The Amish

by Donald B. Kraybill

  Pathway now offers a wide variety of titles for many ages, including autobiographies, novels, and children’s books. Historical works include How the Dordrecht Confession Came Down to Us, a booklet by minister Joseph Stoll, and David Luthy’s The Amish in America: Settlements that Failed, 1840–1960. The Benjie and Becky books, a series popular with children, recount the adventures of five-year-old Benjie and nine-year-old Becky—and always end with clear moral lessons. Other books also present the joys and struggles of Amish life, reinforcing through engaging stories the values underpinning the Amish world. For example, in one Pathway book, The Girl in the Mirror, young Emma Bontrager, born to a father who is crippled, must learn to work hard and accept what life brings cheerfully and unselfishly. As the book’s anonymous author notes in the foreword, “It is my sincere wish and prayer that every young reader will be able to identify with the girl in the story and be led to realize that there are more important things in life than living for ‘self.’”8

  Amish-authored stories are often difficult to classify unambiguously as fiction or nonfiction. For Amish readers and writers, nonfiction (books that are true) and realistic fiction (books that could be true) hold more appeal than, say, science fiction or fantasy. Much Amish writing appears to be autobiographical, and even when it is not, it could be. As the author of The Girl in the Mirror notes, “Though the characters are entirely fictitious, the problems are not.”9 Because such works of realistic fiction focus on real-life situations, they teach values important in Amish life: helping others, following church teachings, and giving up one’s selfish desires in order to lead a life of service to family and church.

  A Plethora of Periodicals

  Stories with similar lessons are a mainstay of the monthly magazines that Pathway issues. The oldest of these, predating the publishing house itself, is Blackboard Bulletin, a magazine for teachers. Pathway also publishes Family Life, which first appeared in December 1967, and Young Companion for teens. These periodicals provide original stories, articles, poetry, letters, and news as well as reprinted items the editors think would appeal to their readers. Attesting to the growth of Amish interest in writing, the Family Life editor reminded readers in 2012 that “years ago there was a shortage of material for our papers. … Today we receive far more manuscripts than we can possibly use.”10 The Pathway publications offer specific instruction on how to practice Amish values and faith from a particular perspective. Yet despite their wide distribution, they are unwelcome in the homes of some of the most conservative affiliations. The reason for this, according to founder and editor Joseph Stoll, is that the books may have “too much religion. They [conservatives] might be afraid of Pathway influence. There’s the threat of more progressive influence.”11

  Although Pathway periodicals are well known, they are hardly alone. For example, the Diary of the Old Order Churches (often simply referred to as “the Diary”) has been published monthly in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, since 1969. Each issue includes letters from Amish writers in twenty or more states, with news of baptisms, ordinations, and households moving from one settlement to another. The most distinctive features are special interest columns for “sky watchers,” bird watchers, mathematicians, and historians, and “The Hausfrau Diary” for housewives.

  The Diary’s topical columns presaged a flurry of new topical or regionally focused periodicals that began during the 1990s and early 2000s.12 For example, School Echoes, published in Elkhart County, Indiana, since 2001, is a monthly magazine that includes commentaries and advice from teachers, short articles written by children, word puzzles, and line drawings for children to color. Other special interest publications include Life’s Special Sunbeams, published monthly for parents of special needs children, and Ladies Journal, first published in 2010, which offers “inspiration and encouragement by women of faith.” Plain Communities Business Exchange appears monthly, and Von das Schlacht Haus (From the Slaughter House) comes out nine times a year. Other publications are more general. Plain Interests, first issued in 2001, has found wide readership with its historical reminiscences and articles on health, gardening, and everyday topics. In 2012, one Amish publisher counted at least fifty Amish subscription publications.13 A sampler of publications appears in table 20.1.

  Table 20.1. Sampler of Amish Publications

  Correspondence Newspapers

  The Budget (weekly)

  Die Botschaft (weekly)

  The Diary (monthly)

  Regional Newsletters

  Der Kierche Brief (Ashland, OH)

  Die Bote (LaFarge, WI)

  Der Gemeinde Brief (Burton, OH)

  The Grapevine (IA)

  Lancaster Gemeinde Brief (Lancaster, PA)

  Gemeinde Register (Sugarcreek, OH)

  Die Blatt (IN, MI, WI)

  Plain Connections (WI, MN)

  Religious Periodicals

  Family Life (monthly for all ages)

  Young Companion (monthly for teens)

  Beside the Still Waters (monthly devotional)

  Tagliches Manna (monthly devotional)

  Topical Periodicals

  Blackboard Bulletin (monthly)

  School Echoes (monthly)

  Life’s Special Sunbeams (monthly)

  Ladies Journal (bimonthly)

  Nature Trails (monthly)

  Plain Communities Business Exchange (monthly)

  Farming (quarterly)

  Buggy Builders Bulletin (quarterly)

  Truck Patch News (monthly)

  Perhaps most notable has been the growth in the number of church newsletters, which include community announcements, listings of where church services were held the previous Sunday, which ministers preached, and who will host services on upcoming Sundays. Many newsletters also post classified advertisements and the telephone numbers of non-Amish drivers who provide taxi service.

  Inscribing Community

  While church newsletters and specialized periodicals present many facets of the Amish world, two widely read correspondence newspapers, the Budget and Die Botschaft, transcend differences in geography and even Ordnung, to some degree, thereby fostering a broad, inclusive sense of Amish communities grounded in common conversations.14 These weekly newspapers have no screaming headlines or paid writers. Instead, like the Diary and the church newsletters, they rely on correspondents—referred to as “scribes”—from various settlements to write letters (in English) relaying local events, which the editors then publish in a straightforward, multi-column format without any photos, editing, or commentary. A typical issue of Die Botschaft contains 747 letters from 683 communities in 25 states and Ontario.15

  The news in these papers focuses on family and community. With the exception of comments on the weather, in fact, many of the reports cover similar content. There is little in the letter from a Kentucky scribe that makes it particularly Kentuckian. Indeed, at any particular time, many scribes write about similar things: church services, accidents, planting, harvesting, visiting, hunting, weddings, burials, and births. “Our church services at Robert A. Troyer’s yesterday was well attended with many visitors,” reported one scribe from Baltic, Ohio, before listing a dozen of the visitors. Two columns to the left, another Ohio writer noted that they “were blessed with a beautiful day after the area received 3 or more inches of rain” and that “John and Ruth Raber say ‘It’s a boy.’ They have named him Bruce. … Grands are Abe J. C. Rabers and Wayne M. Millers.”16

  The similarity in content from letter to letter reinforces the notion that the individual settlements do, indeed, form a larger community. The formulaic organization of the letters further contributes to the sense of oneness. Each begins with a comment on the weather or seasonal activities, followed by church news and life events. If Amish correspondence papers seem strikingly different from social media outlets such as Facebook, they are not. Both these imagined communities—created without face-to-face interaction—bear important similarities. As with online interest groups, the subjects abo
ut which Amish scribes write—and those they avoid—combine to create a world of insider knowledge, assumed taboos, and a shared sense of a larger Plain society. For example, letters casually referring to buggy transportation and advertisements selling driving harnesses and offering taxi services normalize the absence of driver’s licenses.

  Women apparently comprise a majority of the correspondents in the Budget and Die Botschaft. One study found that 46 percent of Budget letters were signed with a woman’s name, and another third were signed ambiguously with the name of a married couple or family. An analysis of letters signed by couples or families, as well as anecdotal reports, suggests that a sizable majority of them are also written by women. Less than a fifth of the letters in both newspapers were submitted by men alone.17

  Although the two papers foster an interstate sense of Amish unity, they have nurtured different perceptions of Amish worlds. The Budget, begun in the nineteenth century and published by a non-Amish firm in Sugarcreek, Ohio, has never enforced tight control over the content of letters. Correspondents represent an array of Amish and Mennonite groups, though many have roots in or some connection to eastern Ohio even if they live elsewhere. Thus, the Budget includes letters by ex-Amish, notices for evangelical books and audio recordings, and business advertisements with close-up photographs of people.

  By the 1970s, such ads, along with letters from former Amish that seemed to encourage defection, were too much for some conservative readers. In response, they launched Die Botschaft in 1975, with much sharper editorial guidelines and restrictions to minimize offense to traditionalists. When the English editor of Die Botschaft allowed an advertisement for cell phones in late 2003, for example, the board of Amish deacons that monitors the paper intervened to discontinue it.18 Although some Botschaft readers had cell phones—and the advertiser was a Lancaster firm with Amish accounts—the Amish advisers to Die Botschaft were uncomfortable because they wanted the paper to present a more explicitly traditional identity.19 By about the 1990s, Die Botschaft had probably surpassed the Budget in number of Amish readers, though not in total number of subscribers. Despite their differences, both papers construct and reinforce Amish commonalities amid persistent diversity.

  Coming at the very time that television and video images were increasingly driving the discourse of mainstream society, the photo-less, black-and-white, old-fashioned design of correspondence newspapers like Die Botschaft drew a bold boundary between Amish life and the rise of a YouTube culture. The upswing of Amish publications also documents the growing disparity within Amish worlds both in content and format—from the black-and-white plainness of Buggy Builders Bulletin to the glossy, four-color, professional design of Ladies Journal, which began in 2010.

  Amish writing and publishing, in all its forms, strengthens community cohesion across time and space by emphasizing values that unite even disparate Amish groups. The flourishing of Amish print culture since the middle of the twentieth century represents a significant cultural shift, one with the potential to mold Amish identity in a variety of ways.20

  Fictional Portrayals for the Rest of Us

  Amish writers for the Budget and Die Botschaft are not the only people inventing Amish worlds through print. Non-Amish fiction writers also construct Amish images that often have more to do with the popular desires and cultural needs of wider American society than with any single Amish community in particular.21 Some onlookers see a quaint, simple folk practicing traditional values of a pioneer past where time moves more slowly but faith is stronger. For others, the Amish are an example of a history best left behind or a suffocating conformity out of sync with America’s celebration of individual freedom. All of these images are communicated and perpetuated by outside authors who have turned out hundreds of Amish-themed short stories and novels, including mysteries, romances, science fiction, and children’s books—works that carry messages that are, in their own ways, as didactic as any Amish-published book of religious doctrine.

  Exotic But Pure Relics of the Past

  For many Americans, the Amish are, as Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw put it, “talismans that link us concretely with the past.”22 A common theme over the years has been the Amish as exotics. Young readers encountered it in the 1955 Nancy Drew adventure The Witch Tree Symbol. It emerges too in the story of sixteen-year-old Texas teenager Leah, the heroine in Lurlene McDaniel’s 1990s trilogy Angels Watching Over Me, Lifted Up By Angels, and Until Angels Close My Eyes, as Leah finds first love with a young Amish man named Ethan. The Amish even act in old-fashioned ways when they participate in contemporary crime stories, from Tamar Myers’s Pennsylvania Dutch mysteries and the Ohio Amish mysteries of P. L. Gaus to Plain Truth by acclaimed novelist Jodi Picoult.

  From these books, outside readers learn that all Amish ride in buggies and lack electricity and that all the women make quilts and all the men build barns. Readers also learn that these exotic people dress so similarly that they are hard to tell apart. Nancy Drew encounters “an Amish woman, wearing a black dress that reached the top of her high shoes, a black bonnet, and a white shoulder kerchief and apron” and is surprised to see that she is young.23 Meribah, the nineteenth-century Amish protagonist in Kathryn Lasky’s novel Beyond the Divide, wonders “what it would feel like to wear a colorful dress.” Instead, “her gray gown and cap” mark her as “one of those pee-culiar sorts with the weird religion and funny talk.”24

  And in these books, the Amish do talk funny. Some speak English in a blend of unvoiced consonants and superlative compounds—the chust wonderful-gut (just wonderfully good) of Beverly Lewis’s protagonists—while others, like Nancy Drew’s young Amish friend Henner, speak mixed-up English: “Oh, Nancy … you kept us from being dead already yet.”25 McDaniel’s Ethan sets himself apart from other seventeen-year-olds by his archaic language, but by the second volume of the trilogy, Leah finds Ethan’s speech musical and wonders at his “quaint” use of words.

  Living in an old-fashioned, tech-free zone, the Amish of popular novels demonstrate the simplicity and stability of the past.26 They are variously quirky, simple, naive folk, yet they are wise in their simplicity. McDaniel’s Leah is amazed by Ethan’s “naiveté and unworldliness,” and Ethan’s brother Eli characterizes the Amish as “living in the eighteenth century.”27 Although Freni, the cook in Myers’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Crime, is “not as strict as some of her brethren,” she finds “everything about the outside world … an enigma” and believes that “even a quick stop at McDonald’s is enough to jeopardize one’s soul.”28

  These books offer an Amish world that is “uncomplicated” and full of “large Amish houses and barns, Daadihauses, grape arbors, and watering troughs.”29 Nancy Drew and her friends encountered “methodically planned, beautiful farm country,” in which “they saw straight green fields of corn, as well as potatoes and tobacco.” And they were charmed by “weedless vegetable gardens … surrounded by neat borders of flowers—cockscomb, begonia, and geranium … in profusion.”30 In short, these novels invite readers to visit an imagined world—uncomplicated by sophistication, yet seemingly healthier than their own.

  Saviors of the World

  Another genre of Amish-themed fiction presents the Amish as a counterbalance to the terror and uncertainty of a future in which science determines all. In the midst of a pervasive technology that is obscure to ordinary people, the Amish guard the secrets that can enable human survival. For example, science fiction author Allen Kim Lang theorized in 1962 that cultures reverse technologically as humans engage in interplanetary colonization. Amish settlers are thus ideal colonizers because they can help other space travelers develop survival skills for recovery. In Lang’s short story “Blind Man’s Lantern,” Amish newlyweds Aaron and Martha Stoltzfoos journey to the planet Murna in search of farmland that is scarce on overpopulated and overdeveloped Earth. In return for their land, the Stoltzfooses are supposed to help an earlier set of space travelers take the planet “back toward the machine age.”
Martha is a scientist, but she uses a microscope “designed to work by lamplight, as the worldly vanity of electric light would ill suit an Old Order bacteriologist.”31

  Other science fiction writers have used the Amish to represent the antithesis of science and progress—in short, to represent humanity’s saviors. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge, the Hamish, an agrarian folk farming in the ruins of the galactic capitol, hide important secrets. In Greg Bear’s Nebula Award–winning work Moving Mars, a visiting Martian seeks out the Amish, “who had finally accepted the use of computers, but not thinkers [artificial intelligence computers].”32

  Science fiction writers are not the only authors who find in the Amish a powerful antidote to modernity’s alienation from nature. In Barbara Workinger’s 2002 mystery In Dutch Again, big city journalist Ian Hunter is enthralled by the assertion of Amish dairy farmer Daniel that “it took many children to work the farms since the Amish didn’t use modern farm machinery but relied on horses.”

  “Your people are real ecologists,” Ian commented.