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Monday 9 November 2020

A Petition from the Church to Donald Trump--or is it?

Here is the stunning transcript of a video available on Youtube. I provide the relevant part:

Hello everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts at Sattler College. We're with Dean Taylor. You're the president of the college here. We're in your office, and you did a lecture on this earlier this year that really caught our attention, and we wanted to talk to you about that and and see if we can hit some of those high points. So, during that lecture you said—and it was obviously rhetorical just kind of make a point—you read a petition to our president Donald Trump. Can you just read that and then explain kind of what you're getting at there and then how that all ties in with with parts of our Mennonite history.

 Alright. Well excellent. OK. I'll start with a letter, and then I'll explain what I was thinking. Sure. OK. The idea was, it was bringing out that, you know, there's been a lot of, you know, negative things against the president, and, you know, we know we're supposed to pray for our president and pray and the government, and so the idea, you know, that all these attacks on the president that we should say something. But, in that, I wanted to make a point though because I was... what I was feeling was that too many of our people are imbibing—they're taking on this whole way of thinking of the current presidency, and that's very scary. So I wrote this petition. Here it goes.

To the president, Donald Trump:
We, the conference of Anabaptists, assembled today in Shipshewana and the free state
of Indiana, feel deep gratitude for the powerful revival that God has given our
nation's through your energy and promises joyful cooperation and the
upbuilding of our fatherland through the power of the Gospel, faithful to the
motto of our forefathers, "No other foundation can anyone lay than that
which is laid which is Jesus Christ." With greatest excitement, we are following the
events of our beloved country and experienced in spirit the national
revolution of the American people. We are happy that, in America, after a long time,
a government that freely and openly professes God as creator stands at the
head of the nation. With special sympathy, we hear that the
government takes seriously the realization of Christian principles in
social, economic, and cultural life, and especially emphasizes the protection of the family.
And signed the conference that I was with]. 
So, the point that I was
making is that, with just a couple words changed, that was a telegram—
that was sent from the Mennonites of Germany to Adolf Hitler.