To be sure, the technology associated with liquid forms of modernity has some interactive elements. The most popular media are “social” media, and the age of Facebook has multiplied the number of “friends” one may claim around the globe. Yet these forms of interactivity continue to decontextualize even as they promise greater connection. Modernization divides whole systems—psychological, social, and organizational—into discrete parts and then separates them in the name of efficiency and productivity. The trademark of Amish culture is its tightly woven community in which all the strands of social life from birth to death are bundled into a single moral order. To be Amish is to have a particular place in a thick web of church, community, and family ties. Such a web could only be preserved, the Amish thought, by protecting themselves from the process of modernization that threatened to tear their lives asunder. Survival, in short, required separating from the great separator.
Their separatist impulse was shaped, of course, by their Christian conviction that they are mere strangers and pilgrims passing through this world on their way to heaven. The penchant to remain separate motivated them to create sociocultural defenses that help to explain their cultural survival. Only by being a separate people have they been able to preserve the integrity of their local enclaves.
Bargaining Outcomes
In chapter 1 we proposed that the Amish fared well in their struggle with modernity because they were so adept at negotiating with it. We employed this bargaining metaphor as a broad interpretive tool and also as a heuristic device to describe actual negotiations. Throughout the twentieth century, Amish leaders protected nonnegotiable elements of their culture from outside forces, yet they were willing to concede other things to the press of progress. In addition, they put a multitude of issues on the bargaining table—trading back and forth with the agents of progress until they struck a cultural compromise. The Amish brought certain assets to the table: they had economic clout—significant value to tourist-heavy areas as well as to business and agricultural economies in rural areas. Furthermore, some of their religious practices were protected by the First Amendment.
The Amish saga, however, is not a monocultural story with a single grand narrative. Amish affiliations and church districts have bargained in different ways over different issues, producing an assortment of story lines that defy generalization. Some groups have focused on resistance, while others have been more open to adaption and change. Swartzentruber Amish, for example, will sit in jail rather than place triangular slow-moving-vehicle emblems on their buggies, yet their co-religionists in Delaware have no qualms about placing flashing strobe lights on the tops of their buggies. Meanwhile, Lancaster County officials plan to place electronic signs along some roads to warn of slow-moving vehicles, and the Amish there do not protest. Clearly, the account of Amish bargaining is a collection of short stories with different characters and sundry resolutions, some satisfying Amish expectations and others disappointing them.
Amish negotiations with modernity generally result in one of three outcomes: retaining nonnegotiables, making concessions, or devising adaptations.
Nonnegotiables
Despite innumerable differences, Amish groups uniformly have resisted certain aspects of modernity, regardless of region or affiliation. With a few exceptions, the non-negotiable issues noted below remain untarnished by modernity.
Most scholars point to individuation and choice as key earmarks of modernity—and the Amish restrain both.4 Amish people of all stripes reject contemporary notions of individualism. Although members in all affiliations have the freedom to express certain preferences and individual differences, their baptismal vows restrict unfettered individualism. Amish people do have a choice regarding church membership, but a decision to join sharply constricts their subsequent range of choices. In short, the subordination of individual liberty to collective goals remains intact.
The Amish have staunchly avoided urban life, resisting the centrifugal forces of mobility that would pull them away from home. Amish groups have also stalled cultural assimilation by retaining distinctive emblems of separation—notably dress, language, and horse-and-buggy transportation. Their religious belief in separation from the world has enabled them to avert excessive consumerism in the areas of personal technology, household furnishings, leisure, dress, and the fads of popular culture.
Separation from the world also limits both participation in the political system (except, in some cases, voting) and the receipt of financial support from government coffers. Almost all Amish avoid U.S. federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and those living in Ontario generally do not participate in the Canadian health care system. Moreover, Amish people have remained firm in their conscientious objection to participating in war.
The Amish have opposed large centralized, bureaucratic structures in their communities and have persistently rejected the dominant forms of Protestant Christian religious institutions—Sunday schools, church agencies, seminaries, and even church buildings. Sacred ritual is typically one of the last things to crumble when any religious tradition faces pressure to change. The Amish have constructed a fortress around their most sacred areas of faith—including music, worship, weddings, funerals, and selection of leaders—keeping them safe from outside influences. They have avoided ecumenical dialogue, formal theological training, and anglicizing their worship as well as many other popular religious currents.
In twentieth-century America, Amish communities also built a dike against social movements that would have transformed their lives in dramatic ways. Bucking the tides of popular cultural change, they preserved traditional gender roles, large families, and endogamy. They remain insulated from feminism, divorce, pluralism, multiculturalism, and inclusivism.
In a dramatic no to the American embrace of formal education, they do not permit high school and higher education, including study in the fields of engineering, medicine, art, music, and theater. Although they selectively use and adapt much technology, they have categorically spurned television, digital media, and ownership of motor vehicles.
Their resistance has included ideological commitments and sociocultural practices as well as distinctive patterns of social organization. These immutable mainstays of Amish life have withstood the press of progress—at least for now.
Concessions
Despite drawing sharp lines of cultural separation from mainstream society, Amish people readily engage in economic interchange. Far from being self-sufficient, they buy and sell goods in regional, national, and international markets. Although Amish-style capitalism constrains the size of businesses, the power of individuals, and the use of litigation to protect entrepreneurial interests in the marketplace, Amish people do seek profits and do not spurn competition. However, the success of Amish “capitalism” owes as much to accumulated social capital as it does to maximized financial capital.
As we noted in chapter 17, the Amish are not Luddites who abhor technology. Even though they view technological innovation as a threat, they use many basic technologies and judiciously vet new ones according to their potential to help or harm the church-community. The technologies that are accepted or rejected vary by affiliation and district.
Heeding New Testament Scriptures, the Amish pay taxes and obey government regulations insofar as they do not violate their religious conscience. If drafted for military service, they will perform alternative service as designated by the government.
Although the Amish generally avoid the American culture of consumption, even ultraconservative Amish people buy commercial products such as flashlights, hand soap, pesticides, cheese curls, soft drinks, chips, and pizza. The extent of consumerism varies across the gamut of Amish people, from those who rarely shop to those who push carts down the aisles of Walmart and Costco on a regular basis.
Adaptations
A third outcome of the bargaining is cultural compromise. These agreements reflect a mixture of old and new, typically involve some give-an
d-take on both sides, and embody a delicate balance between tradition and modernity. Such adaptation is seen, for example, in distinctions between access and ownership of motor vehicles and in the rise of Amish businesses, which are located halfway between farm work and outside factory work.
While many aspects of Amish agriculture reflect the small family farms of early twentieth-century America, farmers in more liberal groups have adapted many practices of modern agriculture, although none of them have large corporate-style operations. The move into off-farm occupations—another adaptation—is a major foray into the outside world. Those working in English businesses spend many hours in English environments, albeit often surrounded by Amish coworkers. Amish women and men who operate their own businesses have many links to people in the English world, yet they still operate under the canopy of the church. And as we have seen, the growth of Amish-produced publications attests to a growing comfort with speaking, writing, and reading in English, which constitutes still another adaptation.
Over the last century the Amish have developed a growing dependence on the use of outside professionals—physicians, dentists, optometrists, lawyers, veterinarians, agronomists, and business advisors, among others. The “use them but don’t produce them” principle captures the compromise of tapping the services of outside professionals while limiting their own people’s education so that they cannot enter those ranks.
As we have documented, Amish people seem to enjoy tinkering with technology, from household appliances to farm and business equipment. Amish mechanics have created endless adaptations to fit technology to the moral order of their churches. Establishing a firewall between using and owning technology can provide access to motor vehicles and the Internet but still keep some distance from the technology.
Finally, Amish bargaining with government agencies has increased at the local, state, and federal levels, especially since the founding of the National Amish Steering Committee in 1967. Negotiations over zoning regulations are common in some of the older settlements where Amish leaders have well-established relationships with government officials. The bargaining does not always go as smoothly in newer settlements, however. Whether in new or older communities, the negotiations we have chronicled have focused largely on the solid forms of twentieth-century modernity, which are gradually dissolving. Successful bargaining with the liquid modernity of twenty-first-century America may be an entirely different matter.
A Precarious Future
The Yale professors in the mid-1950s who predicted the demise of the Amish could never have imagined that twenty-first-century Amish would be thriving in settlements stretching from Maine to Texas and Colorado. Aware of such dubious projections only six decades ago, we are loath to make any long-term forecasts about the Amish future. We do, however, offer some short-term observations on challenges facing the Amish in the decades to come.
Survival in an iPad World
If the home is a fitting metaphor for pre-industrial society, and if Henry Ford’s factory symbolizes the modern world, the Internet best captures the realities of liquid modernity. Amish resistance to progress in the twentieth century focused on the solid structures of cities, factories, consolidated schools, and mechanical gadgets—cameras, computers, cars, tractors, and telephones. In the twenty-first century, however, many of the cultural borders around those objects have become blurred and fuzzy. In the past, Amish interactions with modernity involved distinctions between sacred and secular, work and leisure, community and self—distinctions that are disappearing in the digital world.
When Apple introduced its first iPad in 2010, it sold a million of them in thirty days. Two years later, three million of a new version were gobbled up in three days.5 With each new smartphone app or Twitter scandal, the Amish seem ever more quaint and hopelessly out of touch. How will a traditional people fare in a hypermodern world in which new technology rolls out at an ever-faster pace? Will the negotiation strategies that served them well in the past century be sufficient to sustain them in an iPad world?
Liquid modernity raises new challenges for religious separatists. In the era of solid modernity, the worldly threats were specific and clear. Visible telephone and electric lines were easily banned from Amish homes. With smartphones and iPads, the old boundaries have evaporated, and these devices, oblivious to all borders, are difficult to control because they can be concealed under a bed or in a closet or even carried to a cornfield. Because television is a purveyor of entertainment, it is not difficult for the Amish to declare it outside the bounds of acceptability. But the iPad and similar devices merge media with diverse purposes—from leisure to work, religion to pornography—in one small gadget. Such convergence across cultural boundaries erodes the old borders drawn by Amish churches.
The fixed lines in Amish culture that held solid modernity at bay for so long are now beginning to dissolve. Digital devices are more unpredictable and dangerous than automobiles ever were because, instead of taking an individual out into the world, the new gadgets bring the entire world, with all its temptations and resources, to the individual. What does separation from the world look like when you can hold the world in your pocket?
Internal Tensions
To those on the outside, life in the Amish world seems unchanging. But that slow-paced appearance is something of an illusion. Many issues, in fact, provoke debate in Amish communities about how to live in a hypermodern world. Four topics currently discussed in Amish circles will likely spur transformations in Amish society in the near future: the role of business, the impact of technology, relations with government, and theological shifts.
The boy on the left shows his younger brother how to send text messages on a cell phone. Amish youth in higher affiliations often text their friends, a practice that is forbidden in traditional communities. Daniel Rodriguez
“Business is business and church is church,” said one Amish businessman. Echoing this radical departure from tradition, another entrepreneur wondered aloud, “Why doesn’t the church just stick to church things on Sunday and let businesses alone during the week?” These simple comments unmask one of the biggest challenges facing progressive affiliations: will local congregations be able to keep Amish businesses within the Amish pasture, or will these new enterprises, like young colts, jump the fence?
Historically, Ordnung regulations applied to all realms of life, including all business endeavors. But the desire to be unbridled by church regulations is growing, and it represents one of the most serious challenges to the Amish world. Some businesses, for example, purchase commercial health insurance for their employees. Others are tempted to litigate to protect their financial interests. Still others are tired of technological restrictions that curtail profits. Ironically, the growth spurt of Amish-owned businesses that kept people out of English factories may, in the long run, break down the restraining fences of the Amish corral.
Discussions of technology are also stirring up strife. In the world of liquid and hypermodernity, Amish people are exposed to state-of-the-art technology, whether through the televisions of hospital waiting rooms, the GPS units guiding their taxi drivers, the latest equipment in their shops, or the cell phones in their pockets. Heated debates about technology are occurring in almost all Amish tribes, from disputes over the use of LED flashlights in ultraconservative groups to the adoption of public electricity in more liberal ones.
Despite long-standing declarations about a strict separation of church and state, Amish entanglements with government—not just through negotiations via the Steering Committee, but through other channels as well—are increasing. Some Amish employees in English factories collect Social Security as well as Medicare and disability benefits. Occasionally, families whose children have disabilities access government-sponsored educational programs provided through public schools. Farmers in some groups accept agricultural price supports and collect environmental preservation funds from government agencies. All of these examples, however limited, show the growing acce
ptance by some Amish of the reach of government into their lives and communities.
Theological changes that subvert deeply entrenched Amish understandings of Christian faith are also afoot. Some Amish people are using evangelical Protestant language to describe their faith, which may prove to be particularly problematic because it represents a shift in moral authority from the group to the individual. Evangelical faith privileges the subjective authority of the individual over communal authority (Ordnung), separates salvation from ethics, and encourages a customized personal spirituality with thinner communal links.
A related issue involves supporting missionary programs that go beyond local charity and civic activities, such as serving in volunteer fire companies and doing reconstruction after natural disasters. Although Amish churches have not established mission agencies, some members of more liberal affiliations contribute financially to mission programs operated by Beachy Amish churches, conservative Mennonite groups, or independent evangelical agencies. Clearly, these individual Amish contributors are sympathetic to evangelical endeavors even though their own churches do not endorse them in a formal way.
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