Five Things I Learned From the Holdeman Historical Reference Library
In November of 2020, pages from Church of God in Christ Mennonite’s Historical Reference Library website began appearing on search engines like Google, Bing, and Duckduckgo. These pages contain a treasure trove of previously unreleased information covering a number of important topics related to the church and its subsidiaries. Without further adieu, here are 5 things I learned.
Update: After this story went public, church staff restricted access to the historical archive, password protecting all pages. To access, please contact library staff or view the archive.org snapshot from December 17.
- Holdeman schools were founded to prevent, rather than to provide, a well-rounded education. Meticulously preserved and curated letters and records from historical meetings show that curriculum was and is selected to prevent children from learning about many topics, rather than to provide them with a well-rounded education. Rather than presenting many viewpoints and teaching children how to decide for themselves what they believe, records show school system leaders engaging in a meticulous campaign of censorship and information control over the years.
In some cases, it appears books were excluded not because of their contents but rather because they might lead students to conclude that people outside the church shared their doctrines, which needed to be avoided. “It was suggested that we should drop or avoid Doctrines of the Bible from the suggested list since pupils could get the idea that someone outside the Church has the true doctrine.”
Historical documents on the history of Holdeman schools can be found at https://historicalreferencelibrary.org/schools, which is indexed and available to the public via the search engine DuckDuckGo.
2. The Holdeman church has worked to combat vaccine misinformation among its members. The historical archive contains documents which push back against common misinformation about vaccines and appeal to readers’ moral values in a plea to get vaccinated in order to protect the people around them. “Who is our neighbor? Christians have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of those around them.”
These documents are archived in the cryptically titled category, “Topical” and can be viewed at https://historicalreferencelibrary.org/topical, which is indexed and available to the public via Google.
3. Church leaders still minimize the harm of the mass excommunications in the 1970s. It appears that at the highest levels of leadership, the church has yet to acknowledge the extraordinary harm that was done to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of families during the paneling and mass excommunications of the 1970s. In a powerpoint presentation titled The Enduring Church, Holdeman historian Shawn Giesel characterized the events as “A careful cleansing”. Earlier this year, I reached out to Giesel for comment on the accuracy of a story about the 2022 general conference, in which I discussed the events of the 1970s. His response was a deflection: “Who are your sponsors?”
Documents related to church history can be found at https://historicalreferencelibrary.org/history-church which was indexed and made available to the public by the search engine DuckDuckGo.
4. Church members in the highest levels of leadership have embraced technology, including the audio recording. While I knew that audio recordings for everyday communication had proliferated prior the 2022 conference decision loosening the rules governing the technology, I didn’t know to what extent this was happening. The digital archives include numerous recorded lectures delivered by church leaders, some seemingly from before the guidelines on audio recordings were loosened.
5. Church leaders carefully monitor public perception and reporting related to the church. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I was intrigued to learn that their historical archive includes dozens of news clips about the church and its subsidiaries ranging from local news stories to films hosted on websites, like YouTube, which are blocked by their mandatory Cloudveil software. Notably absent are stories that criticize abuses of power by church leaders over the years. While the archive includes a glowing interview on YouTube with some boys from a CPS unit, press coverage of the events of the 1970s, and press coverage of the church’s sexual abuse controversies has been excluded. Perhaps this archive is intended to reflect the church’s opinion of itsself, rather than being an objective source of information about its history.
There is a ton of fascinating information on the archive, much of which I haven’t had time to read. As I scanned its contents, I couldn’t help but muse to myself that even the existance of a digital archive may be a sign that things within the church are changing for the better. Perhaps openly sharing information, and not just positive information, can create a future that is better than the past. Perhaps a church built on a foundation of openness and clear-eyed honesty about the past is the only kind of church which will can survive in a world where information is diffcult to hide.
Read Next: The Holdeman Mennonites’ Mass Excommunication in the 1970s
