The Mennonite-Anabaptist wing of Christian church has a colourful and sometimes contentious history in Canada. Mainstream society conflicted with this tradition over issues such as pacifism, conscientious objection, propensity to communal separation, refusal to politically participate, and the rights of Hutterite colonies. The Anabaptists' quiet conviction that Christians should not participate in politics and government played a key role in these conflicts.

The author of Politics under God, John H. Redekop, is a retired Canadian political scientist, a prominent church leader in the Anabaptist faith community, and an opinion-shaper in Canadian evangelicalism. The book functions something like the fifteenth century “mirror-for-princes” literature that offered wise counsel to monarchs, but ironically it is written by an “Anabaptist realist” to counsel Mennonite and evangelical citizens on when and how to participate in twenty-first-century politics.

While frictions between mainstream society and Anabaptism might dominate our historical memory, Mennonites have also accrued a long and honourable record of serving neighbours. They have played major roles in advocating for religious freedom, sponsoring refugees, caring for the homeless, providing emergency aid in natural catastrophes, delivering overseas assistance, working for family reunification, initiating foreign and domestic peace-making programs, engaging in international development work, and providing local services such as homes for the elderly. The Mennonite Central Committee, the best-known of their international development and relief agencies, is respected world-wide for outstanding service. Much of the above work has also required various degrees of co-operation with government.

Redekop's aim in Politics under God is to supply reasons for contemporary Anabaptist communities, as well as the larger evangelical Christian community, to see citizenship, politics, and government as potential avenues of service. He encourages them to engage in “selective participation” in politics (91), even though this runs against the separatist grain of their earlier tradition. Redekop offers hints and advice on how best to tackle many political issues. He addresses familiar topics such as “church-state relations” (57f) and “whether morality can be legislated” (141f), alongside less common topics, such as, “is there a biblical basis for civil disobedience?” (171f) and “can there be a Christian political party?” (155f). While the secular mainstream academy likely will not warm to some of his arguments, Redekop offers a clear and logical case for his political framework.

So why should Canadian political scientists care? Let me suggest three reasons. First, in our post-modern age, political scientists are increasingly curious to know how colleagues of faith think about politics. Redekop offers an excellent example of someone who is both a gifted political scientist and a convinced believer. On one hand, CJPS readers may recognize him from 26 years of teaching political science at Wilfrid Laurier University or from his well-known edited text, Approaches to Canadian Politics (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1993). He has authored six books and scores of scholarly articles and has even served on a city council. On the other hand, Redekop has been president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, moderator of the Canadian Mennonite Brethren Conference, and editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald. He is perhaps the first Canadian Mennonite to hold a PhD in political science (Lapp, Foreword, 12). Significantly, Redekop has forged his dual experiences into a coherent “Anabaptist realism” position (19, 23). Politics under God clearly demonstrates how Redekop's faith influences his understanding of the meaning, purpose, and destiny of politics and government, and provides direction for various practical policy issues.

Second, in our multicultural society, it is critical that the Canadian political science community understand the types of roles that various faith communities seek to play in public life. We are sometimes caught by surprise when one or another faith community suddenly appears interested in engaging an election or policy debate. By reading this and similar books, we discover the worldviews guiding each faith community in its understanding of, and participation in, citizenship, government office, military service, and a range of concrete policies.

Third, our increasingly pluralistic democracy has made political scientists aware that Canadian society no longer agrees on a single neutral rational metanarrative on which to base our public institutions and politics. Furthermore, faith communities are simply not withering away, as secularization theories predicted, and Canada grows increasingly diverse with the arrival of new Islamic, Sikh, Hindu, and other faith and cultural communities. It is imperative, therefore, that politicians and political scientists, who are actually rooted in each of these traditions, engage in dialogue with each other to discover what overlapping principles we might discover on which to base public life and institutions. Politics under God, for example, allows us to crawl into the thinking of some of our Anabaptist neighbours and explore how they might contribute to building justifications for democracy, constitutionalism, rule of law, toleration, workable structural plurality, and various public policies.

Redekop's Politics under God significantly increases our understanding of Anabaptist Realist reasoning on politics and government. This contribution could be further enhanced if Redekop were to systematically clarify some underlying public philosophy issues, from his Anabaptist perspective, for example, the responsibility of government relative to other institutions and associations in society. Implicitly, however, Redekop is passing on these further challenges to the next generation of Mennonite political scientists. Those willing to engage the political discussions emerging from Canada's diverse faith communities will be rewarded with insight into the possible futures awaiting our pluralistic country.