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ca. 1500—25 February 1536

Founder of the Hutterites

On an icy winter day in 1536, Jacob Hutter was stripped of his clothing, whipped half to death, drenched in brandy to make him combustible, and then burnt alive before a mob of mostly jeering onlookers. According to one of the few sympathetic witnesses to his execution, Hutter “gave a great sermon through his death, for God was with him.” Hutter’s crime was subversion of both political and religious authorities. A member of the Radical Reformation group that came to be called “Anabaptists,” Hutter preached a Christianity closely modeled on the Acts of the Apostles’ description of the communal life of the early church and Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians extolling the primacy of love in the Christian life. Christians, he told his congregations, should hold property in common and distribute a sizable chunk of it to the needy; practice absolute pacifism, which included a refusal to pay war taxes; and practice as best they could the lifestyle taught and modeled by Jesus.

Hutter was born in the Tyrol region of modern-day northern Italy. A hatmaker by trade, he was exposed as a young man to the teachings of wandering Anabaptists, converted, and soon began preaching himself. Leaving his homeland in 1533 to escape persecution, Hutter traveled to Moravia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, and lived there for two years, building and shepherding a number of congregations. When largely Catholic Moravia expelled the Anabaptists two years later, Hutter was arrested and transported to prison in Innsbruck. He was held there for several months and regularly tortured to force him to recant his religious views and to divulge the whereabouts of other Anabaptist leaders. Hutter refused to be broken, however, and the authorities, enraged by his stubbornness, sentenced him to his horrible death. Had Hutter cooperated, they would have settled for “mercifully” beheading him.

The followers of Hutter, who call themselves Hutterites, continue to practice the communal ownership and absolute pacifism he defended and died for. Persecuted numerous times by both church and state over the past four hundred years, the Hutterite community nearly died out in the nineteenth century. But several rural settlements in North America are now flourishing, keeping Jacob Hutter’s ideal of Christian nonviolence alive.