“Anabaptist” is a blanket term used to cover several different Christian sects that formed after the Reformation and Martin Luther who believe, first, that faith in God must be established and professed as an adult in order to receive baptism. The majority of Anabaptists are Mennonites. Because the faith believed that only adults could fully enter a compact and relationship with Christ based on intellectual and religious evaluation, it would only be adults that could be baptized, not at birth, but in belief. The denial of the validity of infant-baptizm put them at direct odds with both the Catholics and the Protestants. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the specific elements of the Anabaptist faith and to explore their relationship with the more dominant Catholic and Protestant faiths.
