The Amish in
Adam Brooke Davis
"Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? (I Corinthians 6:14)
"Come out from among them and
be ye separate, saith the Lord" (II Corinthians
“And be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Romans 12:2)
Most Americans are familiar with the Amish of Lancaster County Pennsylvania,
where about 40,000 "plain people," (including Old Order Mennonites)
make up about 10% of the county's total population, clustered around three
towns: -- Strasburg, Intercourse, and Bird-in-Hand. There are other major
groupings in
However, over the past several decades, Missouri’s
Amish population has been among the fastest-growing nationwide. There are an
estimated 5000 Amish in
New settlements result mainly from migrations. The Amish typically migrate
in search of more reasonably priced farmland, or to avoid government
regulations which conflict with their religious beliefs (they will not defend
themselves in court), or over internal disagreements as to Ordnung,
the rules by which each community lives, in addition to the core beliefs
expressed in the Dordrecht Confession. These fissions are often
emotionally traumatic, testing as they do the relative strength of commitment
to loved ones and to what they regard as God’s call
to live apart from the ways of the world: “What fellowship can the light have
with the darkness?” they ask. We who live by a cosmopolitan ethic may find it
puzzling that a people who value generosity, hospitality and gentleness do not
also hold tolerance -- or at least non-interference with others' private
business -- as the highest virtue. The bewilderment is lessened, perhaps, as
one comes to understand that in a communitarian (as opposed to individualist)
worldview, there really is no such thing as a private matter. Amish separatism
is the necessary condition for maintaining their dependence on one another.
Persons who break the rules of conduct and the vows of
obedience taken as part of adult baptism present the community with a
heart-rending challenge: shall we change what we do,
rooted as it is in our understanding of what God wants, for the sake of this
person we love? Sometimes that is indeed the choice that is made, and loved
ones follow the innovator (or transgressor, depending very much on one's point
of view) into excommunication. Those who choose faithfulness to the ways of the
original group are required to shun the breakaways, a practice known as meidung, or avoidance. In most cases, the
particular issue seems trivial, at least to non-Amish: the use or non-use of
tobacco (interestingly, largely accepted among conservatives, but rejected
among the more liberal or "modern"), hip-pockets,
or the width of a hat-brim. But also in each case, the question is whether this
particular innovation will be the first step towards the ways of the larger
society, in which the freedom to do what you please is the highest value,
purchased at the cost of a sense of mutual responsibility and (even some
moderns have opined) at the expense of much of what makes life meaningful. Major
schisms over such issues as the use of the English language, the strictness of
shunning, or the use of Sunday schools (to name only a few) have produced such
subgroups as the
Every society eventually encounters its own internal
contradictions, and for the Amish, certainly one tension is between the will to
obey God and conform to the community's understanding of the Divine will, on
the one hand, and the natural (they would call it the "fallen")
tendency of humans to do as they please, on the other. But a more profound fissure
exists between the impulse to purity of belief and practice in service of a God
Whose will is absolute, and the desire to remain in
community with fellow humans, whose understanding is limited, whose drives are
contradictory and whose will is imperfect. In fact, the Amish originated during
the Reformation, in a 1693 rupture with the Anabaptist followers of Menno
Simons. Jacob
Amman differed with other leaders over the frequency of communion, among
other issues. When no meeting of the minds proved possible, his followers broke
away, founding a group that would later be called “Ammanish”
Mennonites. Over the years, multiple fissions took place, with many of the
breakaway groups eventually fusing with the larger Mennonite communities. A
number of Amish groups, easily identifiable to the outsider by their commitment
to what they call “plain” dress, have made judicious decisions about the costs
and benefits of such things as electricity (often run to the barn but not to
the house), tractors (used in some settlements for stationary belt-power) and
even automobiles (permitted by some groups, but only in black and without
chrome trim, in keeping with the emphasis on humility,
and a horror of proud display).
It is a widespread misconception that the Amish are opposed
to modernity or to technology. What they oppose are those features of the
modern world which might lead away from a life of mutual dependence and
responsibility, or might encourage competition for status. Thus, most Amish
communities reject mechanized farming not because machines are evil, but
because a farmer with a tractor has less need of neighbors’ help.
Similarly, electricity (rejected by most Amish in a 1919 decision) and all the
doodads and gewgaws it drives are seen as leading to a “keeping up with the Yoders” mentality. Their rejection of public high schools
is similarly misunderstood: it is not that they do not value knowledge (although
they have little interest in non-practical, abstract or speculative studies)
but that the public school system foregrounds competition, careerism,
independence, individual vision, personal understandings
and self-advancement – all values of the larger society which the Plain
People, for whom humility and community are the greatest of virtues, reject.
Relations with Tourists, Folklorists, Scholars:
We have something to learn by examining our own demonstrable fascination with the Amish (you’re reading this page, aren’t you?). There is idle curiosity, nostalgia, also a certain desire for reassurance about the possibility of living simply in our complex world, and not seldom a desire to be affirmed or reassured, adjudged worthy by the Amish themselves. This last impulse is found among the "seekers," individuals who are drawn to the Amish way, but almost always find it too far removed from our own deeply engrained cultural assumptions -- or just too hard. The Amish regularly and gently admonish such persons to seek simplicity in their own way, and in their own world. The Amish are used to being romanticized by outsiders, and they are also, unfortunately, familiar with questioning that can occasionally become interrogation – Amish simplicity can be experienced by some of us as a kind of reproach to our own ways. They themselves do not evangelize or engage in missionary work, except insofar as their lives bear witness to their beliefs, and they dislike visits from proselytizing outsiders. Because for the Amish, the true way is lived rather than spoken, they are rarely articulate in responding to these challenges. They are by their own design ill-equipped to compete, or even to operate, in a world where the greatest truths are thought to lie in the future, awaiting discovery by a process of argument and analysis that systematically sets aside existing assumptions, that thinks of novelty as a value in itself. They have neither apetite nor aptitude for debate or theology.
While increasing numbers of Amish make their living at least partially from the sale of handicrafts produced for the tourist market, they remain deeply ambivalent about the commodification of their culture, a process that began with the entrepreneurial folklorist Alfred Shoemaker’s efforts to market the “Pennsylvania Dutch” beginning in the 1940s. These people make little distinction between work and play, and the cult of leisure is a foreign concept to them. They find the idea of tourism peculiar, the tourists themselves somewhat silly or merely annoying. The Amish want nothing more than to be left alone. Many visitors find them standoffish, a stance the Amish have learned over time to adopt, rejecting the easy intimacy, the "have-a-nice-day" familiarity which many sociologists see as a mechanism for denying the alienation in mass society. Their isolation has occasionally made them prey to the unscrupulous outsider, as in the Elsie Ropp Case (http://www.kcstar.com/plain/stories/elsie.htm).
But most of their difficulties come with those who wish them well. While
many Amish have cordial relations with the neighbors they call “English” (a
reference to the fact that outsiders do not speak the old Alemannic
dialect of German still in use among the Amish), they have very mixed feelings
about the attention drawn by their lifeways. They
particularly dislike having their pictures taken. It has something to do with
the Old Testament prohibition against graven images, but more to do with what
they regard as that peculiarly modern idolatry and egoism which make the camera
and the personal snapshot so ubiquitous. And certainly they do not like to feel
that the visible correlatives of their most profound convictions, that they
themselves, are reduced to the quaint and the decorative.
This affectionate if patronizing view of the Amish is fairly
recent. Their pacifism drew public ire during the World Wars and through the
Those who encroach upon them mean no harm, or can scarcely imagine the consequences of what seem like the noblest motives, the most ireproachable ideals. One ex-amishman traces his separation from the church to a schoolteacher who said to him, “You can be so much more than a farmer!” That teacher had no doubt the best intentions, and the fact that probably most of us would agree with her view indexes the depth of our non-understanding. It is common for outsiders to suggest that Amish young people should be exposed to alternative views, so as to be able to make their own, informed decisions. "That," said one ex-amishman, "would be like sending your son to a brothel so he can look around and make a rational judgment about whether that sort of thing has any appeal."
It was for the sake of maintaining control of cultural input during their
children's value-forming years that the Amish sought to have their own schools,
a wish that was finally recognized in the 1972 Supreme Court decision, Wisconsin
v. Yoder. In that decision, the high court agreed that the state had the
duty to see to it that every citizen got enough education to participate in the
political process (the Amish will not hold elected office, but many vote) and
so as not to become a public charge. The court held, however, that in this
instance, the state's duty was in conflict with the "free exercise"
clause of the first amendment's guarantee of religious freedom. Concerning the
same issue in his own state, the governor or
The Amish have their troubles, including the sorts of petty
squabbles and cattiness that plague every intimate society. They worry about
their children, their mortgages and their marriages, as others do. More
seriously, the limited gene pool and frequency of second-cousin marriage (five
surnames account for perhaps half the Amish population) results in a high rate
of dwarfism, the highest incidence of twinning recorded in a human population,
a cluster of serious metabolic disorders, and an unusual distribution of
blood-types. But their suicide rate is half the
Some Amish Links:
Reference:
A semi-Official Amish Website (no, this is not a joke, and yes, it’s in black-and-white). Developed in consultation with
the Amish of the best-known settlements in
http://www.800padutch.com/atafaq.shtml
National Committee
for Amish Religious Freedom: an organization working on behalf of the
Amish, whose religion forbids resistance to ill-treatment; this group's work
has established important principles of religious freedom for all Americans,
regardless of their beliefs or non-beliefs.
A list of videos on Amish History and culture (note –
Amish who have seen “Witness” regard it as silly. There was a mercifully
short-lived (1988) TV series, “Aaron’s Way,” a pretentious variation on the “Beverly Hillbillies”
about an Amish man who moves to
Amish Heartland Magazine, from
Some Key Works:
Hostetler, John Andrew. Amish Roots: A Treasury of History,
Wisdom, and Lore.
---. Amish Society.
Kraybill, Donald B. The
Riddle of the Amish Culture.
---. The Amish and the State.
Nolt, Steven M. A History of
the Amish. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 1992.
Amish Publications:
The Budget, a publication by and for Old Order Amish.The Budget does not have a website at
this time; to order a subscription, call (330) 852-4634 or write:
(330) 852-4634
Die Botschaft: a weekly including news and notes from Amish
"scribes" throughout
Pathway Publishers:
Publishing house established in 1964 by two Amish farmers (David Wagler and Joseph Stoll) and run by Old Order Amish,
produces books and such periodicals as Family Life (since 1968, the
largest-circulation Amish publication); Blackboard Bulletin (begun in
1957 as a "round letter"; a resource magazine for Amish
schoolteachers); Young Companion, for Amish children and young adults,
and the Pathway
Readers, for use in Amish schools.
Route 4,
N5H2R3
or
2580N 250W
Herald Press: "Our mission [...] to publish books from an Anabaptist-Mennonite perspective for adults, young people, and children." Publishers of the Mennonite Encyclopedia.
E-mail:
hp@mph.org
Mail:
Telephone: 724-887-8500
Fax: 724-887-3111
Features and Journalism:
Missouri’s Amish Communities, from Destinations:
The
Excerpts from Visits with the Amish:
Impressions of the Plain Life
(
Studies and Essays:
Furner, Mark - On the Trail
of Jacob Ammann
Greksa, Lawrence P. and Jill E. Korbin - Key Decisions in
the Lives of the Old Order Amish: Joining the Church and Migrating to Another Settlement
Gross, Leonard (Director of the Mennonite Archives). Background Dynamics of the
Amish Movement: The Dutch Mennonites vis-à-vis the Swiss Brethren; Pivotal
Individuals within the Swiss Brethren Division of the 1690s; and The Question
of Reformed (Calvinist) Influence
McGonigal, Kate. Durkheimian Explanations of Key Aspects of Amish Culture
Meyers, Thomas J. (
Nordstrom, Mark (
an essay on the
diffusion of innovation among the Amish
Sharp, Jamie (
Resources:
Amish-style foods, a
Amish recipes