Sociology Assistant Professor Candidate Talk: Jonathan Smucker

Join Sociology in DAL 119 at 4:15 on 11/18 for a talk from Jonathan Smucker entitled, "Quiet in the Land No More: Accounting for Mennonites’ Outlier Mobilization in the Gaza Solidarity Movement."

Jonathan Smucker is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Jonathan writes of their topic: In late 2023, a handful of grassroots organizers put out a call for a virtual mass meeting of “Mennonites for a Ceasefire.” Approximately a thousand people attended, kicking off Mennonite Action, a movement that has activated thousands of Mennonites across the United States and Canada. Since then, this relatively small Anabaptist sect has been the most organized and visible Christian denomination in the Gaza solidarity movement in North America. The movement’s unique and disciplined protest style includes singing hymns in four-part harmony, offering prayers, and donning banners stylized to look like traditional Mennonite quilts—wielding symbols of Anabaptist faith, tradition, and identity in the public sphere. This tactical choice and the movement’s outlier level of mobilization are both puzzling considering Mennonites’ centuries-long “quiet in the land” history of eschewing political involvement and avoiding conflict with state authority. Jonathan Smucker details how Mennonite Action’s choices and discipline concerning style, tone, and messages created an “insurgent permission structure” that helped new participants overcome commonly held anxieties and misgivings about protest, while making broader audiences, decisionmakers, and news media more receptive. The movement’s “authentic but instrumental” use of Mennonite tradition, ritual, language, and symbols served to legitimate the movement to its base, make the unfamiliar and scary (i.e., protest and civil disobedience) feel familiar and less scary, and achieve extraordinary integration into congregational life. Jonathan discusses how Mennonite Action, as an outlier case, sheds light on how underdog social movements might accomplish far more than structural and cultural constraints would predict.