With great sadness, the People’s Tribune notes the passing of Johann Christoph Arnold, who died in Rifton, New York on April 15, 2017 after a months-long battle with cancer.
Arnold was a senior elder of the Bruderhof, a movement of Christian communist communities which originated in Germany in the 1920s. He was born in England, the country the Bruderhof fled to after being driven out of Nazi Germany because of their opposition to fascism.
As a young boy, Arnold lived with his parents in a Bruderhof community in Paraguay. There, the conditions of extreme poverty deepened his sympathy for the poor of the entire world. In 1954, he moved to New York. During the 1960s, his interest in the civil rights movement led him to the American South where he worked with Martin Luther King, an experience that changed his life.
Arnold was ordained a pastor in 1972 and served as a pastor until his death. His pastoral work took him into hospitals, nursing homes, juvenile detention centers, and Death Row.
Those of who first met Pastor Arnold in the 1990s know that he worked tirelessly to achieve the united action of all those opposed to the injustices of that time, especially the Iraq war and the increased use of the death penalty in the United States.
Because he was a man of great patience, humility, and sincerity, Johann Christoph Arnold was able to play an important role in bringing together religious and non-religious revolutionaries in the fight to transform society. We are proud to have published his words and the words of other members of his religious community in the pages of this newspaper. The finest tribute we can all pay to his memory is to intensify the effort to unite the revolutionaries of all backgrounds in the fight to create a new, cooperative society.
