KING RANCH COLONY, Mont. — Hutterite bishops said a new National Geographic reality series that follows the members of a rural Montana colony gives a “distorted and exploitative version” of life inside a little-known Christian sect.
The controversy led Hutterite bishops to issue their first-ever press release, said Canadian journalist Mary-Ann Kirkby, a one-time Hutterite who is working with the bishops in Montana’s King Ranch Colony.
The June 14 statement, issued by three Hutterite bishops, accused the National Geographic Channel of presenting a “distorted and exploitative version of Hutterite life that paints all 50,000 Hutterites in North America in a negative and inaccurate way.”
The 10-episode “American Colony: Meet the Hutterites” follows the 59 members of the King Ranch Colony, showing them drinking, swearing and shooting guns, all in violation of the sect’s pacifist and pietist Christian beliefs.
National Geographic said the show captures this rift in presenting “a truthful representation of the struggle between the younger generation and the colony leaders.”
“King Ranch has had its challenges keeping the faith, so it was a very vulnerable people to begin with,” said Kirkby, the author of the 2010 memoir, “I Am Hutterite.”
Arising out of the Anabaptist reformers in Moravia (modern-day Czech Republic), Hutterites faced continual persecution for their beliefs in adult baptism and pacifism.
In the 1870s, 18,000 Hutterites traveled to America and settled mainly in Canadian provinces and in Montana and South Dakota.
There are now an estimated 45,000 Hutterites in North America, living in 462 colonies.
Share with others: