An Amish Paradox

by Charles E. Hurst

  Next, we traverse a series of big hills known as the “Amish roller-coaster” and make our way past 77 Coach Supply Ltd., one of the premier makers of bent wood in the settlement. Just before we enter Mount Hope, we pass near a shop that served as the venue for a Drug and Alcohol Awareness seminar for more than two hundred Amish parents, featuring the sheriff and the head of the local affiliate of a federal drug task force. However, Mount Hope is best known to outsiders as the home of Wayne-Dalton, one of the largest garage door manufacturers in the United States. Wayne-Dalton, the Keim Lumber Company, and Weaver Leather are three of the main English employers of Amish in the settlement. Wayne-Dalton’s gleaming headquarters seem strangely incongruous with the town’s mostly Amish clientele. Even on this weekday, Mount Hope is abuzz with activity. On Saturdays the town really comes alive, as its huge auction grounds on the southwest side of town feature events such as the Horse Sale, the Mid-Ohio Exotic Animal and Bird Sale, and the Farm Machinery Sale. One of our Amish friends describes the Mount Hope auction as not only the best deal in town, but as the “Amish CNN,” the hub of the Plain grapevine.5

  As we exit Mount Hope, we pass a natural foods store and a chiropractor. Such health-related enterprises, which occupy a central place in Amish approaches to wellness, dot the countryside. On our left is Amish-owned Homestead Furniture, whose twenty-seven-thousand-square-foot showroom includes a map showing the location of customers in all fifty states. Now we bear sharply northeast on Route 241 and follow a five-mile stretch of road where one can count the non-Amish farms on one hand. As we approach Mount Eaton, we pass near the Mount Eaton Care Center, a special birthing facility; it serves Amish women who would like a childbirth option that is somewhat between the home and the hospital. We also drive by Mount Eaton Elementary School, where the principal has built a program adapted for Amish parents who prefer a public school education for their children. The K–6 school includes a special seventh-and-eighth-grade addition for the Amish pupils. Although it offers special classes in German, just like the Amish private schools, it also gives Amish youngsters computer skills and a high level of comfort in interacting with their non-Amish peers.

  Following U.S. 250 west out of Mount Eaton, we see the sprawling complex of Coblentz Lumber and Furniture, started by an Old Order Amish man but now owned by a non-Amish man who hires a managerial staff and workforce that is almost entirely Amish. We are reminded that this area is populated by numerous Old Order families who are progressive in their outlook and savvy in their business acumen. One insider estimated that he could count more than a dozen Amish millionaires within a one-mile radius in this region. We also pass by the quilt shop where Charles Knowles, who died in 2007 in his early nineties, used to work. Having fallen in love with an Amish widow while in his sixties, Knowles was one of the few outside converts who survived his “testing period” and was accepted as a full member of an Old Order church.

  As we approach Apple Creek, having almost completed a full circle, our growling stomachs prompt us to make a detour to Kidron, known for its outdoor flea market and a livestock auction frequented by the Amish. It is also the home of Lehman’s Hardware, a popular source of nonelectric home products, which experienced an extraordinary surge in business before the year 2000. As in Mount Hope, buggies seem to outnumber cars, and Amish of all affiliations mingle with one another and with non-Amish in the marketplace. Nearby Central Christian High School serves as the venue each August for the Ohio Mennonite Relief Sale and Auction, to which many Amish contribute quilts, furniture, and other goods to benefit the Mennonite Central Committee in its mission work.

  Our destination, however, is the Kidron Town and Country Store, which not only sells Amish hats, bonnets, and clothing but has a small restaurant in the basement. After our meal we indulge in fresh strawberry pie. Well fed, we get up to leave and notice an Amish teenager at the check-out register with five videos in his hand. It is a fitting note on which to end our tour, since it illustrates the ongoing challenges of keeping the Amish way of life meaningful to the next generation. Such an apparently rural and small-town setting belies the potential tensions and temptations facing the Amish as they attempt to navigate between two worlds.

  In approximately three hours, we have covered nearly a hundred miles and crossed through several counties and nearly a dozen townships. We have witnessed firsthand a remarkable degree of diversity within the Amish community: socioeconomic, religious, educational, and occupational. Most importantly, our drive has raised a host of interesting sociological questions.

  The Puzzle

  Our trip through the Holmes County Settlement illustrates many unexpected features of Amish life, but none more vividly than what Donald Kraybill and Steven Nolt have called the “mini-industrial revolution” among the Amish.6 Although farming remained the central means of economic livelihood for most Amish through the 1970s, high birthrates coupled with the shrinking availability of land, rising land prices, and technological changes in the larger society have made nonmechanized farming increasingly problematic.7 As a result, many Amish have adopted economic alternatives such as micro-enterprises, mobile work crews, and factory employment. Today, more than three-quarters of the Holmes County Amish work in occupations other than farming.

  On the eve of these sweeping economic changes, more than one Amish scholar offered dire predictions about the fate of a people who were seen as irrevocably tied to an agrarian lifestyle. Noted Amish specialist John Hostetler and his colleagues, for example, warned not only that the Amish viewed cultivation of the soil as a “moral directive” but that the very fabric of Amish culture was largely maintained by the ability of parents to establish their children in farming. Their sobering conclusion? Those who “cannot obtain a farm may find it hard to remain Amish.”8

  Yet the Amish surprised the pundits on two counts. First, the move “from plows to profits” was surprisingly successful when measured in economic terms.9 The failure rate of Amish enterprises is far below the national average, and Amish entrepreneurs have shown a knack for creativity, on-the-job learning, and low-key but savvy niche marketing.10 As it turned out, the gap between running a farm and managing a small business was not so large after all. The cultural constraints on business, such as the eighth-grade limit on formal schooling, were more than offset by a formidable repertoire of cultural resources, including a strong work ethic, a ready pool of family labor, and low overhead costs.

  Second, and perhaps even more remarkable, retention rates of Amish youth have climbed to an all-time high over the past few decades. In most settlements, nearly 90 percent of Amish young people join the church. In one study of the Geauga Settlement in Ohio, the retention rate of children who grew up in nonfarming households was slightly higher than the rate for those in farming families.11 Paradoxically, then, the entrance of the Amish into market-oriented enterprises, which often brings them in closer daily contact with the English world, seems to have made the Amish faith and lifestyle even more attractive to its young people. By almost any measure, the Amish today are thriving as never before.

  The compromises made in the shift to nonfarming occupations have clearly transformed the style and substance of Amish life, but scholars and lay observers alike disagree on the scope and magnitude of these changes. Some argue that cottage industries and factory labor are like a “Trojan horse” that has ushered in an Amish cultural revolution.12 For others, the “mini-industrial revolution” is more akin to an unusually large “blip” on the radar screen of incremental and selective adaptation that has been a hallmark of Amish life in the United States for nearly three centuries.13 Similarly, scholars disagree about whether the growing interaction with non-Amish has led to the breakdown of traditional boundaries or whether it has only reinforced Amish skepticism about the outside world.14

  In this book, we argue that it makes little sense to talk about one unified Amish response to change. Instead, we show that the combination of new outside pressures and internal distinctions has give
n rise to increasingly diverse decisions about religious and family life, school and work, and even health care. Our overall goal is thus to illuminate the complex causes of diversity and change among the Amish as well as the increasingly varied social outcomes of the Amish struggle “to save their cultural souls while turning their backs on the pastures of their past.”15

  Ours is not the first attempt to understand the social and cultural dynamics of diversity and change among the Amish.16 It is, however, the first comprehensive analysis of that process in the Holmes County Settlement. In spite of its size, the Holmes County Settlement is decidedly understudied.17 The paucity of scholarly attention is unfortunate because the Holmes County Settlement is not only the world’s largest Amish community but also the most complex. As such, it offers a rich laboratory for exploring how external pressures and internal tensions have given rise to diverse patterns of accommodation.

  The Amish Commonality

  We acknowledge, along with our emphasis on diversity and change, the considerable stock of shared heritage and common outlook that characterizes all Amish in this settlement and elsewhere. Although the Amish are most accurately described as a sectarian group, with membership open to all who are willing to submit themselves to adult baptism and the rules of the church, they share many features of ethnic groups, including a common history, language, symbols, rituals, and beliefs.

  The Amish trace their heritage back to the Swiss Anabaptists who emerged in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the early 1500s.18 In the years after Martin Luther’s protest of practices within the Roman Catholic Church, some young reformers in Zurich, Switzerland, became impatient with the pace of change and called for a sharper break with Catholic tradition. Nicknamed Anabaptists, or “rebaptizers,” because they insisted on baptizing only those adults who were willing to live a life of obedience to Scripture, they were severely persecuted by civil authorities for refusing to take up arms, swear oaths, or acknowledge infant baptism, which, not coincidentally, was used to confer citizenship and determine taxation and conscription for war. The subsequent bloody persecution of Anabaptists, which is chronicled in both the solemn hymns still sung in Amish church services and in the Martyrs’ Mirror, an eleven-hundred-page book kept in many Amish homes, created a skeptical and even fearful view of the outside world.

  Over the next 150 years, the Swiss Anabaptist movement successfully spread into northern Europe, but in 1693 a serious breach occurred within the church. Jakob Ammann, a recent but bold convert, proposed a series of measures to tighten up church discipline. Most controversial was his call to extend the ban on Communion for excommunicated members to an all-out shunning in daily life of those who had been excommunicated. In the aftermath of a heated showdown between Ammann and Hans Reist, a senior Swiss Anabaptist bishop, the followers of Ammann’s version of shunning became known as Amish.19 Facing social turmoil, intermittent persecution, and land shortages over the next few decades, the first wave of about five hundred Amish settlers sailed to the United States during the 1700s, settling in Pennsylvania. A second, larger wave of Amish immigrants came in the early to mid 1800s. All faced danger and hardship in adapting to life on the frontier. Curiously, the Amish no longer exist in Europe, as those who remained ended up joining more progressive churches.20 By 2009, the Amish in North America numbered nearly two hundred fifty thousand in twenty-eight states and Ontario, Canada. These contemporary Amish communities all share the same compelling and unifying story of persecution in Europe, migration to the New World, and the challenges of frontier life.

  Perhaps the most powerful symbol of the cultural distinctiveness of the Amish is the use of Pennsylvania Dutch, or Deitsch, one of a handful of minority languages in the United States that is neither endangered nor supported by continual arrivals of immigrants.21 Of the original Pennsylvania Dutch speakers in the United States, less than 4 percent were Amish (most were Lutheran immigrants from Germany), but Mark Louden estimates that in another twenty years the Amish will likely be the sole speakers of the language.22 Not to be confused with the Dutch spoken in the Netherlands, Pennsylvania Dutch retains the morphology, phonology, and syntax of its Palatine roots in spite of influence from the English lexicon.

  Today, almost all Amish are functionally bilingual in Pennsylvania Dutch and English; however, domains of usage are sharply separated.23 Pennsylvania Dutch dominates in most in-group settings, such as the dinner table and preaching in church services. In contrast, English is used for most reading and writing. English is also the medium of instruction in schools and is used in business transactions and often, out of politeness, in situations involving interactions with non-Amish. Finally, the Amish read prayers and sing in Standard, or High, German (Hoch Deitsch) at church services.24 The distinctive use of three different languages serves as a powerful conveyor of Amish identity.

  The basic organizational units of Amish society foster oral communication and face-to-face interaction. Perhaps the most social encompassing institution apart from the extended family is the church district. Each church district is comprised of twenty-five to forty families who live in relatively close proximity and attend church services, including weddings and funerals, in family homes instead of in a separate meetinghouse. Based on passages in the New Testament, ordained leaders greet each other at church services with a kiss on the lips, known as the Holy Kiss or the kiss of peace.25 With some exceptions, a church district is typically presided over by a bishop, two ministers, and a deacon, all of whom are married male church members who have been selected by the casting of lots.26

  Each church district is governed by an Ordnung, which serves as the “Amish blueprint for expected behavior.”27 Containing both prescriptions and proscriptions, the Ordnung is an understanding of expectations that is usually handed down orally through the generations and reviewed and modified twice a year before Communion. Congregational votes are taken on important matters, but they usually follow the bishop’s recommendation, a system John Hostetler has dubbed the “patriarchal democratic” type.28 Because each church district has flexibility to construct its own Ordnung, interesting variations arise between congregations. But the church district is clearly the institution that controls social change in the Amish community.

  A cluster of church districts that share similar Ordnung are said to be “in fellowship” with each other and are called an affiliation. Full fellowship means that districts can exchange ministers at church services and funerals and that members can take Communion in one another’s church. Amish Communion services still include foot-washing as a sign of continued commitment to the belief that, as one bishop put it, “I need you and you need me.”

  In the Holmes County Settlement, four affiliations account for approximately 97 percent of all church districts: the Swartzentrubers, the Andy Weavers, the Old Order, and the New Order. Of these, the Old Order districts are by far the most numerous. Since each affiliation defines nonconformity in different ways, this dimension of religious life is one of the key sources of variation within an Amish settlement. The term settlement is widely used to refer to a geographically contiguous cluster of church districts, regardless of affiliation. In any given settlement, however, non-Amish homes are likely to be interspersed, to varying degrees, with those of Amish families.

  Males and females sit facing one another in church services, which are usually held in a member’s barn or shop every other Sunday. Photograph by Doyle Yoder.

  Amish of all persuasions share a general set of orienting beliefs that distinguish them from their non-Amish neighbors. First is the belief in the necessity of living a life modeled after Jesus Christ and based in Scripture. Ideally, the Amish try to live out their faith in their daily lives. In this endeavor, they are guided by a strong belief in Gelassenheit, which is best translated as a spirit of selflessness, humility, or meekness. Kraybill describes Gelassenheit as the “master disposition” of the Amish and argues that the “yielded self” of Gelassenheit “stands in con
trast to the bold, aggressive individualism of modern culture.”29 The sharp contrast between the dangers of “high-mindedness” (Hochmut) and the virtues of humility (Demut) is captured in a slogan and song (sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells”) whose lyrics are “J-O-Y, J-O-Y, J-O-Y must be … Jesus first, Yourself last, Others in between.”

  A second key pillar of the Amish worldview is the notion of separation from the world, which finds expression in the clear distinction Amish draw between “our people” and “the English,” between the church and the world. This dualistic mind-set, forged during the years of persecution and still acquired by children at a very young age, is usually traced to biblical passages such as Romans 12:2, which warn that believers should not conform to the world. It also gives rise to other dualisms that characterize the Amish worldview, such as the distinctions between obedience and disobedience, hard work and idleness, purity and impurity.

  The beliefs in Gelassenheit and in separation from the world find expression in numerous cultural practices that serve as visible symbols of Amish identity to both insiders and outsiders. Plain dress (including head coverings for males and females and beards but no mustaches for married male church members) and horse-and-buggy transportation (or, more specifically, rejection of ownership of automobiles) are the two most obvious signs of nonconformity in daily life. The doctrine of nonresistance is another important feature, which distinguishes the Amish from sectarian groups in other parts of the world that have been engulfed in violent confrontations. Because they believe in avoiding force and excessive competition in social relations, the Amish do not file lawsuits or hold political office, and they do not serve in the military, in police departments, or on juries. In addition, all affiliations still place a cap on formal schooling at eighth grade, and one- or two-room schoolhouses have increasingly dotted the terrain in Amish settlements over the past fifty years. Both nonresistance and the limit on formal schooling are designed to combat the sin of pride, which one bishop defined succinctly as “when I think I’m a better person than you.” The fact that Amish of all affiliations still try to live simply and to place limits on technology is also a powerful offshoot of the basic doctrine of nonconformity to the world.