Hutterian Brethren - General Information

The Hutterian Brethren originated in Austria.  Moravian gentry allowed Anabaptist groups to settle their domains as early as 1526 to help develop the local economies and project independence from the Holy Roman Empire.  However, by 1528 the ruling class in the area began became threatened by the possibility of an Anabaptists separatist movement.  The Stabler Anabaptist group of more than two hundred, led by Jakob Wiedemann, was expelled.  After their expulsion the group adopted a communal lifestyle, pooling all their resources and agreeing to hold “all things common.”  They  eventually found refuge and some protection at Austerlitz, also in Moravia.

Simultaneously, other Anabaptist groups were developing in other areas of Austria.  In the Tirol, a Swiss Brethren missionary named George Blaurock had a successful ministry.  Jacob Hutter, from Moos in the Puster Valley, became a convert and soon began a ministry in the Swiss Brethren tradition.  Hutter became the leading Anabaptist leader in the Tirol by 1529.  During that year he traveled to Austerlitz and was accepted into the Stabler community.  When he returned to the Tirol, Hutter encouraged an ongoing relocation of small groups to the slightly more tolerant Moravian area because of the increase in persecution of Anabaptists in the Tirol. 

In 1533 Hutter moved from Tirol to Auspitz, where part of the Stabler group had moved in 1530 after a schism due to leadership disputes.  His disciplinary and leadership skills enabled him to establish a sense of mission and cohesion within the discordant group.  However, persecution of the Hutterites and other Anabaptist groups escalated in the mid-1530s and the Moravian land owners again expelled them.  Hutter’s life was endangered because he was an important leader.  He returned to the Tirol, but was captured and burned at the stake in Innsbruck in 1536.  He refused to renounce his beliefs in the separation of church and state and he refused to take oaths, bear arms, or to abandon his support for a communal way of life. 

After Hutter’s martyrdom, the Hutterian Brethren continued their struggles with persecution, but their numbers continued to increase.  By 1600 the Brethren numbered about 25,000 members. Later persecutions drove the Hutterites to Hungary, the Ukraine, and then to South Dakota in the 1870s. The group's strict pacifism necessitated a migration to Canada during World War I, but many returned to the U.S. after the war and they were granted conscientious-objector status during World War II. Today the Hutterian Brethren are located in the western sections of the United States and Canada and they number more than 30,000. They continue to live in self-supporting agricultural communal colonies (Bruderhofs) where the minister provides both spiritual and secular leadership.  They are pacifists and they remain aloof from the larger society, educating their children inside the colonies and not participating in the politics.

The information for this very brief introduction to the Hutterian Brethren
was taken largely from the following two sources:

Gross, Leonard. (1996). Hutterites. In Hans J. Hillerbrand (Ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia
of the Reformation: Vol. 2 (pp. 284-286). New York: Oxford University Press.

Kephart, William M. (1987). Hutterian Brethren. In Mircea Eliade (Ed.), The Encyclopedia
of Religion: Vol. 6 (p.542). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.