Holdeman Mennonite Leaders Agree With the Taliban on Education: Opinion
The internet has been ablaze with backlash since Tuesday, when the Taliban announced that Afghan girls would not be allowed to attend colleges or recieve a high school education. However, since long before the Americans pulled out of Afghanistan, and long before the Taliban formed in the 1990s, fundamentalist religious leaders within the Mennonite denomination, Church of God in Christ Mennonite, have been bolstering their own organization’s power over its members by preventing children from recieving a high school education. Their actions have been enabled by American and Canadian government officials at all levels in the name of tolerance, despite the obvious harm caused by educational deprivation. Holdeman leaders’ and Taliban leaders’ justification for restricting education are strikingly similar.
On December 20, after Taliban officials announced that girls would no longer be allowed to attend universities within Afghanistan, Taliban Minister of Higher Education Nida Mohammad Nadim defended the decision, saying that their pursuit of higher education “is against Islamic and Afghan values.”
Many years before, Holdeman leaders, emboldened by a SCOTUS decision, chose to forbid children under their influence from attending high school or college. “In regards to high school and colleges, we believe that they are no means for the promotion of Christianity. Therefore we are opposed to their attendance.”
Now, in 2022, in both the United States and Canada, the Holdeman sect, enabled by a near total lack of oversight and accountability for perochial schools, still prohibits education beyond grade eight except in special circumstances. Most children of the church’s nearly 28,000 members will never see the inside of a classroom beyond grade eight.
Responsibility for this ongoing tragedy lies not just with fundamentalist leadership who resort to educational deprivation as a way to control access to information and to keep members under their control. Responsibility also lies with secular authorities whose job it is to ensure that every child has access to opportunity and the ability to live a life of their choosing. Finally, responsibility lies with you as a reader.
What can you do? One way ordinary people can push for change is by contacting your elected officials, who are often oblivious to this issue’s existance. The nonprofit, Contact My Politician, has created an easy-to-use dashboard that allows users to send a single message to all of their elected officials simultaneously. Please consider getting involved by telling your representitives that this issue is important to you.
Another easy way get involved is to put your money where your mouth is by supporting nonprofits like the Amish Heritage Foundation which works to raise awareness and improve access to education for children who, by no fault of their own, have been born into a religious organization which prioritizes itself over their future and freedom.
Malala Yousafzai says that without education for Afghan girls, there is no future for Afghanistan. I believe that is true beyond gender divides in education, and applies to the Holdeman church as well. There is no future for a church which survives by depriving children of education, and tolerance is no justification for enabling the behavior.
Read Next: Is the Holdeman Church Responsible for Abuse Among Its Members?
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