An Amish Paradox

by Charles E. Hurst

  Fig. 2.1. The four main Amish affiliations in the Holmes County Settlement. Church schism has been a recurring feature of Amish religious life since the turn of the century. Courtesy of Mary Schantz.

  The “Ultraconservative” Amish: The Swartzentrubers

  The Holmes County Settlement is the birthplace of the Swartzentruber Amish, the most conservative group, which emerged between 1913 and 1920. The Swartzentrubers have become legendary for their stubborn traditionalism, reflected in their windowless, no-frills carriages, large bonnets for women, wide-brimmed hats and untrimmed beards for men, and spartan homes. Most Swartzentruber men farm, even as many Amish in other affiliations have started small businesses. Moreover, the Swartzentrubers’ construction of time and space is distinctive.4 For example, they have refused to adopt “fast time” (daylight savings time) and have tried to stem the tide of modernity by flatly rejecting such conveniences as indoor plumbing, power mowers, weed-eaters, milking machines, linoleum floors, and community phone booths. In addition, customs such as smoking and bed courtship continue in most Swartzentruber church districts.5

  Because the Swartzentruber Amish do not participate in the Amish directories and typically maintain a wall of silence toward outsiders, it is difficult to trace their growth.6 According to David Luthy, however, they have established more than sixty-five settlements in twelve states and Ontario and are among the fastest-growing Amish affiliations.7 In the Holmes County Settlement, the Swartzentrubers have nineteen church districts, concentrated in northern Wayne County. One Swartzentruber elder told us that because the price of land has gone up tremendously, “more than half of our children live outside the settlement.”

  Although the Swartzentrubers are best known for their minimalist approach to material conveniences, they have undergone several complex church divisions. Most scholars trace the split that created the Swartzentruber group back to Bishop Samuel E. Yoder of Apple Creek. In 1913 Yoder argued that members who joined the church and then left should be shunned until they repented and returned to the church. This strict interpretation of shunning was not supported by the main Old Order group, which wanted to allow the option of lifting the ban if the ex-member joined another Amish or Mennonite congregation and procured a letter saying the person was in “good standing.” Such a description, however, hides more than it reveals.

  Even in the first decade of the 1900s, when there were only nine church districts in the entire settlement, “cracks were beginning to appear” in the unity of the Old Order Amish. In 1913, two bishops from other settlements were called in to search out the trouble, which “proved to be a serious difference of opinion concerning ‘Bann und Meidung’ (excommunication and shunning).” The bishops recommended that members wishing to leave should be duly admonished not to, but if they departed, “we should feel we have done our duty and leave the matter to each church and to God.” If the member “was disobedient and excommunicated by the church and later in a scriptural way taken out of the ‘Bann’ by the church he has now united with, then the original ‘Bann und Meidung’ should be removed.”8 All of the ministers except Sam Yoder accepted these recommendations. Yoder opposed any possible loopholes for leaving.

  An even closer analysis by local historians reveals that the matter was further complicated because of Sam Yoder’s personal and family problems. By 1919 Yoder had a following of 107 families in two districts. That same year, a man in the Geauga Settlement confessed that he had had sexual relations with Yoder’s daughter. Pressed to discipline her, Yoder stood by his daughter. Believing he had been too lenient, roughly half (53) of the families formed a separate group with Dan Wengerd, a co-minister of Sam’s, as their leader.9 A three-day ministers’ meeting, attended by more than four dozen ordained leaders from four states, was then held in Holmes County in November 1919 to resolve the conflict. When Yoder did not show up at the meeting, Wengerd presented his view of the problems: (a) Sam Yoder does not want to commune with churches who do not share his view of shunning; (b) he renounced communing with Ben Yoder’s church without consultation; (c) he did not carefully investigate and discipline his daughter’s conduct; (d) he did not bring to light that he received compensation for his deceased son [who died in an Army camp]; and (e) his wife was not “abiding in her calling.”10

  These Swartzentruber girls help their parents sell hand-woven baskets by the roadside. Photograph by Doyle Yoder.

  On the second day of the meeting, a group of five bishops was sent to mediate with Yoder, but he would not meet with them. Finally the bishops were able to have a lengthy conversation with him, but Yoder refused to have the differences examined, saying “the only way for them to attain peace was to call his things right.” As a result, the five bishops concluded: “Therefore, we consider it inappropriate to continue to have fellowship with him, or to give him the kiss of peace at this time, unless he agrees to have the controversy thoroughly examined.”11 Ironically, Yoder’s refusal to make peace bears striking resemblance to the circumstances under which Jacob Ammann broke from the Swiss Mennonite community in 1693.12

  Given these personal difficulties, why did Yoder have a following at all? It appears he tapped into a wave of conservative sentiment on the part of Amish who had been wary of increased liberalism within the Old Order ever since the major split in the 1850s and 1860s that saw roughly two-thirds of the Amish join the Amish-Mennonites.13 After the Yoder split was finalized, there were attempts to get the groups back together, and eventually the Dan Wengerd faction rejoined with the Old Order in 1934. Sam Yoder had died in 1932, but his group by then had formed distinctive practices and never rejoined the main body. Shortly after his death, rumors began to circulate that Sam Yoder had committed suicide by hanging himself in the chicken house, although Luthy finds evidence to the contrary.14 The name Swartzentruber finally became attached to this group because after Yoder’s death the bishops of both districts had that surname.15

  For the first eighty years after the Sam Yoder incident, the Swartzentrubers in Wayne and Holmes Counties were unified, with one exception. In 1931 Abe Troyer and Jacob Stutzman led a small splinter group that became known as the Stutzman-Troyer Amish (or more commonly, the Troyer Amish).16 The Troyer split created a ripple effect, however. First, a group led by a minister named Tobias Hochstetler broke off from the Troyer church in 1940 to form the Tobe affiliation.17 Then in 1967, a group that came to be known as the New Order Tobe split with the Tobe and began affiliating with the Berlin district of the New Order Christian Fellowship.18 Because the Tobe groups grew out of idiosyncratic conflicts that did not revolve around central doctrinal issues, neither has drawn more than a handful of supporters. The Stutzman-Troyer group has a larger following, though the large majority of its church districts are outside the Holmes County Settlement.

  In the early 1990s, however, the Swartzentrubers experienced what insiders have described as one of the most difficult and painful schisms in Amish history. Once again, the controversy was centered in Wayne County, where the seeds of friction had been growing steadily for a decade or more before 1993. The major issue was control of the young folks.

  Over time, a small number of Swartzentruber parents and church leaders had become concerned about the increasingly rowdy nature of youth activities and the passive stance taken by parents. Known by the term demütig [day-mee-tig], which means “low” or “humble,” these individuals clamped down on the activities of the young people. For example, they would try to prohibit their teenagers from listening to radios, attending big parties, going to professional sporting events or rodeos, altering their hats to give them a cowboy flair, or smoking cigarettes instead of pipes or cigars. In many cases, demütig families were members of the very same church district as those they considered lass (“unconcerned”), families who tacitly condoned the “running around.” But in several districts in the Holmes County Settlement, and in eight or nine districts in the nearby Lodi Settlement, the demütig families made up the majority and had strong backing
from their bishops.19 By the early 1990s, virtually every bishop, church district, and family were reputed to be in one of these two camps, or at least on a continuum of permissiveness with respect to youth activities. The situation was waiting to explode.

  The “final straw” incident began one night in the early 1990s when several youth from one of the “wilder” groups went to a demütig minister’s house to provoke him by playing loud music on the radio. The minister tried several tactics to establish the identity of the boys: shining his flashlight on the boys’ faces (they hid them), spray-painting their buggies (they later washed the paint off), and unhitching their horses so that they couldn’t get away. At this point, one of the boys struck the minister with a jockey stick, causing him to run to a neighbor’s house and call the sheriff.

  At first the minister said he did not know who the perpetrators were, but in the ensuing weeks, and after a passing milk-truck driver said he had seen the boys, the minister accused one of them. This boy was about to join church, and the accusation effectively held up his baptism. In the meantime, a church member stepped forward and confessed that he was actually one of the five responsible (the other four had not yet joined the church) and that the accused boy was innocent. Believing that the church member was covering for the other boy, the minister refused to accept his confession. The church congregation then split over whether to support their minister’s subsequent recommendation to excommunicate the church member and hold up the other youth’s baptism. In retaliation for his perceived lack of forgiveness, some of the boys returned to the minister’s house at night, held him down, and cut his hair, an action that had tremendous symbolic implications.20

  There were numerous attempts to resolve the conflict informally and locally. Most bishops favored getting the young folks back in good standing with the church, but two bishops, Eli J. Hershberger and Mose Miller, supported the minister. Their refusal to back down caused local bishops to “seek counsel” by calling bishops in from other settlements, as had been done for the Sam Yoder conflict. The logic in such cases is that, especially when excommunication is at stake and two sides cannot resolve the issue locally, an outside mediating committee is needed. If the mediating committee’s ruling does not lead to reunification, in theory every Swartzentruber church district across the country must decide which side to support so that it can enforce the ban (or not).

  As it turned out, two national mediating committee meetings were required. At the first meeting, which Miller and Hershberger did not attend, Joe Troyer, as one of the oldest Swartzentruber bishops in the Holmes County Settlement, represented the majority of church families, who favored reinstating the boys. Troyer secured the crucial consent of Isaac Keim and Andy Weaver from the Lodi Settlement. When these two bishops returned home, however, they discovered that their deacons, ministers, and some church members of the demütig persuasion strongly opposed the Troyer stance. So the bishops ultimately retracted their consent. At the second national meeting, Miller and Hershberger showed up but did not offer a handshake or the kiss of peace, indicating their decision to officially part ways. Their smaller faction became widely known in Amish circles as the Mosey Mosies, or M and Ms (because another ordained leader was also named Mose), and the larger group became known as the Joe Troyer branch, or simply the Joe church.

  The church division was bitter, dividing many families, who had to choose between honoring the sanctioning of the boys, sought by the hard-line Mose Miller branch, or supporting the more lenient majority of Swartzentrubers in the Joe Troyer branch. One young man recalls being put out of the house at age twenty-one because his father supported the Mose Miller group while he, the son, wanted to be baptized in the Joe Troyer group. In a sense, the entire incident became a referendum on the demütig attempt to clamp down on rumspringa. From the standpoint of the Joe Troyers, the demütig group was taking a “holier-than-thou” attitude; conversely, the Mose Millers saw the Joe Troyers as tolerating too many worldly excesses.

  This 1993 church division did not mark the end of conflict among the Swartzentrubers. About eight years later, the Mose Miller branch split over a disagreement about policy concerning a parochial school in the Lodi Settlement. When the school board did not settle the matter, Bishop Andy Weaver stepped in. But Isaac Keim disagreed with Weaver’s handling of the matter. The two men had already been at odds over Keim’s attempt to set up a drip line off a garden hose to irrigate his organic farm. In the Holmes County Settlement, the division did not affect the Joe Troyer group, but the Mose Miller churches sided with Keim. The end result is that there are now three nonfellowshipping Swartzentruber branches in the settlement, each of which considers itself the “true” Swartzentruber church.

  To outsiders’ eyes, the three groups do not differ much in their use of technology. But subtle distinctions exist. The Andy Weaver buggies use only one lantern along with some gray reflective tape instead of the two lanterns, set diagonally, used on the Joe Troyer and Mose Miller buggies. In addition, subtle differences in the length of women’s dresses and the number of pleats in their caps and dresses distinguish the groups. In general, the “Joe” church is a bit “higher” than the other two. One Old Order Amish businessman who employs workers from the most conservative groups claims that he can usually tell which of the Swartzentruber branches individuals are from simply by observing their language and comportment. Members of the ultraconservative Andy Weaver faction are the most submissive and unquestioning of authority, the Mose Millers a little less so, and the Joe Troyers least of all.

  Moderate Conservatives: The Andy Weaver or “Dan” Churches

  About midcentury another conflict within the Old Order over the issue of shunning culminated in the birth of the Andy Weaver affiliation (no relation to the small Andy Weaver branch of the Swartzentruber church just discussed). The name comes from a bishop who led a breakaway group, though this affiliation is locally known as the Dan church because all three of the ordained leaders at one church carried the name Dan. In 2009 the Andy Weavers numbered about thirty church districts in the settlement. They are generally distinguished from the Old Orders by more restrictions on technology, a harder line on shunning, and church Ordnung prohibiting parents from allowing their unbaptized children to own cars while living at home. However, they tend to be more tolerant of alcohol and smoking than the Old Order.

  Buggy features are a key symbol of affiliation. The steel-clad wooden wheels (no rubber rims) and the lack of windows and reflective triangle on this buggy mark it as belonging to a Swartzentruber family. Photograph by Doyle Yoder.

  The critical issue that led Andy Weaver to withdraw from his Old Order church district was his belief that the church needed to uphold a stricter interpretation of shunning. Weaver was a very confident and articulate young leader, with many supporters among his extended family and in nearby church districts.21 By the mid-1950s, about five Andy Weaver church districts (out of approximately fifty church districts in the settlement at that time) had formed through splits in Old Order churches and recruitment of like-minded members from more conservative affiliations. A closer analysis of one of these five districts that bordered Weaver’s reveals the internal dynamics of the split.

  Although the official division came in 1952, the seeds of conflict can be traced all the way back to the late 1930s, when a church member in the more conservative northern part of the settlement stopped attending church and bought a pickup truck. Consequently, he was excommunicated, though his wife and children remained Amish. At that time, the church district did not have a full slate of ordained leaders (called the ministers’ bench) and was relying on two ministers and visiting bishops who came to conduct baptisms and communions. In the spring of 1942, two church members “undertook to hold up the council for communion” because they did not agree that the banned member with the truck should be shunned.22 The two ministers replied that they would have it no other way, believing that they had scriptural backing for the ban and for shunning. A mediating
committee of three bishops, two from Indiana and one from Delaware, was called, and they ruled that the shunning should be practiced as soon as one of the ministers became an ordained bishop. The two members did not agree with this decision, or with similar rulings by other mediating councils in the ensuing years. As a result, ill feelings and unrest persisted for the next decade, long after one of the ministers had been ordained bishop.

  The issue surfaced again when a second member stopped attending church for a year. The bishop and other leaders went to see this man, who told them that he did not believe in observing the ban except in Communion. Moreover, he noted that others felt this way. The following Sunday the bishop related to the congregation what this man had said. The bishop then took the unprecedented step of asking all members who supported this more lenient interpretation of shunning to leave. In a dramatic showdown, roughly half of the church members stood up and walked out. Those who remained became one of the first Andy Weaver church districts. “I still remember that day in November 1952 like it was yesterday,” recalled an Andy Weaver elder who was a young church member at the time. “Who was sitting next to who, what they said, it’s still clear as day to me.”

  In the meantime, controversy swirled around those who had walked out because on the “off Sundays” they began singing and reading Scripture with no ordained leaders. In an attempt to isolate this group, ministers held a meeting and subsequently decided that no ordained leaders should lead church services for the wayward group.23 But eventually one or two Old Order ministers came up from the southern part of the settlement and preached for the church in defiance of the council’s ruling. Because of concern about a possible impending split, a mediating committee of three external bishops, one from Geauga County, one from Indiana, and one from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was called in the summer of 1953. They concluded that the bishop had done nothing unscriptural and that no ordained leaders should help this new group. In a meeting on August 18, 1953, the ministers of the original congregation further decided to work together with the disaffected group on the conditions that “the members who have started a separate church shall make a confession … and in the future they shall come to church and fill their office of duties as they have promised upon bowed knee.”24 The next day the leaders announced their verdict to all the parties involved. The bishop further explained that the first step in restoring peace was for everyone to come back and attend church regularly. On the following church Sunday, however, only one member from the disaffected group appeared.