Do Anabaptists "own" the women's headcovering?

[steve-in-kville]

So, for example, MCUSA, Mennonite Brethren, CMC, Lancaster Mennonite Conference, and others I'm forgetting mostly do not practice head covering except perhaps for a few seniors. What percentage of the Anabaptist or Menno world do they represent? I don't honestly know.

Not to mention the Brethren circles tend to be all over the place with it.

[Ken]

So what do you think is the percentage of Anabaptists who practice head covering? 50%? More?

In North America, there are more plain Anabaptists than non-plain Anabaptists.

You can get the info from these people. https://www.etown.edu/centers/young-center/

Do you have a rough idea of the percentage breakdown?

[silentreader]

So what do you think is the percentage of Anabaptists who practice head covering? 50%? More?

That is gonna largely depend on the area. Obviously the "mennonite hotspots" like Holmes Co. and the Lancaster/Lebanon areas will be a lot thicker than other parts of the nation or world. And even then, what about groups that may only wear them for church services? Or don't wear their hair in a bun?

There too much gray area to pin a number down.

And it's often just the ones with gray areas that pin them down.

[ohio jones]

So what do you think is the percentage of Anabaptists who practice head covering? 50%? More?

In North America, there are more plain Anabaptists than non-plain Anabaptists.

You can get the info from these people. https://www.etown.edu/centers/young-center/

Do you have a rough idea of the percentage breakdown?

Looking just at North America, Mennonite World Conference (PDF) counts 649,903 Anabaptists as of 2018. I'm not sure whether this includes CoB, but does include BiC and MB.

Ernie's figures from 2014 (PDF) estimate 260,185 plain Anabaptists, after subtracting Central America.

The percentage of those who practice head covering is almost always going to be less than 50% unless the number of women who don't cover is exceeded by the number of men who do.

[temporal1]

In North America, there are more plain Anabaptists than non-plain Anabaptists.

You can get the info from these people.
https://www.etown.edu/centers/young-center/

interesting. from reading this forum for years, i would not have guessed this. non-plain Anabaptists are most vocal, skewing perceptions. food for thought.

[Josh]

The number of plain Amish is so high it tends to dwarf everything else. (The main reason for their high numbers is a rather high birth rate, and people raised Amish have a strong preference to become Amish in adulthood.) The numbers of progressive Mennonites keep plummeting for a variety of reasons. The numbers in North American keep tilting towards the plain being the majority.

Globally, I’m not sure how one would define “plain”. Anabaptists in the Congo and Ethiopia (the largest constituencies of Anabaptists overall) have a very different culture and practices.

[cmbl]

Historically speaking, headcovering was practiced by most Christian women in most denominations up to about the early 20th century. It became an Anabaptist "distinctive" as others stopped practicing it, so it's sort of an "accidental distinctive." This in contrast to, e.g., adult baptism which was an Anabaptist "distinctive" from the very beginning. ("Observe concerning baptism: Baptism shall be given to those who have learned repentance and amendment of life...")

I put distinctive in scare quotes for two reasons: first, headcovering is not exclusive to Anabaptists, and adult baptism is no longer exclusive; and second, leaving off the scare quotes suggests the assumption that some other branch of Christianity is somehow normative, as if we should define ourselves with respect to it.

[Wayne in Maine]

Anabaptists do not "own" the head covering. My Roman Catholic relatives wore a veil of some sort to mass and decried the lack of head coverings on younger folks.

I look at the Amish, Mennonite and Hutterite practice of veiling/head covering as a hermeneutic that women wear on their heads - it is done in simple obedience to what an Apostle of Jesus stated, showing that these people take a serious and "literal" approach to what Jesus commanded, in his own words and through his inspired apostle's writings.

[Josh]

A rather large group (in the millions) practices a kind of head covering, but they engage in the practice of (often very) long hair. I would say they are trying to obey the scriptures, in a sense, and also “wearing a hermeneutic”. (This is the North American practice; oneness Pentecostals in Latin America are more likely to practice a literal covering. Somehow they manage to stay United Internationally despite this.)

Fractions of Catholic and Orthodox women practice such things as well, and given their sheer numbers end up in the millions. So Anabaptists really are not even the majority doing this. They are, however, the most visible in a North American setting.

[justme]

anabaptists own the women's headcovering in the sense that it is an identifier for each specific split off group.
those of you who live amongst several variations of "coppa liet", i'm sure you've met someone who you don't know, but you know which church they go to, just by the size and shape of their covering.