The Riddle of Amish Culture

by Donald B. Kraybill

  Fourth, other apparent quirks in Amish practice are actually bargains that the Amish have struck with the larger culture. The common impression that the Amish never change is false. They have stubbornly resisted some aspects of modernization, but in many ways they are quite up-to-date. Squeezed by the pressures of progress, they have been forced to strike some deals in order to survive. Although their cultural compromises may appear odd, they are often ingenious arrangements that enable the Amish to retain their distinctive identity and also thrive economically. These negotiated cultural compromises allow them to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak—to protect their traditions while using the benefits of modern technology.

  Our journey into Amish life will not solve all of the riddles. But as we go backstage to begin to unravel them, we will discover that the logic of Amish culture makes more sense behind the curtain than it does in front of it. Cultural practices that stupefy outside observers become sensible and reasonable when seen in the dim light of Amish history. From behind the curtain, many of the puzzles appear to be ingenious solutions to the practical dilemmas faced by a group struggling to retain its traditional values amidst a rapidly changing world.

  THE ANABAPTIST LEGACY

  The Amish trace their religious heritage to the Swiss Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Europe, who emerged in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Disgruntled with the practices of the Catholic Church, Martin Luther led a protest in 1517. His revolt inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, making Protestantism a permanent branch of Christendom. A few years later in Zurich, Switzerland, students of the Protestant pastor Ulrich Zwingli became impatient with the pace of the Protestant Reformation. They argued that Christian practices should be based solely on Scripture, not on church tradition and civic custom. They called for a sharper break from Catholic traditions and a separation of church and civil government. After several heated consultations with the Zurich city council, the dissidents illegally rebaptized one another in a secret meeting on 21 January 1525. This simple service of baptism initiated a new movement, sometimes called the Radical Reformation, that became another branch of the Protestant Reformation.

  The young renegades believed that baptism should only be conferred on adults who were willing to live a life of radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Adult baptism became the public symbol of the Radical Reformation, but the implicit issue was one of authority. Did government officials have the right to interpret and prescribe a Christian practice such as infant baptism, or was the Bible the sole and final authority for the Christian church? The answer was clear for the rebaptizers. For them, Scripture was the ultimate authority. They felt compelled to obey the teachings of Christ even when such obedience placed their lives at risk.1

  The young reformers were nicknamed Anabaptists, meaning “rebaptizers,” because they had already been baptized as infants in the Catholic Church. Their refusal to baptize infants, to swear oaths of allegiance, and to use the sword in armed conflict incensed civil authorities. The Anabaptists were a political threat because they challenged the historic marriage between the church and civil government. They shook the pillars of civil authority because infant baptism conferred citizenship, which helped determine taxation and conscript soldiers for war. Civil authorities as well as Protestant and Catholic leaders were not about to be mocked by a small group of young radicals.

  Within five months of the first rebaptism, an Anabaptist was killed for sedition, and the heretics began to flee for their lives. Meetings were often held at night in caves. The Anabaptist movement soon spread northward into Germany and eventually into the Netherlands. Thousands of Anabaptists were executed by civil and religious authorities over the next two centuries. Civil authorities commissioned special hunters to torture, brand, burn, drown, imprison, dismember, and harass the religious rebels. Describing the persecution between 1635 and 1645, an eyewitness wrote: “It is awful to read and speak about it, how they treated pregnant mothers, women nursing infants, the old, the young, husbands, wives, virgins, and children, and how they took their homes and houses, farms and goods. Yes, and much more, how they made widows and orphans, and without mercy drove them from their homes and scattered them among strangers . . . with some the father died in jail for lack of food and drink.”2

  In Switzerland the killing subsided by 1614. Nevertheless, other forms of persecution continued intermittently until the early eighteenth century. As the persecution waxed and waned, Anabaptists found refuge in Moravia, Alsace, the Palatinate, the Netherlands, and eventually in Russia and North America.3 Even today, stories of the harsh persecution remain alive among the Amish. The Martyrs Mirror, a book of 1,100 pages found in many Amish homes, chronicles the bloody carnage. Stories of the persecution also appeared in the back of the Amish hymn book, the Ausbund.

  The severe persecution had a profound impact on the theological views of the early Swiss Anabaptists. Some of their common convictions were articulated in a statement written in 1527.4 This confession of faith emphasizes, among other issues, the authority of the New Testament as a guide for everyday life, and it highlights the following religious beliefs:

  A drawing from the second Dutch edition of the Martyrs Mirror (1685) depicting an Anabaptist martyr, Jan Bosch, burning at the stake in Maastricht, 1559.

  Adult, or “believers,” baptism

  The church as a covenant community

  Exclusion of errant members from communion

  Literal obedience to the teachings of Christ

  Refusal to swear oaths

  Rejection of violence

  Social separation from the evil world

  One scholar has argued that the core of the Anabaptist vision contained three distinctive features: a radical obedience to the teachings and example of Christ that transforms the behavior of individual believers, a new concept of the church as a voluntary body of believers accountable to one another and separate from the larger world, and an ethic of love that rejects violence in all spheres of human life.5

  In any event, the bloody persecution etched a sharp distinction between the church and the larger world in the Anabaptist mind. Propelled by persecution and missionary zeal, the Anabaptist movement spread into northern Europe. In the Netherlands, Menno Simons became an influential proponent of Anabaptism. Ordained as a Catholic priest in 1524, Menno Simons soon found himself caught between the authority of the Catholic Church and the new interpretations of Scripture taught by the Anabaptists. By 1531 he opted for the Anabaptist view of Scripture, and he left the Catholic Church in 1536. Menno Simons soon became a powerful leader, writer, and preacher for the Anabaptist cause.6 He was so influential that many Anabaptists were eventually called Mennists or Mennonites.7

  The relentless persecution drove many Anabaptists to remote mountainous areas, where they could more easily elude their tormentors.8 As the persecution dwindled, many Anabaptists turned to farming, and over the generations their religious fervor mellowed as congregational life developed into routine patterns. Renewed persecution near Bern, Switzerland, in the 1660s spurred some Anabaptists to head northward to more tolerant areas along the Rhine River. By the late 1600s clusters of Swiss Anabaptists had emigrated from Switzerland to the Alsace region of present-day France, which lies between the Rhine River and the Vosges Mountains. In the early 1690s a controversy erupted among some of the Alsatian immigrants as well as among various factions back in Switzerland. The quarrel came to a head in 1693 and gave birth to the Amish church.

  AMISH BIRTH PANGS

  The Amish take their name from Jakob Ammann, a Swiss Anabaptist leader who moved to the Alsace region to escape persecution. Banned from Switzerland by civil authorities, Ammann was considered a “roving arch-Anabaptist.” He was a recent convert who, according to civil authorities, had become “infected” by the Anabaptist sect.9 In the 1690s, Ammann called for change and renewal in church life. He proposed holding communion twice a year rather than annually, according to the Swiss Anabaptist pattern.
Following the lead of Anabaptists in Holland, he argued that footwashing should be literally observed in the communion service in obedience to Christ’s command. Other issues—the excommunication of liars, the role of church discipline, the salvation of Anabaptist sympathizers—also hovered over the dispute.

  The decisive issue that polarized the debate, however, was the shunning of excommunicated members. Following the teaching of Menno Simons, Ammann taught that expelled members should not only be banned from holy communion but also shunned in daily life. Some of the more lenient Swiss Anabaptists excluded wayward members from communion but did not ostracize them socially. Cultural and regional factors as well as personality conflicts amplified the theological differences. However, differences over the shunning of excommunicated members drove the final wedge between various clusters of Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptists in 1693.10

  FIGURE 1.1 European Roots of the Amish

  The charges and countercharges between Jakob Ammann and the senior Swiss bishop, Hans Reist, became rather harsh. Ammann’s boldness was matched by Reist’s stubbornness. Ammann’s recent conversion to Anabaptism may have encouraged his boldness and zeal for the church. Several Swiss leaders resisted his attempt to reform the church and increase its purity, and to their surprise Ammann excommunicated them. Numerous ministers in various locations supported Ammann’s leadership and formed what eventually became the Amish church. Several years later the Amish group apologized for excommunicating the elders, but by then it was too late to heal the wound. A series of conciliatory meetings continued until 1711 but failed to repair the breach. Many of Ammann’s proposed reforms reflected early Swiss Anabaptist teaching as well as practices advocated by Menno Simons in Holland. Thus, the formation of the Amish movement was, in many ways, an effort of church renewal.11

  The emergence of the Amish created a permanent division among Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptists. Shunning was the pivotal issue in this family quarrel, but Ammann also taught against trimming beards, rebuked those with fashionable dress, and administered a strict discipline in his congregations. Although dress styles were not the catalyst for the schism, they gradually became distinctive among the Amish, possibly because Ammann was a tailor. The Amish were sometimes called “hook-and-eyers” because they considered buttons too ostentatious, and some Mennonites were nicknamed “button people.” Ammann left no books and only a few letters for his followers. For theological guidance, the Amish to this day rely primarily on Anabaptist literature written before Ammann’s time.

  The followers of Ammann gradually became known as Amish, while many other Anabaptists were called Mennonites. Thus, Swiss Anabaptism, originating in Zurich in 1525, had two branches after 1693: Amish and Mennonite. Nourished by a common heritage, Amish and Mennonite life has flowed in separate streams since the division.12

  THE CHARMING NANCY

  Social upheaval, political turmoil, and intermittent persecution prompted the Amish and Mennonites to leave their homelands in the Alsace and Palatinate and emigrate to the New World. A few Mennonites had already established a settlement near Philadelphia in 1683, ten years before the Amish-Mennonite division. In 1710 Mennonite settlers purchased some 10,000 acres bordering the Pequea Creek, several miles south of the present-day city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Between 1717 and 1732, several contingents of Swiss–South German Mennonites followed the early pioneers and settled in the Lancaster area.

  It is possible that some early Amish immigrants accompanied these Mennonite settlers, but the first Amish may not have arrived until the 1730s. In any event, about five hundred Amish came to the New World in the 1700s.13 The Charming Nancy, the first ship to carry a large group of Amish, docked in Philadelphia in 1737 after an eighty-three-day voyage. Some twenty-seven years after the first Mennonites arrived in the Lancaster area, the Amish established two settlements. One of these, known as Old Conestoga, or West Conestoga, formed a few miles northeast of the present-day city of Lancaster. However, most of the Charming Nancy’s passengers made their home in the Northkill colony in southern Berks County, thirty miles northeast of Lancaster. An Amish historian concludes: “These two settlements can rightly be called the mother colonies of our present districts in Lancaster County.”14

  The early settlements were fledgling communities, loosely organized around family lines. They were vulnerable to Indian attacks, drought, and crop failures. An Indian raid, evangelization by the Dunkards, and other factors eventually dismantled the Northkill settlement.15 The Old Conestoga colony near Lancaster also dwindled for unknown reasons, and the survivors of the two settlements scattered to more friendly places, where they joined new Amish immigrants.

  Several new congregations took root in Lancaster after the Revolutionary War, but they remained rather small until the end of the nineteenth century. The Conestoga Congregation began in about 1760, and the Pequea Congregation formed in about 1790. The Lancaster Amish community consisted of these two congregations, with probably no more than 150 adult members, until 1843, when a third congregation emerged. A fourth group blossomed in 1852, and by 1880 there were six congregational clusters in the Lancaster region. Although the Mennonites had settled the best land in Lancaster County before the Amish arrived, the Amish had the last word as they steadily bought more and more fertile farmland in the last half of the twentieth century.

  THE LANCASTER SETTLEMENT

  Over the years, Lancaster County has provided a pleasant habitat for the Amish, who helped to forge its distinguished reputation. Known locally as the Garden Spot of the World, the county tops the nation in agricultural production among nonirrigated counties. Fertile soils, a moderate climate, ample rainfall, and the hard toil of farmers have transformed the 946-square-mile area into an agricultural paradise. With some four thousand farms and 65 percent of its acreage in farmland, the county leads all nonirrigated counties across the nation in the total value of its agricultural products and other key indicators.

  Situated 65 miles west of Philadelphia and 135 miles north of Washington, D.C., Lancaster rests on the western edge of the sprawling eastern megalopolis stretching from Norfolk, Virginia, to Boston, Massachusetts. Lancaster City is surrounded by a quiltwork of farms, small towns, and suburban developments. The county is one of the fastest growing of Pennsylvania’s thirteen metropolitan areas. Its population of 470,000 will likely top 500,000 by 2010. Agriculture continues to thrive in spite of urbanization. Conservation, farmland preservation, manure pollution, traffic congestion, tourism, and intense development pressures dominate the county’s public agenda.

  Despite its robust agriculture, not all Lancastrians are Amish or farmers. Today less than 2 percent of the county workforce is farming, but agroindustry creates about 20 percent of all county jobs.16 Nearly eleven hundred businesses dot the Garden Spot, twenty of which have more than five hundred employees. Twelve major shopping centers and 2,300 retail outlets serve the county. Each year, Lancaster Countians host some 4 million tourists, who spend over $1.2 billion. Tourism involves over 1,800 facilities and creates more than 8,600 jobs for local people, including some Amish. In fact, there are six tour industry employees for every farmer in Lancaster County.

  FIGURE 1.2 Farmland Owned by the Amish in Lancaster County.

  Source: Lancaster County Geographic Information Systems

  Lancaster’s Amish have easy access to large department stores and shopping malls.

  This commercialized Garden Spot is the home of Lancaster’s Old Order Amish community, the oldest Amish settlement in North America, with some 22,000 children and adults.17 More than 90 percent of Lancaster’s Amish are affiliated with the Old Order Amish. Several more progressive Amish-related groups number about a thousand members. These groups splintered off over the years, leaving the Old Order Amish as the sole guardians of traditional Amish culture.18

  Their distinctive garb and use of horses distinguish the Amish from their modern neighbors. Unlike their Anabaptist cousins, the communitarian Hutterites, the Amish own private pro
perty.19 Despite private ownership, a strong tradition of mutual aid and communalism permeates the Amish community. Barn raisings, “frolics,” and other forms of assistance are routine expressions of community life. Although they borrow money from banks, the Amish hesitate to accept government subsidies in the form of farm supports, Social Security, and Medicare.

  Many small industries and businesses have sprung up alongside farming within the Amish community. Indeed, more than half of the adult men are employed in some type of trade or business. For others, farming remains their primary occupation. Dairying, the chief type of farming, is often supplemented by tobacco, poultry, and produce farming. Married Amish women typically work at home, but increasingly many are involved in craft shops and other businesses. Some single women work in restaurants and as domestics in motels and private non-Amish homes. Others serve as teachers, clerical workers, and clerks in retail stores and produce markets.

  Extended families spanning two or three generations often live in adjoining houses on a farmstead. Other Amish own single dwellings along country roads or in small towns. Children are usually born at home, and grandparents typically retire on the farm. Amish youth walk to one-room schools, where Amish teachers stress practical skills and teach English as well as German. The primary language of the Amish is a dialect known as Pennsylvania German, which the Amish call Deitsch. The English they learn in school enables them to communicate fluently with their English-speaking neighbors. Amish social life revolves around family, home, and church. Membership in “worldly” organizations such as service clubs, professional organizations, and political parties is prohibited.