Answer:
Anabaptist member of a fringe, or radical, movement of the Protestant Reformation and spiritual ancestor of modern Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers. The movement’s most distinctive tenet was adult baptism. In its first generation, converts submitted to a second baptism, which was a crime punishable by death under the legal codes of the time.
Step-by-step explanation:
They considered the public confession of sin and faith, sealed by adult baptism, to be the only proper baptism. They held that infants and young children are not accountable for sin until they become aware of good and evil and can exercise their own free will, repent, and accept baptism.
The Anabaptists also believed that the church, the community of those who have made a public commitment of faith, should be separated from the state, which they believed existed only for the punishment of sinners. Most Anabaptists were pacifists who opposed war and the use of coercive measures to maintain the social order; they also refused to swear oaths, including those to civil authorities. For their teachings regarding baptism and for the apparent danger they posed to the political order, they were ubiquitously persecuted.
Although questions were raised about the biblical validity of infant baptism in the early years of the Reformation, the movement’s first adult baptism took place at Zollikon, outside Zürich, probably on January 21, 1525. It was the result of the dissatisfaction of a group of Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli’s followers, led by the patrician humanist Konrad Grebel, over Zwingli’s unwillingness to undertake what they considered necessary reforms. Soon thereafter an extensive movement was in progress, though Zwingli himself tried to dissuade these early Anabaptists from their practice of administering a second baptism to adults. Some of the more distinctive convictions of the Swiss movement were set forth in the seven articles of the Schleitheim Confession (1527), prepared under the leadership of Michael Sattler.
The vehemence and intransigence of the Anabaptist leaders and the revolutionary implications of their teaching led to their expulsion from one city after another. This simply increased the momentum of an essentially missionary movement. Soon civil magistrates took sterner measures, and most of the early Anabaptist leaders died in prison or were executed.