Professor Victor A. McKusick, a pioneer in the field of medical genetics, began researching Amish genetics in the 1960s. His work was greatly advanced in 1989 when Dr. D. Holmes Morton cofounded the Clinic for Special Children near Strasburg, Pennsylvania, to provide diagnostic and comprehensive medical care for Amish and Mennonite children with inherited genetic diseases.48 In its practice of genomic medicine, this nonprofit organization blends clinical care with research on metabolic disorders by applying the knowledge of genetics to the everyday practice of medicine. Since its inception, physicians and scientists at the clinic have worked to identify the molecular basis for common disorders in the Amish and Mennonite population and are able to test for some 120 genetic conditions.49 Using these new understandings of heritable diseases, the clinic provides diagnostic services and comprehensive outpatient care for more than two thousand patients in several states at the remarkably low cost of $800 per person.50
A similar clinic serving Amish people in Ohio and eight other states, Das Deutsch Center, was initiated by Dr. Heng Wang in 2000 in Middlefield, Ohio.51 Providing state-of-the-art clinical care and diagnostic testing, the Center’s professional staff has identified and treated more than seventy rare and genetic disorders, some of which are distinctive to the Geauga County settlement.
These two clinics also serve non-Amish children with rare inherited diseases. With collaborating scholars, the researchers of these clinics have published dozens of articles that advance scientific knowledge of metabolic disorders. The clinical care and scientific advances of these two clinics have spurred Amish and Mennonite communities in other areas to establish similar ventures.52
Since 1995 Dr. Alan R. Shuldiner of the University of Maryland has conducted scientific investigations involving more than six thousand Amish adults who have participated to advance the understanding of various diseases as well as to receive free medical evaluations and screenings for common diseases.53 The research staff and Amish liaisons at Shuldiner’s Amish Research Clinic have investigated a variety of health issues, including obesity, longevity, blood pressure, osteoporosis, mood disorders, and diabetes. The clinic’s research team has produced dozens of scientific articles reporting findings that yield new health information that will benefit Amish and English patients alike.54 Amish participants in genetics studies often express deep satisfaction that their cooperation in these studies will help thousands of non-Amish doctors and patients.55
Health Care as Burden and Gift
Few topics unveil the diversity of Amish views toward modern science and their understanding of divine providence as well as health care practices. Members in some affiliations staunchly resist standard care, believing that they should accept whatever comes as God’s will and therefore making widespread use of folk remedies and alternative medicine. Other people accept organ transplants, heart surgery, and knee replacements, and readily participate in scientific studies to advance knowledge about the human genome. Clearly, when it comes to using science to fix illness and ailments, Amish people are scattered across the continuum from resistance to acceptance.
No matter where along the spectrum a particular Amish household falls, health care can be both a burden and a gift. If illness and the medical expenses it engenders become too great for a single person or family to shoulder, the church will spring into action with emotional, physical, and financial support. Caring for the physical needs of others, including the elderly and the disabled, is understood by Amish people as a Christian duty described in the Bible as “bearing one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2). In their words, such care is simply “being Amish.”
In addition to health care, this particular way of being Amish in the world also comes to bear on Amish interactions with the state, civic society, and charitable organizations, which we explore in the following chapter.
CHAPTER 19
GOVERNMENT AND CIVIC RELATIONS
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In November 2011, Jacob U. Gingerich sent a handwritten letter to 138 members of the Kentucky legislature. Earlier in the year Gingerich, a member of the Swartzentruber Amish affiliation, had spent two weeks in prison for driving a buggy without a fluorescent orange slow-moving-vehicle (SMV) triangle. As Gingerich explained in his letter, the SMV’s triangular shape represents the Christian trinity, and his church considers affixing such a symbol as a “badge for our protection” to be a pagan talisman. As well, his church “forbids … bright, loud and gaudy colors. … It is our religious belief to abide by the law of the land, as long as it does not interfere with our religion.” Gingerich hoped that Kentucky would adopt laws similar to those in at least eleven other states that permit buggy owners to use lanterns and outline their carriages in reflective silver tape rather than affix the SMV triangle, which “we cannot in good conscious [sic] use.”
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Subjects and Citizens
The conflict over SMV triangles in Kentucky reflects key elements of Amish interaction with the state. Gingerich’s humbly worded petition, mirroring the spirit of Gelassenheit and using an old-fashioned medium of communication to address the most bureaucratic structures of the state, shows the cultural gap between Amish and mainstream ways. Journalists following the story noted that “in a high tech world of iPads and smart phones,” Gingerich’s handwritten letters caught the attention of legislators, who in 2012 took steps to amend Kentucky’s highway code along the lines Gingerich suggested.1
The confrontation in Kentucky reveals how Amish encounters with the state combine a spirit of deference with an insistence that faith should not budge in the face of governmental power. God has “ordained that there should be a secular government … to protect the good and punish the evil,” one influential Amish text intones. But if government “asks us to do something that the Bible forbids … our first loyalty must always be to God.”2 In addition, this discord points to the diversity of Amish practices since the vast majority of Amish have no problem with the SMV and quietly wonder why the Swartzentrubers so adamantly oppose it. A more liberal Amish man, for example, after reading in his local newspaper about the SMV dispute in Kentucky, wrote a letter to the editor calling the actions of his Kentucky brethren a “disgrace,” because the Bible “teaches us to submit to the ordinances of man.”3
Despite such diversity—or perhaps because of it—Amish struggles with the state also shed light on the nature of the modern nation-state, its understanding of minority rights, its treatment of dissenters, its expansive regulatory power, and its reliance on the courts to settle disputes that elected officials cannot or will not touch.4
At first blush, Amish understandings of government might seem like a bundle of contradictions. The Amish appreciate civic order, legal property ownership, and other fruits of a functional state. “We have much to be thankful for to live in a land of religious freedom,” one writer affirms. Yet the Amish will not fight to defend the state, participate in the military, or serve on juries. On the one hand, they affirm that God has ordained government, but on the other hand, they assert that this does not “mean God is pleased with all governments,” especially those that are “corrupt” and “doing the opposite of what they are ordained for.” Yet Amish people also believe they have no “right to resist a corrupt government,” protest against it, or try to change it. Instead, they conclude, “We should express our gratitude, live in quiet obedience, and pray for our rulers”—and, following Jesus’s example in Matthew 17:24–27, pay taxes.5
Amish relations with the state are complicated by their refusal to initiate litigation or use the law aggressively to defend themselves. They view such acts as coercion, which violates the nonresistant teachings of Jesus to love enemies and avoid retaliation. A transgression of this deeply held belief will trigger excommunication in most Amish affiliations. This noncombative stance of Gelassenheit handicaps them somewhat in a system of law that assumes that litigation is often necessary to obtain justice. On some occasions Amish people will reluctantly sign on as plaintiffs in laws
uits prepared by sympathetic third parties.6
This seeming ambivalence makes more sense if we understand that the Amish, like their European forebears, see their relationship to the state as that of subjects rather than citizens. Subjects are people who petition for privileges and negotiate certain obligations in return. In contrast, citizens believe that they have rights and responsibilities common to all citizens. Unlike subjects, who live under the authority and patronage of a ruler, citizens actually comprise the state itself. Citizens possess rights without asking for them and have responsibilities whether they want them or not. Citizenship is, in theory, universal in its protections and its demands. Citizens engage one another as political equals in electoral campaigns and support the state through public and military service. Subjects do not assume that all people should be treated equally but rather that each group of people should arrange its own distinct privileges and duties with the powers that be. In this sense, subjects can simultaneously be grateful for government and see it as something quite foreign to their daily lives.
When the Amish first began to settle in colonial North America, they started moving toward citizen-style participation in public life. They eagerly obtained North American land titles and worked with the provincial government to secure their real estate rights. Yet after more than two and a half centuries of life in the United States, even though Amish people have absorbed some elements of democratic citizenship, their subject-like orientation remains striking. In a face-off with government, they often respond by appealing to the highest executive authority and asking for some dispensation, even if the matter might better be solved, from a political perspective, through judicial or bureaucratic channels. For example, responding to a Pennsylvania law that raised the age for compulsory school attendance, Amish petitioners wrote “To Our Men in Authority,” clearly stating that they objected to the law, but concluding, “We beg your pardon for bringing all this before you, and worrying you, and bringing you a serious problem.”7 The petition was hardly a model of modern citizen activism. When Amish issues of religious liberty have made it into the courts or the halls of Congress, they have almost always been presented by sympathetic outsiders.8
Encounters with the Law
The overriding narrative of Amish encounters with the state is one of principled obedience. The Amish do not object to paying sales tax or having a lawyer draw up a will. Likewise, Amish violations of criminal law are rare. Before the 1930s, few Amish conflicts took on legal dimensions, and the state generally resolved them in favor of the church. In 1917, for example, Jacob Schmucker, excommunicated in Geauga County, Ohio, sued the settlement’s leaders because his shunning “prevented [church] members … from continuing to work with” him or enter into “contracts” with him, and it “interfered with the domestic tranquility” of his life. In this and similar cases involving shunning, the courts have ruled in favor of the church and avoided overturning or otherwise becoming involved in matters of church discipline.9
During the twentieth century, however, the rise of what scholars call the “warfare state” and the “welfare state” have dramatically expanded and strengthened the power of government to define and regulate more closely matters of public safety and security and intervene more directly in citizens’ lives. These developments boosted the number of Amish conflicts with the state. Amish people who speak to government officials, such as Jacob Gingerich, who objected to using an SMV triangle, express a sincere desire to obey all laws that do not conflict with church teaching, but laws and administrative regulations increasingly deal with matters of daily life that have long been governed by the Ordnung. Religious liberty in the United States is constitutionally the right to worship and engage in private religious rituals unhindered. The public implications of religion, on the other hand, are less clear because they must be balanced against competing claims of public good. For example, conscientious objection from military service, even when an expression of religious conviction, is not a constitutional right but an allowance granted by Congress as the legislature seeks to draw a line between private faith and public responsibility.10 For the Amish, however, the distinction between private devotion and public practice is not persuasive because the wide sweep of their faith covers both dimensions.
Amish entanglements with the law can be sorted into several categories.11 The first consists of clear violations of the law, such as child abuse or disregard for federal environmental protection regulations, which do not turn on questions of religious liberty.12 If an Amish teenager is arrested for underage drinking, for example, or an Amish business is denied a noise variance, the Amish do not expect any special consideration because they are Amish. In fact, in those cases in which an Amish or Amish-reared individual is arrested for a crime, he or she typically reacts with church-inspired humility and immediately confesses everything—to the consternation of the defense attorneys.
In the second category are regulations that do not appear to outsiders to pertain to religious matters but are in fact intrusive for some Amish groups. Examples include zoning laws that prohibit adding a Dawdyhaus for grandparents, building codes that require electrical wiring in new homes, extraordinary medical interventions on young children, child labor laws, state mandates for Amish businesses to participate in workers’ compensation plans, and municipal regulations that prohibit stabling horses on small plots of land.
A third set of encounters are those involving more obvious claims of religious liberty or matters of serious church conviction, such as conscientious objection during wartime and Amish prohibitions of photo identification.
Some conflicts between the Amish and the state arouse the interest and patronage of outsiders—principally religious liberty advocates and civil libertarians—who take up Amish causes and engage in vigorous litigation on their behalf. High-profile clashes over public school attendance laws during the 1960s and conflicts over local zoning laws in the early twenty-first century have received such outside attention and support.
Standing Up to the State
The earliest Amish claims of religious exemption stem from their pacifist refusal to participate in the military. Amish nonresistance was tested by the American Revolution, and years later dozens of Amish men used all available means to win exemption from conscription during the Civil War. During World War I, when there were few provisions for conscientious objectors (COs), Amish men often reported to military induction camps when they were drafted and quietly insisted that they would not serve as combatants or noncombatants under any form of military authority. Some camp commanders ignored Amish COs or sent them home on farm furloughs, while others used harsh physical punishment and psychological harassment to try to crack—unsuccessfully, it turned out—their commitment. Stories that portray “nonresistance under test” as a heroic stance continue to circulate in Amish communities.13
During the Second World War, the U.S. government permitted COs to perform alternative civilian service in hospitals, forestry, and national parks, in lieu of military assignment. In those years and the Cold War decades that followed, Amish men who were drafted overwhelmingly declared themselves conscientious objectors and typically were assigned to alternative service in understaffed city hospitals. Amish men who were drafted during that period remain deeply grateful for the CO provisions and frequently cite the government’s respect for COs as an example of the religious liberty they enjoy.14
If Amish relations with the Department of Defense proved conciliatory, those with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) during the 1950s were confrontational. In 1955 Congress extended Social Security provisions to include self-employed farmers, effectively bringing the Amish—who at that time were almost all farmers—within the bounds of the system for the first time.15 Amish leaders viewed the nation’s old-age pensions and benefits for orphans and the disabled as a secular insurance program that undercut the church’s practice of caring for its own members, and they refused to cooperate. From the Amish perspective, resisting Social
Security did not contradict the Bible’s injunction to pay taxes (Matt. 17:24–27) because they saw Social Security as a form of insurance and not as a tax. “If we do not pay Social Security, does this not give us an excuse to refrain from filing [income taxes]?” asked one Amish primer, before offering a clear no: “If our income is large enough that the law requires us to file, then by all means we ought to do so.” Objection to Social Security ran deeper than the taboo on insurance and was rooted in the Amish sense of separation from the state. The same booklet explained, “Every time we accept a handout from the government we become obligated to it” and soon “why should we not fight its wars?”16 For the Amish, conscientious objection to war and to Social Security were twin issues.
IRS agents began garnisheeing money from Amish bank accounts, but some Amish simply closed their accounts. In a dramatic move in 1958, the government foreclosed on several farms to recover lost Social Security funds. During the next two years, the IRS forcibly collected from 130 Amish households. The confrontation that received the most attention occurred in 1961 when federal officials placed a lien on the workhorses of Valentine Y. Byler of New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. Later in springtime, agents arrived at Byler’s farm while he was plowing, unhitched three of his horses and led them away as confiscated property. Reader’s Digest magazine published Byler’s story as an account of federal power run amok.17 Byler sued for damages, but his church forced him to withdraw the suit because it mocked the spirit of nonresistance.
In 1965 Congress exempted self-employed Amish from the Medicare program and from Social Security. Until 1988 Amish employers and employees were still liable for all Social Security taxes, but then Congress expanded the exemption to include Amish who work for Amish employers. Amish employed by English employers, however, must contribute fully to Social Security, even though many refuse to draw benefits to which they are entitled.18
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