THE AMISH
THE
AMISH
Donald B. Kraybill
Karen M. Johnson-Weiner
Steven M. Nolt
© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kraybill, Donald B.
The Amish / Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-0914-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4214-0915-3 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-0914-3 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4214-0915-1 (electronic)
1. Amish—Social life and customs. 2. Amish — History. I. Johnson-Weiner, Karen. II. Nolt, Steven M., 1968– III. Title.
E184.M45K725 2013
289.7′3—dc23 2012035333
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
All Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, King James version.
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The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.
For Stephen E. Scott (1948–2011),
friend and colleague whose humility, wit, and patience
reflected the virtues of Old Order life
* * *
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
I. ROOTS
CHAPTER 1 Who Are the Amish?
CHAPTER 2 European Origins
CHAPTER 3 The Story in America
II. CULTURAL CONTEXT
CHAPTER 4 Religious Roots
CHAPTER 5 Sacred Rituals
CHAPTER 6 The Amish Way
CHAPTER 7 Symbols and Identity
III. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
CHAPTER 8 Diverse Affiliations
CHAPTER 9 Population Patterns
CHAPTER 10 Community Organization
CHAPTER 11 Gender and Family
CHAPTER 12 From Rumspringa to Marriage
CHAPTER 13 Social Ties and Community Rhythms
CHAPTER 14 Education
IV. EXTERNAL TIES
CHAPTER 15 Agriculture
CHAPTER 16 Business
CHAPTER 17 Technology
CHAPTER 18 Health and Healing
CHAPTER 19 Government and Civic Relations
CHAPTER 20 The Amish in Print
CHAPTER 21 Tourism and Media
V. THE FUTURE
CHAPTER 22 Pursuits of Happiness
APPENDIX A
Related Groups: Mennonites, Brethren, Hutterites
APPENDIX B
Key Events in Amish History
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Although the Amish are a tiny slice of contemporary American society, they are among its most recognized groups. Pundits and advertisers, cartoonists and Hollywood scriptwriters alike can invoke the Amish with confidence that Americans will recognize these plain-dressing, horse-and-buggy-driving people. Googling “Amish” retrieves millions of results touting Amish products and Amish tourist sites. Hundreds of Amish-themed romance novels penned by non-Amish writers have spilled into the national book market since 2005.
But it was not always this way. Amish people were not always the darlings of the merchants of popular culture. The first group of Amish arrived on American shores aboard the ship Charming Nancy in 1737, and for two hundred years they lived quietly amid their rural, non-Amish neighbors. One of many immigrant groups, they stirred little interest among outsiders. That invisibility vanished two centuries later in 1937, when Amish people in eastern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, publicly protested the local township’s plans to demolish one-room schools and construct a consolidated public elementary school. The conflict was so intense that it caught the attention of the New York Times, which ran a series of stories on Amish life. Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, their conflicts with the state continued to generate national visibility, and the Amish soon became noted for their public dissent from the national narrative of technological progress and individual autonomy.
Yet even as mainstream America began to notice the Amish and their rejection of telephones, automobiles, and public grid electricity, it also dismissed them. As the larger society had begun to experience massive change—urbanization, industrialization, consolidation of education, technological advancements, growth of the welfare state, changing gender and family roles, and globalization—it saw the Amish as residual holdovers from nineteenth-century America. To modern Americans, the Amish seemed outmoded and doomed.
In the 1950s, Gertrude Enders Huntington, a young PhD student in anthropology at Yale University, decided to study an Ohio Amish community for her dissertation research. Sixty years later she recalled that at the time “the Amish … were considered stupid and were universally disliked. They were backward and they impeded progress for everyone.” Her professors “were enthusiastic” about her studying the Amish, she says, but only because they were certain the Amish were about to disappear. They urged Huntington to interview them “before they died out.” In fact, one of her professors “was convinced that such a rigid religious orientation was certain to create serious mental illness, which certainly would contribute to the death of their culture.”1
The Yale professors were wrong. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Amish were thriving in America. In 1900 they had numbered only 6,000, but by 2012 their ranks had swelled to nearly 275,000, and they had spread into thirty states and the province of Ontario. Indeed, the population of this distinctive ethnic group, which is still largely unplugged from the electrical grid, is doubling every twenty years.
The Amish story is compelling because it raises intriguing questions about modern life, the meaning of progress, and the roots of social well-being. How can an Amish businessperson with an eighth-grade education develop and manage an innovative manufacturing firm that trades its goods internationally? How do Amish parents raise children to be productive in modern America while reinforcing the cultural framework that separates them from their mainstream peers?
Our conceptual orientation employs cultural analysis to unpack the web of meanings that guide social interaction within Amish life—meanings that have shaped its evolving diversity and identity. We are interested in how humans construct meaning in their social worlds to explain their behavior and how they draw distinctions and create symbolic boundaries.
The scholarly literature on the Amish has contributed much to our understanding of specific topics and particular geographical communities. What is missing—which this volume provides—is a study of national scope that explores the diverse Amish identities that have emerged since the late nineteenth century. Our work focuses on the geographic expansion of the Amish and their growing diversity, changing identities, and new patterns of interaction with the larger society.
In this book we report the research that we have conducted over the past twenty-five years in a multitude of Amish communities in a dozen states—drinking coffee around kitchen tables, kneeling with families for evening prayers, listening to stories during the communal meal after church services, observing youth singings and weddings,
and interviewing people in cow barns and carpentry shops and even as we drove them to appointments with their chiropractors.
Our work has used the research methodologies of history, religious studies, sociology, and anthropology, including ethnographic description, participant observation, and face-to-face interviews. Survey results, archival documents, and an abundance of printed primary and secondary sources have provided rich data for analysis and interpretation. Because we focus on the Amish experience at the national level, we were not able to delve deeply into any particular geographical community or subgroup of Amish. Nevertheless, we offer detailed evidence from many settlements to illustrate and support our arguments.
Amish people have not stood on the sidelines, watching passively as the rest of the world sped by. Since the late nineteenth century, they have made many choices, taking the initiative to sort out their response to modernization. Although they privilege tradition, they are not antichange or antimodern. Amish religion does emphasize separation from the world, but that is quite different from an ideology that seeks to protest or overturn all things modern. They are not Luddites. Instead, the Amish consider new technologies and adopt only those elements that will sustain their church-communities without erasing the boundaries that separate them from mainstream society.
The central question we pursue throughout this book is this: How has the Amish struggle with modernity modified their religious worldview, cultural patterns, social organization, and interaction with the outside world? As they have wrestled with the forces of progress, Amish communities have, in different ways, been willing to concede some traditions and modify others. While they have staunchly resisted acculturation in such areas as higher education, Social Security participation, and mainline Protestant religious practice, they have yielded in various ways to new technologies, workforce demands, and changes in health care. We investigate how this dynamic struggle has transformed Amish identity and internal diversity. In addition, we trace the Amish journey in the American imagination—from backcountry enclaves to popular culture—and ask what the Amish saga tells us about the American character and the political context that has enabled them to flourish.
Cultural minorities use a variety of strategies to protect their ways of life, and the Amish are no exception. Their stance has been proactive engagement rather than passive acquiescence. In this book we argue that as the Amish grappled with the forces of modernity they employed a three-pronged strategy: resistance, acceptance, and negotiation. Seeking a balance between social isolation and wholesale accommodation, they have struck cultural compromises that blend aspects of tradition and modernity, trading concessions back and forth in a process of social bargaining.
Some scholars of Amish society have focused on particular topics—conflicts with government, occupational change, businesses, media relations, religion and spirituality.2 Others have dealt with Amish communities in specific regions or states.3 Our research stands on the shoulders of John A. Hostetler’s Amish Society, first published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1963 (with later editions in 1968, 1980, and 1993). His groundbreaking work was the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of Amish life, but even its most recent edition (1993) was limited in geographic scope and reflected Amish society as it was in the 1960s and 70s. We extend Hostetler’s efforts by tracking the geographical dispersion, numerical growth, cultural diversity, and myriad occupational and technological changes that have transformed Amish life in recent decades.
In short, The Amish is the first scholarly synthesis and interpretation of this unique ethnoreligious minority in the twenty-first century. However, this book is not just about the Amish but about America more broadly, because any examination of Amish society illuminates mainstream culture in new and often surprising ways. Clearly, an investigation of Amish life invites us to critically reflect on our own values and practices as well.
One of the challenges we faced as we sifted through stacks of field notes and historical sources was how to narrow our focus, for at every turn we had enough material to expand each chapter into a book of its own. We thus had to select the issues most salient to our argument and give scant if any attention to topics such as diet, singing, dress practices, gardening, and buggy styles.
We have organized our account of Amish society into twenty-two chapters in five sections. After tracing their European origins and immigration to North America (chapters 1–3), we describe the religious foundations that undergird their culture (chapter 4) and then the distinctive rituals that embody Amish faith (chapter 5). We explore key dimensions of Amish values and symbols in chapters 6 and 7. In the following seven chapters (8–14) we describe various aspects of Amish social organization, beginning with the maze of some forty affiliations and then turning to gender, Rumspringa, community, and education.
The seven chapters in part IV, which deal with external ties, highlight Amish interactions with the larger society in the areas of agriculture, business, technology, medicine, and the state. We conclude this section by probing the Amish presence in print, tourism, film, and online media. In the final chapter, we explore some of the changes afoot in Amish society, reflect on the outcomes of their struggle with modernity, and ponder their future.
Finally, we want to add a note about words. One of the difficulties we faced in writing this book was finding accurate, yet clear terms to describe the complexity of Amish life. The Amish world has no central bureaucratic structure; its two thousand congregations and forty different affiliations operate somewhat independently and exhibit a wide diversity of cultural practices. A former Catholic who joined the Amish noted that the diversity of Amish groups is similar to his “Roman Catholic heritage and the several hundred types of nuns, brothers, priests, monks. They all have the same faith and doctrines but a great number of differences in their constitutions and garb and practices.”4 When we write about all the horse-and-buggy-driving Amish groups collectively, we use broad phrases such as Amish world, Amish society, Amish life, and so on. To denote a particular kind of Amish, we employ the words affiliation, group, and sometimes tribe.5 In addition, some affiliations have subgroups.
The phrase Old Order can be confusing because it has two meanings. It first emerged as a historical label in the 1860s and 1870s in the aftermath of a national schism that produced two Amish branches: the Old Order Amish, who sought to maintain older traditions, and the more progressive Amish Mennonites, who eventually lost their Amish identity as we explain in chapter 3. In the course of the twentieth century, additional divisions within the historic Old Order branch led to new groups, so that by the twenty-first century, the Amish world included diverse affiliations with names such as Andy Weaver, Renno, mainline Old Order, Swartzentruber, and New Order, to mention just a few. Thus, we use Old Order at times in its historical sense and at other times to name a particular group within the larger Amish world.
When describing the various Amish groups arrayed between the cultural poles of separation and assimilation, we are loath to use the labels traditional and progressive for several reasons. These terms present a false dichotomy: even the most modern societies have traditions; and the most traditional ones, far from being static, incorporate some new social elements. Moreover, in American culture the word progress is laden with positive assumptions—forward, better, good—despite the fact that some of the repercussions of progress are detrimental if not downright destructive. Nevertheless, some Amish groups are quite open to outside influence, while others cling tenaciously to longstanding traditions. So with some reluctance we use progressive and traditional, liberal and conservative, change-minded and tradition-minded to describe an affiliation’s degree of separation from the outside world. We also speak of high and low—two terms used by the Amish themselves—to refer to a group’s location on the ladder of assimilation into mainstream society.
The Amish, who speak a German dialect, refer to outsiders who speak English as simply “the English.” We use the terms non-Amish, outsiders, a
nd English interchangeably to refer to people outside Amish society.
Although the story we tell accents Amish diversity, for stylistic reasons and literary ease we sometimes use the phrase the Amish. Many Amish voices speak throughout the text. Most of those we interviewed preferred to speak anonymously, and we have honored their requests. However, we have typically identified those who have used their own names in their published writings. All anecdotes, including those that open chapters, come from our fieldwork, and none are composites.
Our goal is to tell the Amish story with the resources of solid scholarship in a style that appeals not only to scholars but also to a broader audience interested in the Amish experience.
§ Visit www2.etown.edu/amishstudies/ for more information, photos, resources, and updated demographic statistics on Amish society as well as for educational supplements for
The Amish.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Community is a prominent theme in Amish life, so it is appropriate that this book was a collective project, from the research and writing through the editing and production. Consequently, the roster of people and organizations to whom we are grateful is long.
First, we recognize the substantial support of a collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that underwrote much of the research for this book, the development of an Amish Studies website (www2.etown.edu/amishstudies/), and a conference, The Amish in America: New Identities and Diversities, organized by the Young Center in 2007. We acknowledge, however, that the views, findings, and conclusions stated on the website and in this book do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We thank our advisory committee, a group that offered suggestions, criticism, and support for the project during the grant period. The committee consisted of the following colleagues: Herman Bontrager, Jill E. Korbin, Mark L. Louden, Thomas J. Meyers, Stephen E. Scott, Diane Zimmerman Umble, G. C. Waldrep, and David Weaver-Zercher.
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