Religious rules make steel-wheel ordinance controversial
Jean Caspers-Simmet
Date Modified: 11/12/2009 9:03 AM
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Issue isn't a new one
Agri News staff writer
CRESCO, Iowa -- Driving tractors with steel wheels is a religious issue for Old Order Groffdale Mennonite Conference members, said Donald Kraybill, a sociologist and senior fellow at Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies in Elizabethtown, Pa.
Kraybill prepared a statement to be read at Monday's hearing in Cresco on the Howard County Road Protection Ordinance which bans steel wheel vehicles on hard surfaced roads.
"Contrary to what some people may think, the practice of farmers in the Groffdale Conference to place steel cleats on tractor wheels is not just an old tradition," Kraybill wrote. "It is an explicit religious practice by virtue of the fact that it is a church regulation."
Members must abide by the rule or face excommunication, and as a religious practice, the use of steel wheels is protected by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, Kraybill wrote.
Kraybill has researched and written extensively about Amish and Mennonite groups.
In his book Horse-and-Buggy Mennonites: Hoofbeats of Humility in a Postmodern World, which he wrote with James Hurd, he looks indepth at the "riddle of the tractor tire."
Kraybill explained in his statement that the Groffdale Conference began in 1927 in eastern Pennsylvania in a division of the Old Order Mennonite Church. Church members who were more open to change, now known as the Weaverland Mennonite Conference, let members buy and drive cars.
Groffdale Conference rejected cars and continued using horses and buggies.
When the Groffdale Conference agreed to let its farmers use tractors, the tractors had to have steel wheels, not rubber tires, Kraybill said.
"The Groffdale Conference church fears that accepting rubber tires on tractors will lead to use of the tractor for transportation and eventually to the use of cars which in turn will lead to breaking up their close knit communities," Kraybill wrote.
Putting steel wheels on tractors is a religious rule because it reflects the Groffdale Conference's religious belief in separation from the world, Kraybill wrote.
Using steel wheels is part of the Ordnung, the rules and regulations of the Groffdale Conference Church, which must be followed by all baptized members, Kraybill said. The Ordnung is a set of understandings approved by all the ordained ministers.
The church has struggled with the issue of steel wheels for 20 years and has "repeatedly affirmed and upheld the use of steel wheels," Kraybill said.
For additional information on the history and beliefs of the Groffdale Conference Church see the book Kraybill wrote with James Hurd, Horse and Buggy Mennonites: Hoofbeats of Humility in a Postmodern World (2006), Penn State University Press.