The Amish

by Donald B. Kraybill

  Of course, that most Americans have come to regard the Amish in certain ways may say more about mainstream society than it does about the Amish themselves. Still, popular understandings have an impact on ordinary Amish life, shaping everything from public policy to tourism. Amish identity in the twentieth century was hewn not only from their own convictions but also from public perceptions. An overview of those perceptions illustrates the changing views of Americans toward these nonconformists in their midst.

  Stubborn Traditionalists

  Amish people first gained national attention in the 1930s as they became entangled in an effort to resist government involvement in local life. In 1937 Amish parents in one Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, township organized opposition to state consolidation of rural schools and tried to halt the construction of a new building. Since most communities were fighting for a share of New Deal dollars, Amish opposition to federal funds was newsworthy, and the Amish cause made the New York Times. The image in these stories was of backward and ill-informed people fighting a futile battle against the future. One New York Times article characterized Amish life as “drab.”35

  Conflicts heated up as the United States expanded programs that cared for the aged or dictated workplace dress. After 1955 some self-employed Amish farmers stubbornly refused to participate in Social Security. They garnered sympathy from government critics, such as the editors of Reader’s Digest, and eventually received congressional exemption from the program in 1965. As minority rights and identity politics gained ground during the 1960s and 1970s, the Amish won additional group-based exemptions such as a waiver of Occupational Safety and Health Act mandates requiring the wearing of hard hats on construction sites.36

  Amish men walk up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court when the high court considered the Wisconsin v. Yoder case in 1972. Lancaster Newspapers

  In this context, lingering conflicts over compulsory high school attendance found resolution in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 1972 case of Wisconsin v. Yoder. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in defense of the Amish dissent, legitimating, as one observer put it, “the right not to be modern.” This antimodern image was closely tied to the logic of the ruling, since the justices’ arguments were based largely on their assumption that, as backward farmers, the Amish had no need for advanced schooling.37

  By the end of the twentieth century, however, conflicts with the state often conjured popular appraisals of the Amish that were much less sympathetic. Could ultra-conservative Amish refuse to immunize their children? Could they persist in using primitive plumbing that undercut public health codes? Local jurisdictions often said no. And when cases of child abuse surfaced, the public was decidedly unsympathetic to the Amish argument that their self-trained counselors and homespun treatment centers were better suited to punish perpetrators and handle victims’ needs than were social service professionals, whom the Amish kept at bay.38

  Technophobes Choosing a Simple Life

  Another set of popular images revolved around Amish aversions to the latest forms of technology. As rural electrification, telephone cooperatives, and agricultural mechanization became common in the early twentieth century, the Amish refusal to connect to public utilities and to buy cars began to set them apart from their rural neighbors.39 After World War II, most Amish refused tractor farming even though agricultural extension agents encouraged them to “get out of the mud” of their bygone traditions. Farming with horses kept their agriculture small-scale, and although many adopted hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers, their farming remained labor-intensive. More visibly, horse-and-buggy travel marked the Amish as distinctively odd in a nation committed to automobile ownership and constructing a multimillion-dollar interstate highway system.40 They soon became known as “horse-and-buggy people,” studied by sociologists as a folk society frozen in time.

  Suddenly, in the 1970s, the image of the Amish as irrelevant relics was flipped upside down. The energy crisis and an emerging environmental movement created an atmosphere in which the Amish were hailed as a people ahead of their time. Activists certain that “small is beautiful” applauded the Amish as a people who lived off the grid and did not allow technology to master them. Indeed, some outsiders began to see the Amish as Luddites, opposed to all technology. As such stereotypes gained currency in ensuing decades, observers were shocked or indignant to learn that Amish youth traveled on in-line skates and Amish contractors used cell phones on job sites.41

  Inadvertently, popular understandings of the Amish as technophobes also created a mystique about Amish products—in effect, an Amish brand—for consumers looking for distinctive goods that bespoke a plain, homespun aesthetic. The appeal of the Amish brand, mostly promoted by English entrepreneurs, fueled Amish small business growth and a boom in Amish-built furniture and other woodcrafts. Ironically, this demand for homemade products often encouraged Amish entrepreneurs to adopt new technologies in an effort to boost production and match consumer appetites.

  Objects of Tourist Desire

  The consumption of Amish products with their enticing Amish brand was intertwined with Amish-themed tourism. By the mid-1950s, American middle-class tourism was mushrooming. Bus and car tours to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, promised views of an old-fashioned way of life for northeastern urbanites living in a postwar society undergoing dramatic social change. (See fig. 3.2.)

  FIGURE 3.2. Twentieth-Century Social Changes in the United States. Source: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Labor

  The 1955 Broadway musical Plain and Fancy, which mixed Amish family life with a celebration of American self-determination, dramatically boosted tourism. The Amish Farm and House, the first Amish-focused attraction to charge admission, opened east of Lancaster City the same year. Amish tourism in the Midwest picked up in the 1960s with bus tours of Holmes County, Ohio, and the opening of Amish Acres in Nappanee, Indiana, in 1970. Each of these venues mixed images of the Amish as quaint relics with hints that these people might well be the keepers of traditional wisdom in this new atomic age of science and suburbia.42

  A combination of nostalgia and avant-garde art merged in the 1970s and stirred an interest in Amish quilts. In 1971 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City included Amish quilts in an exhibition (and subsequent traveling show), Abstract Design in American Quilts, that treated functional handicraft as boldly designed modern art.43 Collectors began flocking to Amish settlements to buy old quilts, which one scholar dubbed “America’s first abstract art.”44 The sudden rush to acquire their quilts birthed a new cottage industry among Amish women and reshaped their quilting tradition as they adapted to demands for contemporary design. “We have to keep up with what colors are fashionable so we can make the changes from one year to the next,” said one. Within a few years, Doug Tompkins, founder of the Esprit clothing company, had filled his San Francisco headquarters with Amish quilts and opened the building to Californians eager to glimpse a bit of Amish culture that seemed at once both old-fashioned and cutting edge.45

  Amish tourism received a further boost in 1985 thanks to the Academy Award–winning feature film Witness, starring Harrison Ford.46 The film’s unlikely plot revolved around the clash of cultures that flared when a hardened detective found refuge on an Amish farm. Witness presented Amish people as peaceful but naive—sequestered from the world and unfamiliar with modern ways—and helped to spur a steep rise in tourism to Amish communities. In the twenty-five years that followed the film’s release, the annual number of visitors to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, skyrocketed to eleven million.47

  Media Icons: Rumspringa and Forgiveness

  Popular media had been complicit in shaping public perceptions of Amish identity throughout the 1900s, but two events near the turn of the twenty-first century highlighted how Amish Americans had become icons of popular media. In 1998 and again in 2006, high-profile crime stories wove together images of pastoral innocence with hard-edged drama.

  In 1998 two Amish-reared youn
g men linked to a Philadelphia-based cocaine distribution ring that was tied to the Pagans motorcycle gang were caught selling drugs to their Amish friends in Lancaster County. This remarkable collage of images made the “Amish drug bust story” a sensation, but it also revealed that some unbaptized Amish teens lived very differently from their parents, a fact that generated intense media interest.48

  Overnight, Rumspringa—the Pennsylvania Dutch term for the years when teenagers “run around” and socialize with their peers before they join the church—found its way into the vocabulary of reporters. Tapping into popular interest in Rumspringa, an independent film entitled Devil’s Playground tracked drug use among a few Amish teens in northern Indiana. Other media stories focused on alleged child abuse and animal abuse at Amish hands. The theme in this string of exposés was hypocrisy: the Amish had been too good to be true; in fact, they were not very good at all.49

  In 2006 another crime story propelled public perceptions of the Amish in a different direction. On October 2, a non-Amish man entered an Amish school near Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and shot ten girls, five of them fatally, before killing himself. News media swarmed to the crossroads village to cover the horrific shooting in the most idyllic of locations. But within hours, the story of lost innocence shifted to one of bewilderment. Reporters struggled to understand how members of the Amish community almost immediately forgave the shooter and reached out in compassion to members of his family, hugging them at his burial and treating them as fellow victims.

  This incident thrust images of the Amish as an unbelievably forgiving people into hundreds of media stories around the world. Many writers saw the Amish as living Christian values that lots of people professed but few practiced. For their part, the Amish were as uncomfortable with this new status as they had been with the drug bust story, though for different reasons. “The news reports have set a high standard for us,” one confided. “We don’t want to be exalted,” another explained. “Now we’re under the public eye …. We wonder: can we Amish people really be what the public expects of us now?”50

  These stories demonstrate a fluctuating view of the Amish that, as religion and media scholar David Weaver-Zercher has argued, oscillates between two poles. Americans tend to view the Amish as a “saving remnant”—a simple, pious community living life as it once was and still could be. Yet they also see them as a “fallen people”—the subject of exposés and the butt of jokes that purport to reveal the real and repressed nature of their life. In fact, Weaver-Zercher contends, these seemingly conflicting interpretations almost always go together, reassuring modern observers that they need not feel guilty if they admire, but then quickly dismiss, the Amish way.51

  By the twenty-first century, Amish identity was, at least in part, tied up with the expectations, fears, and dreams that mainstream Americans projected onto them. In reality, of course, Amish society is much more complex than any of these popular images, even if Amish people cannot entirely escape their influence. It is to the basic building blocks of their community and way of life that we now turn.

  II

  CULTURAL

  CONTEXT

  CULTURAL CONTEXT

  CHAPTER 4

  RELIGIOUS ROOTS

  * * *

  On a sweltering August Sunday morning, an Ohio Amish congregation gathers for worship on the second floor of a member’s barn. The smell of threshed oats and fresh-cut hay fills the modest sanctuary with the scents of summer. The family hosting church has arranged backless wooden benches into twenty-foot-long rows—four rows for the men and boys that face five rows for the women and girls, with an aisle in between. During the three-hour service, members kneel twice on the bare wood floor to pray. Each time the people turn to kneel facing their benches, the host quickly rises and pulls the barn’s two twelve-foot-high doors shut with a dramatic clang. When the prayer concludes, he reopens the doors. Asked later by a visitor why the doors had been closed, the elderly bishop replies matter-of-factly, “Because Jesus taught us to pray in private” (Matt. 6:5–6).

  * * *

  Sources of Amish Spirituality

  The opening and closing of barn doors on a summer morning offers a glimpse into the interior of Amish religious sensibility. This most simple gesture—fraught with affection for Scripture, humility, and devotion—reveals the community’s deeply Christian roots. It also offers a metaphor for the inner religious lives of the Amish, which have garnered much less scholarly and popular attention than the visible emblems of buggies, quilts, and beards.1 As in other human societies, Amish beliefs become embodied in social practices that, in turn, shape and reproduce their religious views. While their heartfelt commitments may remain concealed by the doors of more visible markers, they permeate all aspects of Amish culture.

  Social scientists have long explored the correspondence between religious beliefs and their social contexts. All religions are nested in particular social systems, and the Amish faith is no exception. The themes of humility, obedience, and patience mesh smoothly with the patterns of a small community that expects its members to deny self-interest for the sake of collective goals. The religious ideals and the social system reinforce each other. Beliefs legitimize social practices, which, in turn, create a plausibility structure that gives credibility to spiritual ideas. We begin by examining several of the roots of Amish spirituality and then describe some of the faith commitments that both shape and are shaped by Amish practices.

  Ancient Authorities

  Amish spirituality is grounded in several sources of inspiration—the Bible, Martyrs Mirror, the Ausbund, the Dordrecht Confession, and various prayer books and devotional writings. The Amish use Martin Luther’s 1534 German translation of the Bible, and when they read the Bible in English, they turn to the 1611 King James Version. Many households own a Bible with the German and English versions printed side by side. Although they rarely use words such as infallibility or inerrancy, which are popular in fundamentalist Protestant circles, Amish people have an abiding confidence in the Bible as an entirely authoritative guide for daily living.

  The Amish give priority to the writings of the New Testament, especially to the teachings of Jesus. Only New Testament texts are read aloud in the church service, and three-quarters of these come from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which recount the life and teaching of Jesus. The Amish especially highlight Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), with its admonitions to be meek, merciful, and pure of heart; to love and forgive enemies; and to trust God’s divine providence.

  Despite the prominence of the New Testament, the Amish do not neglect the Old Testament. Some of its verses are memorized, and many sermons retell the creation story and the lives of Joseph, Abraham, David, and other Hebrew patriarchs and prophets. Scriptures from both Old and New Testaments are used in the rituals of baptism, communion, ordination, weddings, and funerals.2 Nevertheless, the Amish hermeneutic—their way of reading and interpreting the Bible—privileges the New Testament and especially the teachings of Jesus.

  Selections from the Bible are read in every church service, in daily family devotions, and for personal inspiration. Rather than trying to exegete the meaning of a verse, the Amish, in the words of one person, think the Bible can “interpret itself” if the reader believes and obeys the plain sense of the text. Beyond that, they believe that any interpretation should involve the entire congregation and its leaders. As one man explained, “Amish spirituality is grounded in religious tradition connected to scriptural commands, and straying outside those boundaries is viewed as ‘betrayal of Scripture.’ Hence, few go there.”

  Members of an Amish congregation in central Pennsylvania gather for Sunday worship in the home of one of the families. This group drives white-topped buggies. Dennis Hughes

  Scripture is discussed in informal settings, especially within families, but not in organized Bible study groups because, as one member said, “Bible study groups tend to be divisive rather than edifying or unifying.”
Critical analysis, especially by individuals, is discouraged for fear that such study might give rise to factions, challenge traditional authority, and sow discord in the congregation.

  Unity is best promoted, the Amish contend, when all members hear the same preaching and teaching. Congregations grant considerable authority to preachers to interpret the meaning of Scripture and its application to daily life. But even a minister’s interpretation in a sermon is subject to review and possible correction by other preachers at the end of each church service.3

  A Cornerstone Prayer

  The Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus taught to his disciples (Matt. 6:9–13), is the cornerstone of Amish devotional liturgy. The words of this petition are uttered in every worship service, wedding, and funeral. Its phrases flash across Amish minds in silent prayer before and after meals, and they are spoken in the kneeling prayers when the family gathers each evening for devotions. Children memorize the Lord’s Prayer at an early age, and this prayer, so precious to the Amish, is the final, silent plea at the graveside service.

  The Lord’s Prayer is central to Amish devotional life in part because Amish people generally do not compose original prayers for public utterance, thinking that doing so would call too much attention to the one praying. Trying to improve on the words of Jesus, in Amish minds, would be a useless act of pride. One young carpenter explained, “It is a well-rounded prayer. We think it has all the basics, and we don’t think we can improve on Jesus.” A key phrase in this oft-repeated prayer is its pointed reminder of the importance of accepting, without complaint, whatever divine providence brings: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). From cradle to grave, “Thy will be done” etches a deep sense of submission into Amish minds.