Proliferating Brands of Amishness
Amish population growth and geographical sprawl will likely spawn greater diversity, producing an evolving number of Amish identities, propelled in part by congregation-based ecclesial authority. With some two thousand Gmays, there are already nearly that many different ways of being Amish, and the diversity of Amish identities will surely multiply in the future. The proliferation of diversity is not necessarily a threat to Amish life, but it will continue to confront their communities as well as baffle outsiders seeking an easy definition of what it means to be Amish.
The diversity in the Amish world reflects the issues and concerns that drive Amish communities to resist or adopt new technologies and to their different ways of interacting with outsiders. In its own way, each Gmay grapples with how to adapt to changing technology, government regulations, and mainstream social mores that encroach on Amish practice. Moreover, each district has to contend with its own internal struggles whenever its members cannot agree on how to respond to external challenges.
Many Amish youth in the highest groups are up to date on the latest electronic gadgets and Hollywood goings-on, and even the most conservative Amish families feel increasingly squeezed by the intruding world. Growing diversity means parents in different communities face different challenges as Amish children grow up in different Amish worlds. While their peers in Lancaster County or Elkhart–LaGrange are on Facebook, teens in ultraconservative groups may be unsure how to use a cell phone. Before baptism, liberal Amish youth drive cars and dress like the English, while their conservative peers engage in bed courtship and continue to sing slow German songs at youth gatherings. One Amish man lamented the growing differences between Amish affiliations as evidence of disobedience and the imminent return of Christ: “There are so many different groups now. This tells you the end is near.”
If the Amish population continues to grow at its present rate, it will produce more remote rural settlements with traditional practices like butchering and barn raisings at the same time that those activities are vanishing in the communities that have a shrinking agricultural base. Another consequence of the growing diversity may be that the most liberal Amish will be less likely to support their ultraconservative brethren when they refuse to install smoke detectors or affix slow-moving-vehicle emblems on their carriages. The affiliations at the opposite extremes of the Amish spectrum use each other to define themselves. Commenting on the wide gap between Amish tribes, one Swartzentruber bishop confessed that the Lancaster County Amish are as different from his own people as his non-Amish neighbors.
For mainstream Americans, the growing diversity of the Amish world and the expansion of Amish settlements will likely spawn local conflicts related to horse-drawn transportation, zoning, building permits, child labor, and competition between Amish and English contractors. Hollywood stereotypes simply cannot begin to prepare locals for an influx of new Amish neighbors who settle nearby. Local people may be disappointed when their Amish neighbors do not fit the stereotypes—or annoyed when they do. In any case, the growing diversity among and within Amish affiliations poses a challenge for the future.
Will Amish Cars Fly?
In a playful essay about the future of Amish society in the year 2100, Brad Igou speculates that, while the rest of the world flies about in airmobiles, the Amish will be driving rebuilt cars left over from the mid-2000s.6 We agree that Amish cars likely will not fly, but more importantly, we think that Igou is onto a key point about the Amish future and how they adapt: that is, that Amish identity is ever evolving as their practices change. Amish practices in the twentieth century generally lagged behind those of mainstream North America, creating sharp differences that defined in public ways what it meant to be Amish. When American farmers added rubber on the wheels of their tractors, the Amish retained steel wheels. When vacuum milking machines entered American barns in the 1940s, the Amish were slow to adopt them. Only a few settlements had accepted vacuum milkers in the 1950s, while others waited until the 1990s, and a few others still continue milking by hand in the twenty-first century. Although the Amish may be late adopters, they do nonetheless adopt—and even more often adapt—modern practices. So if airmobiles ever do fly in the skies, the Amish might be driving Amish-adapted cars while sporting a new but distinctive identity.
Airmobiles or not, Amish identities will evolve as the twenty-first century unfolds, and this evolution may hold some challenges. We noted in chapter 8 that the more traditional communities are the fastest growing ones and that they will likely become a larger slice of the Amish pie in the future. In addition, some of the more liberal affiliations may reduce the most conspicuous signs of Amishness and define their identity more by personal faith and private religious ritual within their church-communities. This raises a key question: Will horse-drawn transportation remain the litmus test of what it means to be Amish? The answer is likely yes for those groups who seek cultural separation and rural isolation, but perhaps others will develop new forms of Amish identity. A change-minded Amish bishop recently confided, “We probably made a mistake when we didn’t accept the car,” a harbinger that some churches may eventually trade in their horses for cars and cross the historic line of Amish identity.
In 2002, the Miller family left their Amish church in Wisconsin for an Amish community in Montana. Seven years later they moved to Idaho with their nine children. “We’ve kind of come out of the box,” explained Mrs. Miller. Out of the Amish box, they have joined the world of regular clothes, DVDs, cars, and computers. Yet, she says, “We’re not trying to throw everything away. We’re trying to keep family first, that’s really, really important for me and my husband.”7 Millions of other Americans would say the same thing. But any semblance of Amish identity for families like the Millers will fade fast without the support of a broader Amish community. Because they live by themselves, the Millers’ attempt to shrink parts of their Amish identity while holding onto other parts may not be as easy as they hope.
All human groups have their flags—their symbols of identity—although some are more prominent than others. So despite all the variants of Amish life, particular affiliations will still retain an Amish identity in one way or another. Yet a critical question remains: Will the commercial hype affixed to them in the twenty-first century alter Amish identities? Will Amish people begin to think of themselves mostly through the images created by the marketplace—as merely the makers of buggies, furniture, and quilts? Such a relationship could create an economic dependence in which Amish people become captive to producing what the market demands. If that happens, their unique cultural practices will be perpetuated more because their economic survival requires it and less because their faith commends it. If so, these sectarian separatists may be staking their very survival on the admiration of a world they were taught to despise.
American Ties That Bind
We have emphasized the otherness of Amish life as expressed in their public symbols of identity. Yet the Amish are tax-paying citizens who contribute to the national economy and appeal to the First Amendment to protect their religious practices. The Amish and English are, in many ways, interdependent, a fact that cannot be ignored in any speculation about Amish futures.
Amish people often rely on their non-Amish neighbors for a variety of small favors, from access to a home freezer to use of a phone to a ride to the local hospital in an emergency. They shop in non-Amish stores, and some sell food and crafts to tourists at roadside stands. The Amish use commercial banks, eat in English restaurants, buy medicines from local pharmacies, and distribute products from their shops across the country. In the more progressive communities, Amish people work for outside employers. In short, Amish people rely on the outside world for their economic well-being.
A more profound link exists, however, between the Amish and their non-Amish neighbors. Even as the Amish interact with the secular world, they reject it, and in doing so, they define themselves. Being Amish means rejecting the lifes
tyles of the English world. In that sense, the Amish need the English so that they know who they are not.
But the English need the Amish too. While the Amish define themselves in opposition to “the world,” their worldly neighbors often look to the Amish for inspiration on how to live a simpler, more unadorned life. In their rejection of cars, televisions, and other trappings of technology, the Amish seem somehow more authentic and unvarnished than outsiders and are frequently referred to as models of resistance to modernity. As a result, the Amish have, ironically, become part of modern American popular culture, the stuff of fiction by writers as diverse as Carolyn Keene, P. L. Gaus, Beverly Lewis, and Jodi Picoult.
The Amish have spurned mainstream lifestyles, but we cannot reject them. They are fellow citizens, acknowledged and accepted, even as they try to separate themselves from us. Accepting and accommodating the Amish and other plain-dressing Anabaptist groups has become an expression of the American commitment to religious freedom, free speech, cultural diversity, and even religious values. Just as Amish churches need us to set the worldly norms they reject, we need them as fellow citizens, for they reinforce our notions of the American character and our legal and cultural commitment to religious liberty, freedom, and the right to be different.
Much of Amish survival and growth can be attributed to their deft ability to negotiate with modernity, but that is only half of the story. They have also flourished in America because of American tolerance of dissenters, respect for minority rights, and First Amendment protection of religious practice without state intrusion. By serving as a test case for religious liberty, the Amish have helped to define the American character.
Thus, the English and Amish exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship, a mutualism in which each is necessary for the other to thrive. As noted earlier, legal scholar Garrett Epps calls the Amish a persistent grain of sand in the American oyster. What they seek, he says, “is not the right to remain the same, but the right to change at their own pace and in their own season. … They remain irreducibly other, stubbornly themselves. We have tried and failed to absorb and Americanize the Amish and we should be grateful that we failed.”8
The Amish and the Modern Soul
Several headlines in North American newspapers during the thirty years from 1888 to 1918 tell the tale of turn-of-the-century public perceptions of the Amish:
A Queer Religious Sect
A Queer People and Their Ways
Odd in Many Ways: They Are a Strange People9
Images of Amish people as backward and ignorant continued into the mid-1900s and then shifted toward more positive representations after 1960. The development of tourism and the Amish defense of rural one-room schools may have helped revise their popular image.10 The widely viewed feature film Witness in 1985, and seven years later, Vogue magazine’s fourteen-page, full-color spread of new fashions, photographed in Lancaster County and titled “The Great Plain,” pointed to the rise of the Amish in popular culture.11 In 2011 the New York Times, in an article titled “Amish Fashion Week,” reported that Dior Homme was featuring “soft, draped, plain, [clothing with] the boys wearing flat, wide-brimmed hats … a sudden flashback to Alexander Godunov as an Amish dreamboat farmer in Witness.”12 And the website Trend Hunter suggested in November 2011 that “Amish-inspired fashions are taking the world by storm.”13
Rather than denigrating Amish people or calling them odd and archaic, twenty-first-century North Americans are now welcoming their look, their difference, and their novelty.14 In the tolerant ethos of liquid modernity, Amish ways are not generally scorned but instead are seen as interesting expressions of cultural diversity that deserve at least minimal respect. Plain people, whose martyr ancestors centuries ago were torched for their religious beliefs, now have become objects of public curiosity and admiration. And in an ironic twist of history, both the automobile and the television, forbidden by the Amish in order to keep the world at bay, now bring outsiders by the millions into real and virtual Amish Country.
Some visitors hope to discover in the Amish a genuine connection to their imagined American past. Others, troubled by the pace and stress of contemporary life, want to explore the wholeness that seems to grace Plain communities. Still others are charmed by a people who have had the stubborn courage to temper the forces of modernity. The enthusiasts of liquid modernity affirm the Amish, buy their goods, and emulate their fashion, however loosely. Visitors are uncertain, however, whether the Amish are viable prototypes for contemporary living or cultural leftovers of yore.
Why are we so intrigued by the Amish? They are, of course, different, but mere difference is not enough to explain the extent to which they absorb us. Is it their courage to buck the tide of progress that wins our admiration? Are we drawn to their sense of place, their strength of identity, their apparent security, and even their sense of confidence? Their presumed slower pace of life attracts those of us living harried and frenzied lives. Do we admire their ability to fashion a humane system that seems to meet basic human needs in a satisfying way? In the midst of a fragmented world, their sense of wholeness lures and inspires us. For whatever reason, they seem to have discovered an alternate way to fill some of the longings of the human heart.
The Amish might have been ahead of the times in their critique of modernity, but they are not postmodernists, even though they bask in its tolerance. In many ways, they repudiate the chorus of postmodern themes—relativism, consumerism, inclusiveness, and the pleasures of spectacle. As we have shown, they heed ancient religious authorities, contend for communal constraints, and erect walls of separation—all of which defy postmodern sensitivities. So why, ironically, are we fascinated by a people who eschew many of the values that most of us cherish—individualism, inclusivity, tolerance, choice, and diversity? Most of the things the Amish reject, says one scholar, “are the precise things that Americans cherish … and that have made our country great and wealthy.”15
Flavor is a Japanese bakery that sells “Amish Country” pastries based on authentic Amish recipes as well as other baked goods. This Japanese saleswoman, dressed in “Amish” garb, offers samples to customers in the transit terminal at Nagoya, Japan. Donald B. Kraybill
How is it that we are captivated by a people whose ways we also may find troublesome, even offensive? We are annoyed by folks who limit education, reject evolution, dismiss gender equality, curb personal freedom, and stifle personal achievement and artistic expression. Amish pleas for yielding to community feel oppressive, sexist, and suffocating by some contemporary standards. Their exclusivity and church-prescribed uniformity irritate our penchant for diversity and pluralism. Likewise, their unwavering commitment to permanence in marriage and church vows offends our inclinations for experimentation and change. Their fidelity to tradition—conforming to church regulations, driving similar carriages, dressing alike—also nags us. Are these folks, we wonder, mere puppets of their culture, controlled by the strings of religious tradition?
The rigidity of their moral order seems to squelch the human spirit and squander human potential. Consider the hundreds of potential pilots, chemists, nurses, lawyers, playwrights, and violinists who instead cultivate crops, wash dishes, and pound nails in Amish shops. Certainly it would be a dark and dismal world if everyone joined the Amish and shunned science, higher education, open inquiry, and artistic creativity.
Amish ways indeed trouble the modern soul. Their communal constraints have crafted a secure cultural home without the aid of higher education. They rely very little on government safety nets, yet the homeless and uninsured are missing from their ranks. Widows and orphans, the destitute and the disabled, receive respect and care within their community. Their spontaneous, humane social security efforts spring into action in the face of fire, disability, sickness, senility, and death. Drug abuse and poverty are rare. Youth are occasionally arrested for disturbing the peace or driving under the influence, but violent crime is virtually nil. Divorce is unheard of, and the elderly grow
old within a caring circle of family and friends.
As in any society there are unhappy marriages, cantankerous personalities, family feuds, and cases of sexual abuse. As one grandmother noted, “We have our good ones and our bad ones, just like other people.” But all things considered, Amish quality-of-life indicators are remarkably robust. “Which society,” asked one Amish father pensively, “has the most lonely and homeless people?” In Amish society, youthful teachers master the craft of teaching without the benefit of high school—let alone college. Amish eight-grade private schools produce thousands of entrepreneurs who are able to develop and manage thriving businesses. Work pulses with meaning, human dignity, and a delight in artisanship. Extended family networks provide care throughout the life cycle. Ironically, Amish people seem to be in charge of their destiny with little strategic planning or effort.
Most troubling of all is the possibility that, despite our abundance of high-tech gadgets, leisure time, and national efforts to control things and dominate the world, the Amish pursuit of happiness might produce more satisfied—even happier—lives than the rest of us experience. Despite all our comfort and convenience seeking, the possibility that these homespun folks are happier bothers at least some of us. It seems that in some uncanny way the Amish may have outwitted us—or perhaps even outwitted modernity itself.
Amish ways trouble us because they challenge our assumptions about bigness, progress, diversity, education, freedom, individual dignity, and tradition. They propose that tolerance and individualism may have to yield if they spoil the virtues of an orderly community. The upside-down values of Amish life esteem tradition more than change, lift communal goals above personal ones, acclaim work over consumption, and place personal sacrifice above achievement. They raise doubts about whether the mantra of hypermodernity—more, newer, bigger, faster, and more powerful—necessarily means better.
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