The Anabaptists were radical groups organized around a shared belief in the baptism of mature believers.

The movement began in 1525, and it represented worldly and Christian nonconformity. Its central tenets opposed the Catholic Church and other established Protestant churches.

The Anabaptists were diverse, consisting of small numbers of English, French, Italians, and Slavs. Common characteristics among these groups were their social radicalism, inspired by the desire for the restoration of the practices of the New Testament church, that baptism must be postponed until people are capable of understanding the promises made, rejection of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, an expectation of the end of the world, commitment to individual holiness of conduct, and aversion to clerical, scholarly, mercantile, and governmental elites.

Many of the Anabaptists held a strong patriarchal view of the domination of men over women, which was sometimes articulated and generally practiced among members. Women did, however, have wider opportunities for prominence among early Anabaptists than in the established Protestant churches, such as when women were the overwhelming majority of Anabaptists in besieged Münster (1534–1535). Their opportunities, however, diminished  with sect formation and organization.

The hatred the Anabaptists experienced emerged from the widespread belief that they intended to overthrow the whole social order. Although there were different groups within the movement, the anabaptists who held power in Münster from 1533–1535 were radical, advocating common property and practicing polygamy, which impugned the reputation of all Anabaptists. The title “anabaptist” therefore became a derogatory term and one of abuse. 

Anabaptists traced their view of baptism to baptisms in Switzerland, particularly during the succession of those initiated by Hans Denck (1495–1527) and his convert Hans Hut (1490–1527) in Augsburg in 1526. In 1528, the Catholic Church decreed capital punishment for Anabaptists because they held that only believers could receive a valid baptism, hence denying the sacramental validity of infant baptism. For the Anabaptists, baptism is embedded in a comprehensive conception of “transformation of life”, with ‘discipleship of Christ’ being its most important expression. 

Frequent divisions became apparent in Anabaptist history, such as in the separation of the Hutterites from the Austerlitz Brethren in Moravia (1533), of the Waterlanders from the Mennonites (1557) in the Netherlands, and of the Amish from the Swiss Brethren (1693) in the Palatinate and Switzerland. 

References

Livingstone, E. A. 2006. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2 ed.). Oxford University Press.

World Encyclopedia. 2014. “Amish.” Philip’s.