Anabaptists Born: Swiss Rebels Challenge Church

A small group of believers gathered in a private home in Zurich and did something that could get them drowned: they baptized each other as adults. On January 21, 1525, Conrad Grebel poured water over George Blaurock in what is considered the founding act of the Anabaptist movement. In doing so, they rejected the foundational assumption shared by both Catholics and mainstream Protestants—that infant baptism made one a Christian and a citizen simultaneously. The Zurich radicals had been allies of the great Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, but they broke with him over the pace and scope of reform. Zwingli wanted change to proceed with the cooperation of the city council. Grebel, Felix Manz, and their circle believed the true church should be a voluntary community of adult believers, completely separate from state authority. When the Zurich council sided with Zwingli and ordered all unbaptized infants to be christened within eight days, the radicals chose defiance. The act of re-baptism was considered both heresy and sedition across Reformation Europe. The 1529 Imperial Diet of Speyer made Anabaptism punishable by death, and thousands were executed by drowning, burning, and beheading over the following decades. Felix Manz himself became one of the first Anabaptist martyrs, drowned in the Limmat River in Zurich in January 1527. Catholic and Protestant authorities, who agreed on almost nothing else, united in persecuting these radical dissenters. Yet the movement survived and spread. Anabaptist principles—believers'' baptism, separation of church and state, pacifism, and voluntary religious community—proved remarkably durable. The Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites all trace their origins to that Zurich gathering. More broadly, the Anabaptist insistence on religious liberty and the separation of church and state planted seeds that would eventually shape the American constitutional tradition.