An Anabaptist Church Confronts Modernity: A Plain People Separate from the World

In this study the reader will learn about the origins of the Holdeman Church, beginning in the Dutch Lowlands of the sixteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. This narrative history delves into the culture of the Holdeman people and how John Holdeman created a religion in the nineteenth-century United States that attracted a small group of German immigrants from Russia. The book addresses the question of whether the Holdeman people, numbering about twenty-five thousand members in the United States, can resist the temptations of modernity and not only survive but thrive in the twenty-first century. The story is a tribute to their effectiveness in defining themselves and drawing the boundaries of separation in a world of social instability and the breakdown of many traditional norms and values.