In the Midwest, Amish contributions more often flow toward Christian Aid Ministries (CAM), an international relief organization begun in 1981 in Holmes County by an Ohio businessman who was then a member of the New Order Amish.46 CAM’s constituency is largely plain-dressing Mennonites and Beachy Amish, but many Amish people also contribute time or money to CAM, which bills itself as “a trustworthy, efficient channel for Amish, Mennonite, and other conservative Anabaptist groups” seeking to “minister to physical and spiritual needs around the world.”47 In 2011 CAM operated directly in thirty-four countries—eight of which hosted permanent office facilities, schools, or orphanages—and distributed nearly 90,000 food parcels, more than 2.2 million Bibles and other books, some 56,000 pounds of seeds, and almost 26,000 comforters.48 Amish volunteers are highly involved in CAM’s warehouses in Kalona, Iowa; Shipshewana, Indiana; and elsewhere. Giving to CAM and to MCC reflects the evolving Amish economy. A shift away from farming, in which wealth was lodged in land and commodities, to small businesses and self-employment increased financial liquidity, making cash donations more common.
Some Amish people also engage in public service through the Conservative Anabaptist Service Program (CASP). In 2011, for example, a team of twenty-one Amish workers did reconstruction work at a Lake Michigan Recreation Area operated by the U.S. Forest Service. CASP was developed as a government-approved option for alternative service for conscientious objectors if a military draft is renewed.49
Amish donors, bidders, and auctioneers are central to the success of a network of Haiti Benefit Auctions hosted in a number of midwestern Amish settlements and in Sarasota, Florida, and eastern Pennsylvania. These auctions annually raise significant contributions for several conservative Mennonite mission agencies that operate projects in Haiti.50
Financial support for these organizations points to some of the practical limits of Amish charitable work. Although many Amish contribute regularly to Beachy Amish and Mennonite overseas projects through CAM and other avenues, almost no Amish serve as individual missionaries or aid workers. Virtually all Amish churches prohibit air travel, and Amish theology has long been skeptical of verbal evangelism unaccompanied by the corporate witness of an entire community. Some New Order Amish, who are allowed to fly and whose theology is more open to mission work, have served in overseas assignments, often with CAM or with Master’s International Ministries in Ukraine.51
One uniquely Amish transnational project is a partnership between Amish schoolteachers from the United States and highly traditional, plain-dressing Old Colony Mennonites who live in northern Mexico and are descended from Russo-German immigrants. This project circumvents Amish dictates against evangelism and air travel: the relationship does not involve proselytizing, and the Amish can travel to Mexico by train or bus.
The partnership began in the mid-1990s when an Amish delegation visited Mexico and met with Old Colony Mennonite leaders. The Mennonites had struggled with poverty, and their schools were inadequate; the Amish visitors saw an opportunity to help a group that was ethnically and theologically similar to their own. These contacts evolved into the Old Colony Support Committee, which draws on donations and volunteers from Amish settlements in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Indiana, and Montana to place Amish teachers in Old Colony schools where they head up classrooms and train Mennonite teachers. About two hundred Amish teachers and support staff have served in Mexico, with many of them returning multiple times for four- to six-month terms. Virtually all the teachers are single women whose written reports and “prayer cards” are distributed to Amish supporters, giving them a status akin to missionaries in other traditions. The Old Colony Support Committee provides a quarterly newsletter but remains quintessentially Amish—it has no office or paid staff and holds its low-key annual meetings in members’ homes.52
The American Oyster
In his 1972 opinion in Wisconsin v. Yoder, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “We must not forget that in the Middle Ages important values of the civilization of the western world were preserved by members of religious orders who isolated themselves from all worldly influences against great obstacles. There can be no assumption that today’s majority is ‘right’ and the Amish and others like them are ‘wrong.’ A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.”53 Burger’s sentiment—that the Amish have something to teach other Americans about dissent and democracy—has been echoed by many civil libertarians and religious freedom advocates over the past forty years.
Law professor Garrett Epps, although appreciative of the Yoder decision, has wondered if Americans fully understand what the Amish encounter with the state really means. The United States has permitted only a limited degree of religious diversity, Epps notes, because the country tends to transform religious traditions “until they take on a particular American character”—one marked by individual belief, voluntary choice, and universal values—that makes them all pale versions of one another.
The Amish, however, refuse to fit into this American mold, persisting in their un-American style of a collective faith and particular way of life. “Their struggle is for their own survival as a community, not for the liberty of society as a whole,” Epps argues. They refuse “to simply become yet another American faith competing in the free market” of denominations, which James Madison and other founders of the nation imagined. As such, the Amish have become like a grain of sand in the American oyster—a minority group that has “resisted … the majority’s hostility” and acted as an “irritant that cannot be absorbed or digested” but might yet “be transformed into a pearl.”54
Whether Americans recognize that pearl, and how they value the Amish irritant, may say more about the nature of American democracy than do the words of Justice Burger, who elsewhere in his opinion suggested that the Amish represent the best of American values. In actuality, the Amish stand in sharp contrast to a prized American value like individualism.
Amish encounters with government and their engagement with civic life more broadly reveal the diverse and contested nature of Amish society. Outsiders both scorn them and rally to their defense. Some partisan activists, bemused by constituents who act like subjects rather than citizens, use the Amish for political gain. The impersonal and bureaucratic nature of government requires that Amish people speak with one voice, but even the National Amish Steering Committee refuses to negotiate on behalf of everyone who claims the Amish name. Clearly, the Amish do not speak with one voice. In fact they publish in many voices, as we shall learn in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 20
THE AMISH IN PRINT
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In 1975 a small group of Amish leaders led by Ezra Wagler, a deacon in Bowling Green, Missouri, launched a weekly correspondence newspaper entitled Die Botschaft exclusively for horse-and-buggy-driving readers. The paper is composed of reader-submitted letters that recount the often mundane events of life in dozens of settlements across North America. Subscribers can remain abreast of births and deaths, track the weather, and learn who hosted church services in any number of communities. Innocuous as such material might seem, the content of the paper is not left to chance. A five-member board of deacons monitors Die Botschaft ’s content and advertising, overseeing “what is acceptable to be printed and who is acceptable as writers.” Explicit guidelines prohibit “murder or love poems or stories” and “letters of religious discussion or criticism.” Similar restrictions apply to advertisements: “No photos of people in ads,” “No books on positive thinking or how to get smart,” “No Mysteries, War, and Love stories.”
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Amish Identity in a World of Print
The extent to which Amish people read and write often surprises outside observers. Despite skepticism about higher education, the Amish have prolific writers, and every large settlement—and some smaller ones—include Amish printers and publishers. Amish authors c
reate a diverse array of works, ranging from professionally published books such as The Amazing Story of the Ausbund, written by a minster in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, settlement and sold publicly, to “On the Beutiful [sic] Country Days,” a collection of original poetry photocopied by a fifteen-year-old girl for her friends and relatives. Some parents pen reminiscences for their children and grandchildren, others write and publish stories of personal grief to help console and encourage those similarly afflicted, and still others compile family genealogies or submit articles and poems to one of the many Amish-edited periodicals.
For some Amish authors, writing provides a personal creative outlet, even if it is an anonymous one. In the humble spirit of Gelassenheit, many works are published without the author’s name. But that feature of Amish authorship points to what is often its larger purpose: supporting the values of the community. Publications as diverse as memoirs, doctrinal works, and cookbooks all reinforce community ties and traditions. For example, The Amazing Story of the Ausbund was published in the hope that “the churches of our days may be reminded of things we should be learning from history. We may be standing in greater danger of losing out on many of the beliefs and practices of the early Christians and the first Anabaptists than most of us realize.”1
Cookbooks also connect communities and perpetuate traditions. Cooking with the Horse & Buggy People, a collection of recipes from the large Holmes County, Ohio, settlement, subtly communicates the separation from mainstream society by providing treatments for ailments that would send some non-Amish people to the nearest hospital. There are folk remedies for whooping cough, snake bites, and—alarmingly—“mad dog” bites, as well as a “spring tonic” that combines sulfur, cream of tartar, and Epsom salts in a jar of water. By preserving Amish culinary practices in writing, cookbooks help to transmit a particularly Amish food culture.
But the Amish are not the only ones who use print to reinforce particular notions of Amishness. Non-Amish novelists have employed Amish characters and settings in hundreds of books and short stories. Some writers present the Amish as simple folk who have rejected all technology and are somehow more “real” and honest than most Americans, while others present their own form of morality tale by focusing on what they perceive to be Amish imperfections and shortcomings. The authors of Amish-themed romance novels blend rurality and religion with very chaste romance in ways that have lured millions of readers.2 The growing corpus of Amish literature produced by both Amish and non-Amish writers warrants attention for the ways it mediates and even constructs Amish identity.
Publishing for Amish Purposes
Amish writing and publishing are not new phenomena. Reformation-era Anabaptist literature such as the Ausbund hymns and the Martyrs Mirror account of church history continues to inform Amish life. In the late 1800s, Iowa schoolteacher Samuel D. Guengerich edited Herold der Wahrheit, a periodical to which many midwestern Amish households subscribed. Yet writing and publishing remained tangential to Amish life until the mid-twentieth century. The massive outpouring of print within Amish society in the half century since 1960 shows a gradual shift from a German-based oral discourse to an English-based print one. This movement from orality to text-based literacy reveals the influence of modernity’s press toward formality and abstraction. Moreover, the plethora of Amish-produced publications offers new ways of formulating and thickening Amish ties across increasingly diverse affiliations.
Producing Schoolbooks
Publishing that was distinctly Amish came into its own because of the need for textbooks and other materials for the emerging network of Amish schools. Initially, many Amish school directors, desiring to maintain a traditional public school curriculum, simply bought discarded texts from neighboring rural public schools. As the number of Amish schools mushroomed, however, there were not enough cast-off books to supply the Amish demand. Moreover, textbook companies continued to revise their titles, and Amish parents grew uncomfortable with the newer versions. The best solution, it seemed, was for the Amish to begin producing their own books.
The first sizable Amish publisher, Gordonville Print Shop, was already an established printing company in central Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, when Andrew S. Kinsinger bought the business in 1957 from its non-Amish owner. A year later, Kinsinger became the first chair of the Old Order Book Society of Pennsylvania, a group that had formed to acquire textbooks for Amish schools. For Kinsinger, using the printshop to produce textbooks specifically for Amish (and Old Order Mennonite) schools was a logical step. In 1958 Gordonville Print Shop obtained the rights to several out-of-print public school textbook series and began to reprint them. Twenty years later, the printshop was employing “four to six people working in the print room” and offered “a full line of books, workbooks, record sheets … as well as a full line of supplies … for the schools.”3 Under the direction of the Old Order Book Society, Gordonville continues to supply schools in the most conservative Amish communities with textbooks that were standard in public schools several generations ago.4
Although the Gordonville books assured parents that their children were learning from the same texts they themselves had used, some leaders in the Amish school movement hoped that private schooling would play a more active role in preparing children for Amish life, and for that task they needed books written specifically for Amish readers. In the summer of 1963, Joseph Stoll and David Wagler discussed publishing school books while threshing oats on their Aylmer, Ontario, farms. Wagler had just started a mail order bookstore and was getting requests for out-of-print books. The men talked about reprinting titles, but soon the conversation turned to writing and publishing “some of our own.” As Stoll recalled, “There was some question about who would be the printer. We turned it over to Jacob Eicher [then a minister], who said, ‘I can’t write or sell books, but I can run machinery.’”5
The following spring, Stoll, Wagler, and Eicher incorporated Pathway Publishing Corporation (now Pathway Publishers) and began writing and publishing a line of new textbooks specifically for Amish students. The first of these Pathway Readers appeared four years later, in 1968. Unlike the old public school texts reprinted by Gordonville, the Pathway Readers intentionally reinforce contemporary Amish identity. Many of the fiction and nonfiction stories, particularly in the books for younger children, are set in Amish families and communities, with little reference to mainstream society. The reading books for the upper grades do include some selections by non-Amish authors, but they have been carefully chosen to reinforce Amish values.
In 1995 a former Pathway editor, Delbert Farmwald, and his wife, Linda, started a third Amish publishing company, Study Time, in LaGrange County, Indiana. Farmwald had become dissatisfied with the textbooks available for teaching arithmetic in Amish schools. Many schools were still using the Strayer-Upton series first published in the 1930s and kept in print by Gordonville Print Shop.6
Intertwining Amish life and Anabaptist heritage with world events, Study Time mathematics books are designed to prepare Amish children for daily interaction with the broader, outside world. The few illustrations in the texts present the world that children see, with backhoes and dump trucks as well as horses and baskets of corn, while the math problems reinforce Amish ways of dealing with that world. The series draws on American and world history for its problems. Students calculate the average number of patents issued per year from 1500 to 2000, for example, and determine the proportion of volcanoes that are active in Japan.
Study Time editors want their textbooks to encourage students to think for themselves, but at the same time prepare them for eternal life. For example, in a note printed inside the front cover of the arithmetic books, the editors assert that “it is obvious that numbers, facts, and their calculating procedures are so orderly, so accurate, and so consistently dependable that the Author [God] of this entire system of concepts must have been infinitely greater and wiser and keener than the human mind.”
Study Time also publishes a number of
other titles, including a geography textbook. In a break with tradition, it also produces a multivolume preschool activity set designed to prepare preschoolers for deskwork and the English language. Although the most conservative Amish parents would see little use for such materials, some parents in more progressive communities begin school-like activities in their homes before their children enter school.
Getting Amish Authors into Print
Alongside the production of schoolbooks has been the development, especially since the 1960s, of an Amish literature—books written by the Amish for the Amish—designed to both entertain and instruct. Pathway Publishers has been a leader in providing such books for all ages. Pathway’s first hardcover book, Worth Dying For, was, in fact, not a textbook but rather a story of religious persecution in the days prior to the Reformation. Published in 1964, Worth Dying For represented Wagler’s dream of producing “sound reading materials” that would supplant the kinds of reading matter finding its way into Amish homes that, in the eyes of Wagler, too often taught “a false kind of religion which is contrary to the faith of our fathers in such vital points as nonresistance and non-conformity to the world.”7 Another early Pathway title was The Mighty Whirlwind, which recounted the experiences of those who lived through the tornadoes that struck northern Indiana on Palm Sunday in 1965. The book included captivating first-person Amish accounts of the storms and their aftermath, along with reflections on divine providence.
The Amish Page 46