Member of a movement of the Protestant Reformation characterized by adult baptism. Anabaptists held that infants were not punishable for sin because they had no awareness of good and evil and thus could not yet exercise free will, repent, and accept baptism. Denying the validity of infant baptism, they accepted adult baptism, which was regarded as a second baptism by those outside the group who identified them as Anabaptists (from the Greek for rebaptizers). Confident of living at the end of time, early Anabaptists sought to restore the institutions and spirit of the primitive church. The first adult baptisms took place outside Zürich in early 1525. Most Anabaptists were pacifists and refused to swear civil oaths.
Thomas Müntzer advocated a more violent eschatology that called for the overthrow of the rich by the poor and was executed after leading the Thuringian peasant revolt (1525). Another group of Anabaptists, led by John of Leiden, took control of the city of Münster and sought to establish the millennial kingdom. Their excesses led to their violent suppression in 1535 and further persecution and martyrdom of the Anabaptists. Many Anabaptists settled in Moravia, where they stressed the community of goods modeled on the primitive church at Jerusalem. This branch continues as the Hutterite movement, primarily in the western U.S. and Canada. Increasingly persecuted throughout Europe, Anabaptists in the Netherlands and northern Germany rallied under the leadership of Menno Simonsz. and survive as the Mennonites.
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