Interpretation of “nonresistance, or love Mennonite style”

Di Brandt’s “nonresistance, or love Mennonite style" suggests that the Mennonite church’s doctrines of nonresistance can have horrible consequences in daily life. She begins the poem by plunging directly into this discussion. The first line lays the biblical framework that both underlies the church's position and helps to explain the chance of injury by quoting Jesus’ advice to turn the other cheek when confronted with wrong. Brandt argues that indoctrinating children, especially girls, with this sort of passivity can leave them vulnerable to abuse. To begin bring this troubling side effect of a passive stance to the reader’s attention, Brandt follows, in lines 2-4, by giving seemingly innocuous examples of childhood experiences lsuch as when “your best friend tells fibs / about you & teacher punishes you / unfairly.” As the poem progresses, this style of weaving common biblical phrases from church doctrine into painful experiences becomes harsher and more critical.

Lines 4-11 continue the trend of critical analysis by showing the hypocrisy that is often present in Christian humility. Mixing biblical phrases with her own vision of how they play out, Brandt writes that, “if someone steals your shirt / give him your coat to boot this will / heap coals of fire on his head & let him / know how greatly superior you are.” Brandt throws doubts on the virtues of humility and self-giving extolled by the church by showing how they are often accompanied by a sense of self-righteousness such that any virtue is nullified. This part of the poem comes off as extremely pessimistic and condescending towards the church. However, lines 9-11 take a slightly different twist by instead emphasizing that this method of dealing with conflict becomes the easiest means for someone who is always willing to turn the other cheek. The conflicts that can arise from this dependence on an illogical self-righteousness occupy the rest of the poem. 

Starting in line 12 and continuing throughout the poem, the author focuses on sexuality and boundaries and how they are so easily abused within the power systems created by the Mennonite ideology. To bring the reader into the more disturbingly personal and poignant portion of the poem, Brandt writes in lines 12 and 13 that, “it gets tricky when your grandfather / tickles you too hard,” and goes on to describe even more invasive abuses. The first blatant sexual abuse in the poem is when her uncle kisses her on the lips “too / long” (14-15). Brandt points out the cultural context, and possible blame for these abuses, in lines 17 and 18 when she writes that “you want to run away but you / can’t because he’s a man like your father.” However, Brandt does not wallow here; just as quickly, the focus is shifted to the speaker’s parent’s relationship and the sexual abuse there. The effect of this shift is to get the reader intimately troubled with the specifics of the speaker’s abuse, and then, before having time to fully process it, surged back out to the general. By tying personal experience to general trends, Brandt does not allow the reader to excuse her abuse as an isolated incident. Instead, by showing how sexual abuse can be--and is--present within churched marriages, the reader is forced to consider larger, more systemic faults. This theme of including everyone in the discussion is brought to its unsettling climax in the last five lines of the poem, when Brandt uses second person to describe the rape. 

It is also important to note that the entire rape description is framed within the ideology of the church. Brandt introduces the rape by saying, “the / only way you will be saved is by / submitting quietly” (33-35). This reference to salvation through submission, in juxtaposition to an awful abuse, is at the heart of Brandt’s argument. If the church always preaches submission--women to men, children to adults, people to God, etc.—then what are young women who have internalized these doctrines and are put in these situations expected to do? The second bold reference to church dogma is the pun found in the last two lines, when Brandt writes, “as you love your enemy / deeply unwillingly & full of shame” (38-39). By tying this sick abuse of sexuality to the love that the church preaches, Brandt effectively shows the correlation between a well-meaning doctrine and the very serious--but largely unintended--consequences that may result.