My Political Views Expressed to Hondurans Where I Worked

 Who are the Mennonites? Are they a sect? Do they believe in Jesus? What do you think of Honduras? What is your opinion of the Vietnam war? Why are you here instead of fighting for your country? Do you like John F. Kennedy?  Were a few of their opening questions. 

I remember 1968, the year I arrived in Honduras, as being a tumultuous year in the history of the USA. The Vietnam war was continuing with body bags returning to the states on a daily basis. Anti-war protesters poured into the streets causing confusion and frustration on all sides of the issue. Civil Rights marches pushed the country to confront its racist past, if not present. Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. It seemed like the USA was being torn apart at the seams. What had been a model of democracy for the world was being exposed as having differing sets of laws for different groups of people and being hypocritical on its foreign policy motives. 

This wasn’t lost on Hondurans. The office staff at the hospital peppered me with questions about what was happening in the country of my birth. I was as confused as they were and being thousands of miles away from the turmoil made it difficult for me to form an opinion. I based my responses on my beliefs as a Christian/Mennonite. I belonged to the kingdom of God, not the USA, with Jesus as my leader and my church as my state. I did not participate in the politics of my country and was opposed to armed conflict of any type. My belief in Jesus’ admonition to love my enemies and to “turn the other cheek” defined my politics. My constitution was Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5. 

These views of Christianity were completely new to my listeners since most of them were nominally Catholic and assumed that the church and the state came in one package as it had since the Spanish conquest of the Americas. 

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