and Tyrol that fed the communities with converts and carried most of the missionaries to their deaths. The consolidation held. It is the reason the movement survived when other communal Anabaptist experiments of the 1520s did not.

Hutter was arrested near Klausen in Tyrol in late 1535, tortured, and burned at Innsbruck on 25 February 1536 after refusing to recant. His wife Katharina was executed some two years later. Hutterites do not venerate him in the Catholic sense and they read the account of his death as the pattern of discipleship rather than as the life of a founder.

Riedemann's Account of Our Religion

Peter Riedemann was imprisoned three times for his faith and used the confinements to write. During his imprisonment at Wolkersdorf in Hesse in the early 1540s he produced the Rechenschaft unserer Religion, Lehre und Glaubens, translated as the Account of Our Religion, Doctrine and Faith, addressed to the landgrave Philip of Hesse as a defence of what Hutterites actually taught. It runs through the Apostles' Creed, then treats baptism, the Supper, community of goods, government, oaths, marriage, family order and the trades a Christian may follow. It remains the Hutterite confession of faith today, and no later document has replaced it.

The Hutterite Chronicle (Die älteste Chronik der Hutterischen Brüder) and Riedemann's Account are the movement's own primary sources and are published in English by Plough Publishing House. Dates and events in this section follow those sources and standard Anabaptist reference works, notably the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

The Golden Years and What Ended Them

The second half of the sixteenth century is remembered in Hutterite tradition as the good years or golden years, when the Moravian communities were numerous, prosperous and comparatively unmolested under leaders including Peter Walpot. The end came with the Turkish wars, the Habsburg Counter-Reformation and then the Thirty Years' War. Raids, forced quartering and requisition ground the communities down through the 1600s, and in 1622 Cardinal Franz von Dietrichstein expelled the Hutterites from Moravia. Some went to Slovakia, then part of Upper Hungary, and others to Transylvania. Those who stayed and conformed under pressure became the Habaner, a group that kept the crafts and lost the faith over the following century.

6. Four Centuries of Migration

Hutterite history since 1622 is a sequence of forced moves in which community of goods lapsed twice and was deliberately restored twice. The pattern matters for understanding the group, because Hutterites do not regard their communal life as a heritage they inherited without effort. Twice it died out, and twice a small number of people chose to begin it again.

Slovakia, Transylvania and the First Lapse

In Slovakia the communities came under sustained Habsburg pressure to convert, with children removed, property confiscated and Jesuit missions assigned to the settlements. Community of goods was given up there in 1685, and the remaining households lived as ordinary tenants while keeping some memory of the old practice. The Transylvanian remnant was nearly extinct by the middle of the eighteenth century when it was reinforced from an unexpected direction: Lutherans deported from Carinthia by Maria Theresa were resettled in Transylvania, encountered the surviving Hutterite books, and adopted the faith. Community of goods was restored among them in the early 1760s. Their arrival is also why the Hutterite dialect today has Carinthian rather than Tyrolean roots.

Russia

Renewed pressure pushed the group into Wallachia in 1767 and then, at the invitation of Russian authorities offering land and exemption from military service, into Ukraine in 1770, where they settled at Vishenka and later at Radichev and Huttertal. Community of goods lapsed a second time in 1819 under economic strain and internal division, and the Hutterites farmed as individual families for four decades. In 1859 Michael Waldner, a blacksmith, re-established communal living among one group. In 1860 Darius Walter established it among another. A third group, formed in 1877 under Jacob Wipf, a teacher, completed the set. These are the three Leut: Schmiedeleut from the blacksmith, Dariusleut from Darius Walter, Lehrerleut from the teacher.

Dakota Territory, 1874 to 1879

When Russia introduced universal military conscription and pressed Russification on its German-speaking colonists, the Hutterites emigrated to Dakota Territory between 1874 and 1879, roughly 1,265 people in total. About a third of them founded the three communal colonies. The rest took individual homesteads, kept the faith without community of goods, and became known as the Prairieleut, most of whose descendants eventually joined Mennonite congregations. Every Hutterite colony in the world today descends from the communal half of that migration.

The First World War and the Move to Canada

The war brought the sharpest crisis of the North American period. Hutterites spoke German, refused military service and refused to buy war bonds, and they were treated accordingly: colonies were raided, livestock seized and sold for bond drives, and young men conscripted. Four Hutterite men from South Dakota who refused to put on the uniform were court-martialled and imprisoned, held at Alcatraz in conditions that included being chained to a wall, and then transferred to Fort Leavenworth. Two of them, the brothers Joseph and Michael Hofer, died there in 1918. Nearly every colony moved to Canada between 1918 and 1922, chiefly to Alberta and Manitoba. Some returned to South Dakota from the 1930s onward, and colonies now exist on both sides of the border.

The emigration figure of roughly 1,265 people and the division between the three communal colonies and the Prairieleut follow John A. Hostetler's Hutterite Society and the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. The treatment of Hutterite conscientious objectors in 1918, including the deaths of Joseph and Michael Hofer at Fort Leavenworth, is documented in United States military and prison records and is treated in the standard scholarly histories of the group, including the work published through the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.

7. How a Hutterite Colony Works

A Hutterite colony is a working farm and a village at once, usually holding between sixty and a hundred and fifty people in ten to twenty households, with a common kitchen, a common dining hall, a church and school building, a laundry, workshops, barns and grain handling. The residential buildings are long low apartment blocks in which each family has bedrooms and a sitting room and no kitchen, since meals are taken together. The layout is deliberate, and it puts the dining hall and the church at the centre of the settlement.

Colony size and branching thresholds described in this section follow the standard scholarly accounts of Hutterite life, notably John A. Hostetler's Hutterite Society and the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Individual colonies vary and the figures are typical ranges rather than rules.

Leadership and Decisions

Leadership is shared among several offices and is answerable to the assembly of baptised men. The head preacher, the Diener am Wort, is the spiritual head of the colony and normally the final word in disputes. A second preacher assists and often teaches the German school. The householder or steward, the Haushalter or Wirt, manages the finances, the purchasing and the colony's dealings with banks, buyers and government. The farm boss runs field operations, and enterprise managers run the hog barn, the dairy, the poultry operation or the manufacturing shop. A council of five to seven baptised men, including the preachers and the steward, handles ordinary decisions. Significant matters go to the assembly of all baptised men for a vote. Women manage the kitchen, garden, laundry and childcare through their own rota under a head cook, and they do not vote in the assembly. Hutterite gender roles are traditional and the colonies do not present them as anything else.

Worship

Worship happens daily. A short evening service, the Gebet, is held before supper on most days, and the main Sunday service, the Lehr, carries a longer sermon. Sermons are traditionally read from a written corpus composed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, copied by hand for generations, so a Hutterite congregation today hears the words of preachers who died under Habsburg persecution. Singing is unaccompanied and unison, from old German hymns including many written in prison by Anabaptist martyrs. Men and women sit separately and children sit at the front.

Work and Money

Colonies are commercial farms operating at scale, producing grain, hogs, poultry, eggs, dairy and beef, and many run manufacturing enterprises making agricultural equipment, ventilation systems, furniture or steel components. The colony sells into ordinary markets, files taxes, holds accounts and borrows for capital projects. What does not happen is personal ownership of the proceeds. Members receive a small periodic allowance for incidental purchases in some colonies and nothing in others, and any money earned by a member working outside goes to the colony.

Branching

When a colony grows past roughly 130 to 150 people it divides, which is the mechanism by which Hutterites have expanded across the plains. The colony buys land elsewhere, builds a complete second settlement over several years, and then splits its members into two lists of equal capacity, balanced for age, skill and family. In many colonies the two lists are drawn and the choice of which group leaves is settled by lot on the day, so that no one can manoeuvre for the better outcome. Both halves receive a working colony, and the process starts again.

8. The Three Leut and How They Differ

Hutterites divide into three branches called Leut, a German word meaning people or folk, and the division goes back to the three separate restorations of communal life in Russia between 1859 and 1877. The three hold the same doctrine and differ in discipline, dress, technology and the degree of central authority. They do not intermarry as a rule and each has its own senior elder and its own council of preachers.

Distribution and characterisation of the three Leut follow the standard scholarly literature on the Hutterites, including the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online and studies published through the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. Colonies of all three branches vary internally, and any general description of a Leut admits exceptions.

The Schmiedeleut Division of 1992

The Schmiedeleut divided into two groups in 1992 in a dispute over the leadership of the senior elder Jacob Kleinsasser, over the centralisation of authority and finances, and over the branch's relationship with the Bruderhof communities, with which Kleinsasser had built a close association. The two resulting groups are usually called Group One and Group Two, and they remain separate. Group One colonies are generally the most permissive Hutterites on schooling, technology and outside contact, while Group Two returned to a more conservative pattern. Hutterite writers discuss the split openly, and it is a reminder that a communal body faces the same questions about authority that every other Christian body faces.

What Does Not Differ

All three Leut hold community of goods without exception, baptise adults, refuse military service and oaths, worship daily, keep German for worship, dress plainly, marry within the Hutterite people and divide colonies when they grow too large. A visitor moving between a Lehrerleut and a Schmiedeleut colony would notice the dress, the machinery and the schooling, and would find the same doctrine and the same daily shape of life.

9. Baptism, Marriage and Membership

Membership in a Hutterite colony begins with adult baptism, and everything else follows from it. Children raised in a colony are not members: they are taught, fed, housed and schooled, and they are free in principle to leave before baptism. Baptism usually comes in the early to middle twenties after a period of instruction, and it is a triple commitment to God, to the Church and to the community of goods. Marriage requires prior baptism.

Growing Up in a Colony

Hutterite childhood is structured by age groups. Small children go to the Klein-Schul, a colony kindergarten where they eat and nap together from around age three. From about six to fifteen children attend both the English school, taught by a state-certified or province-certified teacher, and the German school, taught by a colony member, which covers Scripture, hymns, the old German script and Hutterite history. Around fifteen a young person moves into the adult workforce of the colony and eats at the adult table. The years between fifteen and baptism are the period in which young Hutterites are known to test limits, and the colonies tolerate a degree of it without approving of it.

Marriage

Marriages are made between colonies rather than within a single colony, since almost everyone in a colony is closely related. Young people meet at weddings, funerals and inter-colony visits, courtship is chaperoned and comparatively brief, and the couple must be baptised and have the consent of both colonies and of the preachers. The bride moves to the groom's colony. Divorce is not accepted. Families are traditionally large, and colony growth still runs primarily through births. Our guide to Catholic marriage covers the sacramental doctrine that Anabaptists do not hold, since Hutterites treat marriage as an ordinance of creation rather than a sacrament.

Leaving

People do leave, most often young men in the years before or shortly after baptism, and the colonies handle departure with less severity than outsiders expect. A person who leaves before baptism has broken no vow. A baptised member who leaves is under the ban and may be received back on repentance, and a significant proportion of those who leave do return. What a leaver does not take is property: no share of colony assets, no accumulated wages, no pension. The Supreme Court of Canada considered exactly this in Hofer v. Hofer in 1970, when expelled members of a Manitoba colony sued for a share of the assets, and the Court held for the colony on the ground that the members had freely accepted the terms of the communal association. The same Court later ruled in Lakeside Colony of Hutterian Brethren v. Hofer in 1992 that a colony must follow its own procedures fairly when it expels a member.

Case citations above refer to published decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada: Hofer v. Hofer (1970) and Lakeside Colony of Hutterian Brethren v. Hofer (1992).

10. Nonresistance, Oaths and the State

Hutterites hold complete nonresistance: no military service, no combatant or armed role of any kind, no lawsuits for revenge, no personal violence. The position comes from the Sermon on the Mount, particularly Matthew 5:38-48, and from the founding quarrel at Nikolsburg where the Hutterite party refused both the sword and the war tax. They also refuse the judicial oath, taking Matthew 5:34-37 and James 5:12 at face value, and they affirm instead, which is now accommodated in Canadian and American law.

What Hutterites Grant the State

Hutterites do not regard government as evil. Riedemann's confession follows Romans 13 in teaching that governing authority is ordained by God to restrain wrongdoing among those who do not follow Christ, and that Christians must pay taxes, obey the law and pray for rulers. What Hutterites deny is that a Christian may personally wield the sword or hold an office that requires it. Colonies pay ordinary taxes, comply with agricultural and employment regulation, and appear in court over land, contracts and internal disputes.

Friction With the State

The friction has been real and repeated. In Alberta the Communal Property Act, passed in 1947 and repealed in 1973, restricted the size and location of Hutterite land purchases, an explicitly targeted piece of legislation aimed at limiting colony expansion. In 2009 the Supreme Court of Canada decided Alberta v. Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, in which members objected on religious grounds to the photograph required for a driver's licence, and the Court upheld the province's universal photo requirement. The earlier First World War episode described in section 6 remains the sharpest case, and it is the reason most Hutterites live in Canada rather than the United States.

The Catholic Position on the Same Questions

The Catholic Church teaches that legitimate defence can be a grave duty for those responsible for the lives of others, and it sets strict conditions for the use of force in the just war tradition, treated in our guide to just war teaching. The Church also honours conscientious objection and asks that provision be made for those who refuse to bear arms, a position stated in the Second Vatican Council's pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes 79 and echoed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2311. On oaths, Catholic teaching permits the oath taken truthfully in a just cause while treating the Lord's words in Matthew 5 as a call to a truthfulness that would make oaths unnecessary (CCC 2153-2155). The Hutterite reading is stricter, and it has been consistent for five hundred years.

11. Technology, Schooling and the Outside World

Hutterites separate productive technology from personal technology, and that distinction explains almost everything that puzzles visitors. A colony will run air-seeded grain operations, climate-controlled hog barns, computerised feed systems, accounting software, welding shops and a fleet of trucks. The same colony may forbid a television in a family sitting room, restrict smartphones, and filter or prohibit personal internet use. The question a Hutterite asks about a machine is what it does to the community, and a combine strengthens the colony's common work while a private screen divides it.

How the Rules Are Set

Technology rules are set at the level of the Leut and applied by each colony, so practice varies visibly. Schmiedeleut Group One colonies are generally the most permissive, allowing computers and some personal devices in the home. Lehrerleut colonies are the most restrictive. Dariusleut colonies vary widely between one another. Rules also change over time, and they change through the colony council and the assembly rather than by individual decision, which is the mechanism that keeps the practice communal.

Schooling

Colony children attend a school on colony property, staffed by a certified teacher who is often not a Hutterite and paid by the public school system, alongside German school taught by a colony member. Formal education historically ended at the legal minimum, around grade eight or ten, on the reasoning that further schooling drew young people out of the community and taught ambition. That position has moved. Several Schmiedeleut colonies now support high school completion and, in some cases, teacher training and nursing qualifications for members who then return to serve colonies. The change is contested inside the Hutterite world and is one of the visible fault lines between the branches.

Contact With Outsiders

Hutterites deal with outsiders constantly in business, since they buy, sell, borrow and hire in ordinary markets, and they are courteous and reserved about it. What they avoid is social absorption: outside friendships that turn into shared leisure, media that carries the values of the surrounding society, and the accumulation of individual choices that would erode common life. Hutterites do not proselytise, and outsiders who ask to join are usually told, kindly and firmly, how difficult it is. A small number of adult converts have joined and stayed.

12. The Bruderhof: A Separate Communal Movement

The Bruderhof is a Christian communal movement founded by Eberhard Arnold in Germany in 1920, and it is a separate body from the Hutterites even though the two were formally united for parts of the twentieth century. The name causes confusion because Hutterites also call their colonies Bruderhof, meaning a place of brothers, so the same word names both a Hutterite settlement and this distinct movement.

Origins

Eberhard Arnold, a German theologian and writer, left a comfortable position in Berlin in 1920 and moved with his wife Emmy and a small group to the village of Sannerz in Hesse to live in common. The impulse came from the German youth movement, from the social crisis of postwar Germany, and from Arnold's reading of the Sermon on the Mount and the early Church. When he discovered that Hutterites were still living communally in North America, he travelled there in 1930, spent a year among the colonies, and was ordained as a Hutterite servant of the Word, uniting his community with the Hutterian Brethren.

Exile and Separations

The Bruderhof was suppressed under the Nazi regime and dissolved in Germany in 1937, after which the community moved to England, then to Paraguay during the Second World War when its German members faced internment in Britain, and eventually to the United States, opening a community in New York State in 1954. The union with the Hutterites was broken in 1955, restored in 1974 through the Schmiedeleut, and ended again in the 1990s during the same period of dispute that divided the Schmiedeleut. The two bodies are now separate.

How the Bruderhof Differs From Hutterites

The Bruderhof holds community of goods, believer's baptism and nonresistance as the Hutterites do. It differs in almost every visible respect. Bruderhof communities speak English, dress simply without a fixed plain costume, educate their children to university level in many cases, actively publish and evangelise through Plough Publishing House, receive adult converts from many backgrounds, engage in public advocacy, and maintain communities in several countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Paraguay, Australia and South Korea. A Hutterite colony is a closed rural economy. A Bruderhof community is a communal household deliberately open to the surrounding society.

13. Hutterites and the Amish Compared

Hutterites and the Amish are the two best-known plain Anabaptist peoples in North America and they are constantly confused with each other. Both baptise adults, refuse military service and oaths, dress plainly, speak a German dialect at home, practise church discipline and keep separation from the surrounding world. They diverge on ownership and on technology, and both divergences run deep.

The comparison exposes what each group thought the greater danger was. The Amish concluded that the world corrodes the Christian through technology, mobility and connection, so they restricted those and kept the family farm intact. Hutterites concluded that the world corrodes the Christian through private ownership and self-interest, so they abolished ownership and accepted the machinery. Each has kept a distinct Christian community alive for centuries by a different route. Our guide to Amish belief and practice covers the Ordnung, Rumspringa and the Meidung in the detail they deserve, and our guide to the Anabaptists covers the sixteenth-century roots both groups share.

14. Community of Goods and the Vow of Poverty

Community of goods is the point where Hutterite practice comes closest to Catholic religious life, and the resemblance is not accidental: both are built on the same passages in Acts. A Benedictine monastery and a Hutterite colony both hold property in common, distribute according to need, eat together, work together, pray together several times a day, admit members by a public commitment, and send out no member with a share of the assets. The Rule of St Benedict, chapters 33 and 34, forbids private ownership to monks, quotes the same words from Acts 4 that Hutterites quote, and directs that things be given to each according to need.

What the Two Have in Common

The commonalities are substantial and worth stating before the disagreement. Both hold that possessions are a genuine obstacle to following Christ and that the Gospel says so directly (Matthew 19:21, Luke 12:33). Both hold that the sharing at Jerusalem is normative in some sense rather than a historical curiosity. Both organise ownership at the level of the community rather than the household. Both treat obedience and the surrender of personal preference as inseparable from the surrender of property, which is why neither a monastery nor a colony can be reduced to an economic arrangement. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes Acts 4:32 at paragraph 952 and applies it to the communion of saints, teaching that everything the true Christian has is to be regarded as a good possessed in common with everyone else.

Where They Differ: Counsel or Command

The disagreement is about the scope of the obligation. Catholic teaching distinguishes the commandments, binding on all, from the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, which are freely embraced by those called to the consecrated life. The Church holds that private property is legitimate for Christians generally, that the right to property is real and serves human freedom and family responsibility, and that this right is subordinate to the universal destination of goods, so that owners hold their property as stewards obliged to serve the common good and the poor (CCC 2402-2404, and 2443-2449 on the duty to the poor). A Catholic who is not called to religious life is bound to justice, generosity and detachment, and is not bound to abolish ownership.

Hutterites deny the distinction. Riedemann and Walpot both argue that the counsel and command division is a device for softening the Gospel, that the Jerusalem church consisted of ordinary believers with families rather than a separated order of ascetics, and that a Church which permits private wealth alongside Christian brotherhood has accepted a permanent contradiction. On the Hutterite reading, Catholic monasticism proves the point rather than answering it: the Church knew what the apostolic life looked like and confined it to a minority.

The Catholic Answer From the Text

The Catholic answer begins with Acts 5. When Ananias and Sapphira sell a field and hold back part of the price while claiming to give it all, Peter's rebuke turns on the freedom of the gift: while the property remained unsold it was theirs, and after the sale the money was at their own disposal (Acts 5:4). Their sin was the lie rather than the retention. That verse indicates a community in which giving was voluntary and generous rather than a rule of compulsory divestment. Catholic exegesis adds that Acts describes the Jerusalem church specifically, that Luke's language of selling as need arose suggests continuing rather than total liquidation, that Mary the mother of John Mark still owned the house where the church gathered a few chapters later (Acts 12:12), and that Paul's letters instruct wealthy Christians on how to hold and use their wealth rather than telling them to renounce it (1 Timothy 6:17-19).

The Catholic conclusion is that the common life is real, good and commended, and that the Church has kept it continuously in the religious orders for longer than any other institution on earth. Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Jesuits and hundreds of other institutes have professed poverty and held goods in common for centuries, and the practice has always been understood as a vocation given to some for the sake of all. The Hutterite reply is that the whole church at Jerusalem lived this way and no vocation was required. That is a real exchange between two positions that each take Scripture seriously, and it is one of the more interesting arguments in Christian history.

15. Where the Catholic Church Differs

The Catholic Church differs from the Hutterites on baptism, the Eucharist, the ministerial priesthood, the visible structure of the Church and the scope of community of goods, and it agrees with them on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the authority of Scripture, the seriousness of discipleship and the danger of wealth. Setting the disagreements out plainly is more useful than an argument conducted at a distance.

Baptism

Hutterites baptise adults only, on personal confession, and regard infant baptism as no baptism at all. The Catholic Church teaches that baptism is the sacrament of regeneration by which sin is forgiven and a person is incorporated into Christ, that it works by the power of God rather than by the strength of the recipient's own decision, and that the children of believers are therefore rightly baptised, a practice attested from the early centuries (CCC 1250-1252). The Church also recognises the baptism validly conferred by other Christian bodies with water and the Trinitarian formula, which includes Hutterite baptism of an adult. Our guide to baptism works through the Scriptural argument.

The Eucharist

Hutterites keep an annual memorial Supper and deny any change in the elements. The Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, that the Mass is the same sacrifice as Calvary offered sacramentally, and that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life (CCC 1324, 1374-1377). This is the widest gap between the two bodies, and it is not narrowed by the fact that both use the language of unity around a common table.

The Church and Ministry

Hutterite colonies choose servants of the Word by lot and by the vote of the members, with no claim to apostolic succession and no sacramental ordination. The Catholic Church holds that Christ established a visible Church governed by bishops in succession from the apostles, with the Bishop of Rome as the visible principle of unity, and that holy orders confers a sacramental character. The Hutterite answer is that the true Church is recognised by the marks of the apostolic life rather than by a chain of consecration, which is the same argument other Anabaptists make and is addressed in our guide to the Catholic priesthood.

Separation and Mission

The deepest practical difference concerns mission. Hutterites keep the Gospel by withdrawing a community from the surrounding society and preserving it intact across generations. The Catholic Church holds that it is sent to all nations (Matthew 28:19), that it must be present inside every culture, and that its members are called to sanctify ordinary secular life from within, a teaching the Second Vatican Council set out for the laity in Lumen Gentium 31. The Catholic Church also keeps withdrawn communities of its own, in Carthusian and Trappist monasteries and enclosed convents, and it holds them alongside the parish, the school, the hospital and the family rather than instead of them.

What Catholics Should Take From the Hutterites

Three things are worth taking seriously. First, the Hutterites have kept a difficult obedience for five hundred years across four countries and two lapses, which is a fact about perseverance that deserves respect. Second, they read the New Testament on money as though it meant something, and most Catholics do not. Third, they demonstrate that a shared life is possible in the modern economy, which is worth knowing at a moment when isolation is the ordinary condition. A Catholic who reads them fairly will come away with sharper questions about his own possessions, and the answers are already in the tradition, in the Rule of St Benedict, in the Franciscan movement, in Catholic social teaching on the universal destination of goods, and in the Church's insistence that the goods of the earth are meant for everyone. Our guide to Catholic social teaching covers that ground.

16. Related Topics