Confession by the Deed: Asserting Anabaptist Ecclesiopolitical Performativity

The “propaganda by the deed” is a 19th-century anarchist notion emphasizing the communicative power of action in revealing the non-inevitability
of human political organization. In this article, I offer a reading of the 1527
Schleitheim Confession in light of this notion. Schleitheim is similarly
animated by an assertion of possibility: ecclesial and worldly sovereign
order are not inevitable, but can be remade. Schleitheim gives us in detailed
rigor techniques by which the ecclesiopolitical community can be shaped.
In giving us these practices—including regulations on baptism, church
discipline, and the election of leaders, among others—the text seems aware
that this new community, too, is not inevitable. This becomes especially
apparent in its closing statements, instructing its followers to refuse the
swearing of oaths. Instead of such sovereign guarantees, it points toward
the lived practice of the community as what we might call the confession
by the deed, as a form of life that is never guaranteed, but must be lived,
interminably to be restaged and reasserted.