How can Christians avoid becoming acculturated and complacent to the violence of imperialism? The history of Christianity was framed with a lineage of martyrs in the Martyr’s Mirror, a book by Thieleman J. van Braght created to keep the Mennonites from becoming part of the ever expanding Dutch empire. The Martyr’s Mirror was unusually artistic effort of devotion by the author to remind the Dutch Mennonites of their persecuted Anabaptist roots as a lineage of Jesus’ first apostles by virtue of being victims of violence for their steadfast faith in God. The newly developed high seas of Dutch global capitalism and colonialism was quickly making the Dutch Mennonites extremely wealthy and complacent. 200 years later, only a small minority of German Christians living under Nazi government stood up to the empire and refused to fight in Hitler’s armies.

It is not surprising that German Mennonites of those days did not assume a stronger critique of National Socialism [Hitler’s Nazi Party]….They had long since lost any connection to the critical stance of the first Anabaptists, and their understanding of their own history was revisionist. (John Lapp & Arnold Synder. Testing Faith and Tradition. 176)

Only by forgetting and re-constructing history can the once persecuted minority enjoy the privileges of imperialism without remorse and justify their own complacency to evil.