Everyday life in these remote towns and colonies is punctuated by conflicts, big and small – just like anywhere else – but Mennonites have a number of distinctive methods for dealing with them. The conviction that certain realities shouldn’t be exposed is what lurks behind the time-honoured Mennonite practice of avoiding conflict and refusing engagement. I was talking from the inside and exposing things that shouldn’t be exposed.’ A lot of people had no clue how to read it. ‘I guess it was a kind of bombshell,’ Wiebe told an interviewer in 1972, ‘because it was the first realistic novel ever written about Mennonites in western Canada. It was important to keep the peace in all matters, including the matter of Peace Shall Destroy Many.

When my mother said, ‘Rudy Wiebe has aired our dirty laundry and it’s about time,’ she whispered. Others, like my parents, were supportive, secretly though, as was and is the custom among dissenting Mennonites. After the book was published he was fired from his job as the editor of a Mennonite newspaper and denounced, by some, as a liar, an upstart and a traitor. He also wanted to raise questions of sexuality and racism, and to test the established perception of Mennonites as a people ‘ in the world but not of the world’.Īt the time, Wiebe was a devout Christian and respected member of the Mennonite establishment. He wanted to write honestly and philosophically about the conflicts that arise from non-conflict. He was no Mennonite provocateur or self-appointed rabble-rouser. Rudy Wiebe hadn’t intended to stir things up with his novel. How can Mennonites stand aside while others are dying to protect the freedoms they enjoy? How can Mennonites justify selling their produce to the Canadian army, at a profit no less, and continue to preach peace and love for one’s enemies? Wiens begins to wonder whether the Mennonite opposition to war may be self-serving. It is 1944, wartime, and the local men have either gone to conscientious objector work camps around Canada, or stayed behind to tend the crops and raise livestock. These were exciting words to me.Īll the fuss was about the challenging questions posed by the novel’s central character, Thom Wiens, an earnest young farmer living in a small isolated community in Saskatchewan (much like the community Rudy Wiebe grew up in). By the time I was buying books myself, I had learned to think of this novelist named Rudy Wiebe as controversial and heroic, as an intellectual whose work was groundbreakingand revolutionary. My mother would later tell me that she had driven herself to the city, Winnipeg, the day it was made available in stores – it would never have been sold in my little conservative Mennonite town – to find out what all the fuss was about. Although the book was published two years before I was born, I can remember my parents discussing it at the kitchen table, conspiratorially, as if the topic was in itself dangerous.

Peace shall destroy many