Sometime in the twentieth century, women won the right to vote and racial segregation ended, giving everybody equal opportunity and the choice to be whatever they want to be. Anyone can become president. Women can do anything men can do. I can choose my own lifestyle, and I don’t have to marry or have children if I don’t want to. When I visit a historical museum, I’m amazed at how hard life was for people in the past and I’m grateful that I didn’t live back then.
The keys to getting ahead in life are hard work and education. America has the greatest universities in the world. We’ve put a man on the moon and mapped all our genes. Science and technology have made amazing strides in my lifetime, giving me more choices and control over my life, and I expect those advances will continue. Doctors can treat just about any illness or condition, and I am confident that medical discoveries will keep increasing our life spans.
I can go anywhere I want and move wherever a job or education takes me without having to ask anyone’s permission. Anyone can reach me on my cell phone, day or night, no matter where I am. I can listen to my own music without being bothered by anyone else’s tastes. I rely on computers and the Internet so much it’s hard to remember how I lived before I had them 24/7 in the palm of my hand. From file sharing to social networking, technology is bringing the whole world closer together. I can only imagine all the new things the next generation will be able to do to make things better!
Of course, these stories are oversimplified in order to illustrate the distinct topographies of Amish and American identity and show the deep gulf between the basic contours of these two worldviews. This particular American story may not reflect the experiences of some ethnic minorities or recent immigrants, yet it has been the dominant metanarrative shaping American politics, higher education, and the American self-understanding. And although it is not everyone’s story, it is a coercive narrative that the Amish have heard time and again as they faced off with federal officials, school boards, and municipal authorities. In many ways the Amish narrative challenges the optimistic American embrace of progress, raising the question: Exactly what kind of Americans are these Amish?
It is true that they do not fly the American flag, fight in the military, or celebrate the unveiling of new media gadgets. Nor do they hold public office, serve on juries, or assume the civic responsibilities often associated with citizenship.
They do, however, play softball, read local newspapers, pay taxes, and occasionally vote. When it comes to industriousness, stable families, and a yearning for lean government, they exemplify some deeply rooted traditions in American culture. Amish people are like other Americans in other ways as well. Amish parents want the best for their children and worry about whether their children will make good choices. Some Amish teenagers think their parents are too strict, and sometimes they rebel. Amish people seek meaningful work and fulfillment in friendships and community activities. Their deep desires often reflect those of most Americans. However, they have pursued those aspirations in different ways.
Having sojourned here for almost three centuries, often on the fringe of society, the Amish have been shaped by the American experience. They have not emigrated or searched for other homelands because, despite their fears of modernity, North America has offered them ample space to practice their religion.22 Their practices have sometimes tested the boundaries of religious liberty, but the legal outcomes have helped to preserve the free exercise of religion for their fellow Americans as well.
Young Amish women stand on the beach near Rehoboth, Delaware. Like other Americans, Amish people enjoy the beauty of nature. Gary Casadei
The Pursuit of Happiness, Amish Style
The Amish story is compelling because it raises profound and intriguing questions about modern life, the meaning of progress, and the roots of social well-being. How can one-room Amish schools, with only eight grades, devoid of all technology save a battery-operated clock, turn out successful entrepreneurs whose firms gross annual sales of a million dollars? What is the meaning of assimilation and multiculturalism in light of the Amish American experience? How have the nonconforming, peculiar-looking Amish come to feel at home in American society, whether shopping at bigbox stores or negotiating legal exemptions from Congress?
In this book, we assess how the Amish have fared in their struggle with modernity. As they wrestled with the forces of progress, what were they willing to concede or negotiate? Even more important, on which issues did they dig in and resist? We explore how the outcomes of their struggle reshaped their identity and added to their internal diversity. In addition, we chronicle the transformation of the Amish in the American imagination—from backward bumpkins to media icons—and ask what the Amish story tells us about the American character and the cultural ethos that offered them such a congenial habitat.
The Amish have employed a strategy—a set of goals and calculated means—as they have grappled with modernity. Theirs has been a stance not only of resistance but also of proactive engagement. Throughout their history they have made choices that have shaped how they live, work, and raise their families. They were not passive when, in 1967, in the midst of concerns over the Vietnam War–era military draft, an informal network of lay leaders formed the National Amish Steering Committee to represent Amish interests to the government. They took action when school consolidation threatened to disrupt their children’s education in rural public schools by building one-room schools that now thrive in the Amish world. And the Amish were anything but passive in 2003 when Ohio Amish farmers and business leaders formed Green Field Farms, a corporation that markets Amish-grown organic products in several states.
Lacking knowledge of such Amish initiatives, it is easy for outsiders to imagine them as a static people who live just like their ancestors did 250 years ago. That myth assumes that the Amish have been bystanders—a quiet folk society disengaged from the transformations of modern America. On the contrary, as they were shaped by and contributed to those transformations, they made many choices along the way. As we narrate the Amish story, we pay special attention to their choices—to be or not to be modern, to assimilate or to withdraw—for those decisions and their consequences have shaped the character of the Amish in America.
That their choices have fashioned their destiny as a people raises a fascinating paradox. If choice and its concomitant responsibilities are prized in American culture—if indeed the essence of being American is to have choices—then the Amish can truly claim an American identity. If choice is the ubiquitous mark of modernity, then the Amish, like their neighbors, have been branded with this mark. In fact, their fundamental notion of what it means to be a church community is based on the idea of voluntary adult membership, a concept that reaches back to their religious roots in the sixteenth century. What could be more modern than the notion of choice in religious affiliation?
Yet Amish choices, ironically, restrict the range of individual choice. They have chosen, in other words, to limit choice. Members are not free to dress as they please, buy a car, or pursue higher education. And while individuals can make many choices, the community’s collective choices do shrink the scope of individual liberty.
The Declaration of Independence proclaims an American creed in these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Do the Amish find happiness in their countercultural way of life? Is it possible to have a meaningful and satisfying life without the latest technology, college degrees, luxury vacations, and an embrace of scientific progress? Might it be that Amish people have outwitted modernity and are as happy as the rest of us in mainstream society?
We will explore these and other questions from both the Amish and American side of the cultural dialogue that has shaped—and continues to shape—Amish life and appraisals of that life. Before doing so, however, we turn to the birth of the Amish church in Europe.
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CHAPTER 2
EUROPEAN ORIGINS
* * *
No sooner had Dirk Willems escaped from prison than a guard and a sheriff took off in hot pursuit of him. It was 1569 in the Dutch village of Asperen, and Willems had been jailed for joining a radical religious group, the spiritual forebears of the Amish. Now, as he fled those who would torture and perhaps execute him, he made his way safely across a frozen pond. The guard was not so fortunate. He broke through the ice, and as he sank into the frigid water, he called for help. Willems could have considered this an act of divine judgment on his captors and continued his escape. Instead, he stopped, turned around, and went back to rescue his pursuer, believing it was his Christian duty to return good for evil. Unimpressed by Willems’ choice, the sheriff had him rearrested. Shortly thereafter, Willems was burned at the stake as a heretic.
* * *
A Particular Past
More than 400 years after Dirk Willems’ astonishing rescue of his enemy, the Amish continue to tell his story. They recount this tale of the man who saved the life of his enemy in their sermons and school curriculum. It is a story of suffering and martyrdom but also a dramatic reminder of tough ethical choices, religious commitments, and actions that run counter to mainstream expectations. And it is a reminder that Amish society is rooted in a particular past that continues to inform its contemporary identity.
Reminders of heritage abound in Amish life. When church members gather for biweekly church services, they sing from the Ausbund: das ist, Etliche schöne Christliche Lieder (True Collection of Some Beautiful Christian Songs), a hymnbook filled with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyrics. They listen to sermons peppered with references to ancestral martyrs. Even those Amish who are most reluctant to interact with outsiders or who grumble about intrusive tourism express eagerness to chat with a visitor from Switzerland or Germany, revealing their sense of connection to places “over in the Old Country.” Amish interest in the past is also evident in the abundance of genealogy books and memoirs they write, with titles such as Echoes of the Past and Hidden Treasures Handed Down from Our Ancestors Since 1600.1 Amish people have a strong sense that history is a reliable guide, and in turn, their history offers clues for understanding their interaction with broader American culture.
Amish roots reach back to the sixteenth-century’s Protestant Reformation and, more specifically, to the Radical Reformation that emerged in those tumultuous times. During the first half of the 1500s, many things that Europeans had long taken for granted were in flux. Spanish conquistadors spread stories of a vast “New World” populated by exotic people, plants, and animals, which called into question the European understanding of the world. Meanwhile, huge quantities of Mexican silver captured by these same conquistadors destabilized European economies, sparked inflation, and pushed many peasants to the edge of survival. Compounding a sense of unease, the printing press sped ideas—and rumors—across the continent with stunning speed.
As if such developments were not enough to rattle social stability, vocal religious critics began challenging the Catholic Church, the institution that had long claimed to hold society together on earth and assure one’s journey to heaven. Leading reformers such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin questioned church doctrine and structure and eventually split with Rome, establishing the Lutheran and Reformed churches. The stage for a more radical reform movement was set.
Radical Anabaptists
The ferment of the 1500s produced other religious dissenters as well, dissenters whose critique of Christendom was deeper than that of the mainstream Protestants. These radicals, who gathered in small groups in German-speaking lands and in the Netherlands, challenged the entire premise of the medieval state-church relationship by arguing that the true church was composed of only those who separated themselves from the corrupt world and obediently followed the teachings of Jesus. This way would not be popular, they warned. Indeed, Jesus had said that his followers would be a “little flock” scorned by “the world.”
The radicals rejected the prevailing practice of routinely baptizing all infants, a practice that linked Christianity with citizenship. Instead, they began to baptize one another as a sign of their adult commitment to “take up the cross” of Jesus and live a disciplined life accountable to one another rather than to the state church. As a result, they earned the nickname “Anabaptists” (rebaptizers) and found themselves condemned by both Catholics and mainline Protestants as religious, social, and political revolutionaries.2
Almost all Anabaptists were orthodox Christians who affirmed the authority of the Bible and embraced traditional understandings of the Trinity, sin, and God’s grace as the basis of salvation. But Anabaptist views of the nature of the church and Christian life set them apart from many other Christians of their day. Anabaptists believed that the true church was an alternative community, distinct from surrounding society and not responsible for enforcing civic morality or acting as a moral prop for the state. Anabaptists expected government to maintain a minimal level of social order, but they also believed that such a worldly task was not a responsibility of the righteous. Instead, church members were to be obedient to Jesus, renouncing violence (even in self-defense) and refusing to swear oaths.
These commitments put Anabaptists at odds with civic and religious leaders, who censured the radicals as subversives who would upend social order and theological truth. Authorities used edicts, legal harassment, imprisonment, and even execution in a vain attempt to stop the spread of the Anabaptist movement. These actions only confirmed the Anabaptists’ sense that the world was brutal and immoral and that they were justified in rejecting it.
Between 1527 and 1614, authorities killed as many as twenty-five hundred Anabaptists. Their martyrdom remains a focal point of Amish consciousness. The hymns that form the core of the Ausbund were written by Anabaptists jailed in Passau, Bavaria, as they awaited execution. One such hymn intones:
When the distressed cry out
To their God on high,
He sustains them
In all their needs.
He does deliver all those
Who are of a broken heart,
Having a contrite spirit…
[Yet] the righteous must suffer much
In this strife with affliction…
[But] God always helps them.3
Other hymns memorialize sixteenth-century martyrs such as Hans Haslibacher, who was beheaded in 1571.
Hundreds of Anabaptists were tortured and put to death for their religious beliefs in the 1500s. Maria van Beckum was burned at the stake in the Netherlands in 1544 because she had been baptized into the Anabaptist faith. She and her sister-in-law Ursula (at left) prayed to God to forgive their tormentors. Ursula watched Maria be burned and then stood on the woodpile for her own execution. Martyrs Mirror Trust: Kauffman Museum, Bethel College/Mennonite Historical Library, Goshen College
Many Amish households own a thick book about these martyrs entitled Martyrs Mirror. More than a thousand pages in length, Martyrs Mirror begins with the crucifixion of Jesus, recounts the suffering of the early church under Roman persecution, and culminates in hundreds of pages of Anabaptist martyr stories—including the story of Dirk Willems, who saved his pursuer’s life. This hefty book, available in both German and English versions, continues to find a ready Amish market in the twenty-first century.4 Even though many families do not regularly read aloud from the book because of its somewhat archaic language, its martyr stories are frequently retold and applied in sermons. “We hear about the martyrs almost every time we have church,” one middle-aged woman affirmed.
The prominence of the martyrs in Amish memory and the emphasis the Amish give to their self-surrender and reliance on God is significant. At the same time, the martyr stories also cast the state in the role of antagonist and suggest that the world cannot be fully trusted. While other spiritual descendants of the Anabaptists have valorized the Anabaptists’ willingness to speak tru
th to political power or highlighted their penchant for evangelism, the Amish have emphasized martyrdom and obedience to God’s will even in the face of stiff opposition.
Martyrdom shaped the Anabaptist movement in specific ways. Persecution contributed to the fact that Anabaptism never had a singular spokesperson or overall leader. Although by 1545, twenty years after its inception, the movement received the nickname “Mennist” or “Mennonite,” thanks to the influential writing of Menno Simons, an Anabaptist preacher, Menno never held the same status among Anabaptists as, for example, Luther did among Lutherans. The harassment also flushed Anabaptists out of the urban areas where the movement started and scattered them into rural hideaways. By the mid-1600s, Swiss and German Anabaptists were concentrated in Alpine valleys around the Swiss city of Bern, north through the Rhine Valley, and eastward into parts of Austria and Moravia. Meanwhile, Dutch Mennonites had spawned a string of communities across northern Europe and into Prussia-Poland.
Despite a lack of state authority to enforce religious orthodoxy, as in Lutheran lands, or any central doctrinal authority akin to the Catholic pope, the Anabaptist radicals generally recognized one another as members of the same faith. For example, by the mid-1600s, Dutch Mennonites, who thrived in the relatively tolerant environment of the Netherlands, were occasionally using their political influence to ask the Dutch government to pressure Protestant officials in Switzerland to ease persecution of Swiss Anabaptists. Although such intervention relieved some pressure, waves of legal harassment continued in Switzerland, periodically pushing groups of Swiss Anabaptists to leave for more lenient lands to the north, particularly the Rhine Valley regions of Alsace and the Palatinate where, after the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, nobles were looking for loyal tenants to restore their war-ravaged estates.5
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