The Amish
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23. M. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, 79.
24. Handbuch für Bischof, 33. A listing of Scriptures and hymns typically used in the communion service appears in M. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, 272–300.
25. Verse three of Ausbund, song 84, pp. 449–50, translated in M. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, 291.
26. “Most Humble Position?”
27. The kiss is mentioned in Rom. 16:16, 1 Cor. 16:20, 2 Cor. 13:12, 1 Thess. 5:26, and 1 Peter 5:14. For an Amish interpretation of it, see “Christian Greeting.” Ministers in all groups greet each other with the kiss and also use it to seal rites such as baptism and ordination. In some groups, lay members of the same gender greet each other with the kiss, but in other affiliations they perform the rite only at the close of the footwashing ritual.
28. For a brief statement opposing public display of alms, see “Public Alms,” 8.
29. M. Beachy, “Decided by Lot”; E. Stoll, “Ordaining by Lot”; D. Wagler, “Ordinations in the Church,” 35.
30. E. Stoll, “Preparing for an Ordination,” 9.
31. Luthy describes ordination procedures and variations in “Survey of Amish Ordination Customs.” P. Yoder, Tradition and Transition, 60–64, gives a history of the ritual. M. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, 301–13, provides the typical hymns, Scriptures, and prayers used in the service.
32. Some New Order churches and a few other groups hold a separate preordination service, during which candidates are nominated, a few days before the ordination service. The logistics of nomination vary somewhat by region and affiliation. In Geauga County, Ohio, for instance, the leaders sit by an open window while members file by outside, whispering the name of their nominee through the window.
33. Illinois Directory, 32–34.
34. In the ordination of a bishop, the candidate kneels on the floor as the supervising bishop gives the charge while two others place their right hands on the candidate’s head.
35. Procedures for confession are outlined in Handbuch für Bischof. M. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, 376–92, provides resources for the reinstatement of a fallen member.
36. The length of the temporary ban varies by local custom, affiliation, and the circumstances.
37. Complete wording appears in M. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, 378–79.
38. We discuss mental health and views about counseling in chapter 18.
CHAPTER 6. THE AMISH WAY
Epigraph: A & M Trustee Committee, “Plain Community Alternative.” See also Randy Ludlow, “Amish Demand to Judge Their Own,” Columbus [OH] Dispatch, Dec. 12, 2010.
1. Sections of this chapter are adapted from Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, chap. 2. Debate about the definition of culture has a long history in both anthropology and sociology. One aspect of that discussion focuses on whether culture motivates people to act or if its primary function is to justify past actions. We understand culture as doing both. For a persuasive argument for the dual-process model, see Vaisey, “Motivation and Justification.”
2. Sandra Cronk, in her 1977 doctoral dissertation, “Gelassenheit: The Rites of the Redemptive Process,” was the first scholar to identify Gelassenheit in Old Order communities. Donald Kraybill, in Riddle of Amish Culture, used the concept to interpret Amish culture. Numerous Amish and Old Order Mennonite writers have warmly invoked the concept since Cronk introduced it: E. Kline, Theology of the Will of Man, 3; P. Kline, “Gelassenheit”; Martin, Distinctive Teachings, 45–72; and Joseph Miller, “Peculiar Beauty of Gelassenheit.”
3. We are indebted to Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, as well as Swartz, Culture and Power, for understanding Gelassenheit as a master disposition in Amish life. In Bourdieu’s terms, Gelassenheit is habitus—a habit-forming, transposable disposition that blends perceptions and action, sentiment and social structure together. As a disposition, habitus has both structure and propensity that are shaped by early socialization toward action. For another application of habitus to Amish society, see Reschly’s Amish on the Iowa Prairie.
4. P. Kline, “Gelassenheit.”
5. “The Big ‘I,’” 6–8. For modern perspectives, see Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.
6. Letter to Emma Huyard King, April 25, 1993; emphasis added.
7. 1001 Questions, 76–77.
8. E. Stoll, “Cheap Shirts and Shallow Reasoning,” 10.
9. Quotes in this paragraph and the next are from a letter to Donald Kraybill, Oct. 12, 2009.
10. Amish parents talk about children needing to “learn to give up” and accept what comes, rather than asserting their own will. See J. Hostetler, “Anabaptist Conceptions of Child Nurture.”
11. M. Smucker, “How Amish Children View Themselves,” 226–29.
12. This quote and the next are from Guidelines in Regards to Parochial Schools, 47, 50.
13. For two Amish views that support spanking, see 1001 Questions, 98–101, and “Cruelest Kind of Child Abuse.”
14. “Rules of a Godly Life,” 69, 71.
15. The few Amish church disciplines available in writing typically condemn pride and admonish members to express humility. An Ordnung of 1779 in Germany instructs ministers to serve “not in pride or as lords, but in humility and holiness.” Clothing should display “lowliness and humility.” (See Christlicher Ordnung.) The rejection of outward adornment is rooted in various Scriptures, including 1 Tim. 2:9 and 1 Peter 3:3–4.
16. These verses are highlighted in 1001 Questions, 125–26.
17. 1001 Questions, 125.
18. “Rules of a Godly Life,” 99.
19. Letter, Feb. 23, 1993, in Donald Kraybill’s files.
20. “Proud Look,” 12–13.
21. The Pennsylvania Ordnung of 1837 and the Ohio Ordnung of 1865 both explicitly forbid mirrors (the Ohio Ordnung says “large mirrors”) on the walls of houses. A late twentieth-century Daviess County, Indiana, Ordnung also eschews “large mirrors.”
22. Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion, 244.
23. Emphasis added.
24. Yoder and Estes, Proceedings of the Amish Ministers’ Meetings, 218–20.
25. Ibid., 258.
26. See M. Lehman, “Amish Taboo on Photography”; D. Lehman, “Graven Images.”
27. [E. Stoll], Strangers and Pilgrims, 4–5.
28. D. Wagler, “What Is Left to Write About?,” 4.
29. “Simple Living,” 18.
30. During the U.S. economic recession of 2008–2010, some other Americans turned to the Amish as exemplars of thrift and frugality. See Craker, Money Secrets of the Amish.
31. John K. Lapp Jr., Social Booklet, 2–4. For another Amish perspective, see “Scrimping: Good or Bad.”
32. Letter to Donald Kraybill, Oct. 12, 2009.
33. Letter to Karen Johnson-Weiner, Nov. 23, 2010.
34. Auctioneering is not sanctioned by all Amish communities. In traditional affiliations, a member of the family will serve as an informal auctioneer for family auctions—but not in front of a public audience.
35. A & M Trustee Committee, “Plain Community Alternative,” 3.
36. “The Millers,” letter to Kyle Martin, April 26, 2008, in Donald Kraybill’s files.
37. R. Troyer, “Selling Cut Flowers,” 41. Women in the most traditional groups do not have separate flower gardens, but they delight in having well-tended flower “patches” in their vegetable gardens.
38. Women often tease men about hunting not for meat but for the “rack,” or antlers. Men generally keep the rack, and some even hang it in an out-of-the way spot in a shop or barn.
39. The quotations in this paragraph and the next appeared in various reports in the December 2008 issue of the Diary.
40. Lancaster County Amish man, “Ask an Amishman: What do the Amish think about Jews?,” Amish America (blog), March 16, 2009, http://amishamerica.com/ask-an-amishman-what-do-the-amish-think-about-jews/.
41. Orr, “Public Library Usage,” 15.
42.
When learning to read, children are told that reading for pleasure happens only after they have done all their chores.
43. Staff Notes, Family Life, Jan. 2010, 7.
44. Barbara Ebersol (1846–1922) made beautiful, colorful fraktur bookplates described by Luthy in Amish Folk Artist Barbara Ebersol. In Two Amish Folk Artists, Louise Stoltzfus provides an overview of the work of Ebersol and watercolorist and furniture maker Henry Lapp (1862–1904). For overviews of the decorative Amish arts, see Herr, Amish Arts of Lancaster County, and McCauley and McCauley, Decorative Arts.
45. Keith Elliot Greenberg, “Amish Painter Tries to Blend the Best of Both Her Worlds,” USA Today, Jan. 29, 1991.
46. www.facebook.com/StoltzfusDigitalAbstractArt.
47. See www.amishcookonline.com; Sharon Cohen, “The Amish Cook: A Little Lifestyle, Religion—and Food,” News–Gazette (Champaign-Urbana, IL), Aug. 3, 2000; and Eicher and Williams, Amish Cook at Home.
48. Other examples of Amish publishing under their own names include Enos Detweiler, father of six, a schoolteacher and part-time farmer in Van Buren County, Iowa, who writes a column, “A Week with the Amish,” for Our Iowa magazine, and a schoolteacher, Loren Beachy, who writes a biweekly column, “The Plain Side,” for the Goshen News.
CHAPTER 7. SYMBOLS AND IDENTITY
Epigraph: Furlong, “Research Papers.” For her full story, see Furlong, Why I Left the Amish.
1. Our analysis of distinctions in a group’s moral order rests on the classic work of Bourdieu, Distinction; Douglas, Purity and Danger; Wuthnow et al., Cultural Analysis; and Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order.
2. Although all Amish groups permit deer hunting, some prohibit the use of florescent orange safety clothing or traveling out of state to hunt.
3. In applying biblical principles to issues of daily life, the Ordnung operates much like Mid-rash in the Jewish tradition.
4. In some settlements, leaders write down portions of the Ordnung, but even in such cases the resulting document is not published and distributed as a “rule book.” A written Ordnung is most common in newer settlements composed of households that have migrated from different settlements with differing Ordnung expectations. In such cases, oral tradition does not provide a common bond, so certain agreed-upon decisions in the new settlement may be written down for clarity.
5. [ J. Beiler], “Ordnung,” 383; See also J. Stoll, “Rule to Measure By.”
6. Furlong, “Research Papers.”
7. Pennsylvania “Dutch” is often considered a misnomer, that is, a mistaken English corruption of the word Deutsch (the German word for “German”). However, as the Oxford English Dictionary demonstrates, in the eighteenth century the word Dutch was the proper English word for people and places of the Rhine Valley. Thus, English sources of the 1700s spoke of Dutch immigrants where later sources spoke of Germans. Eighteenth-century English sources used the terms Holland Dutch or Low Dutch to refer to those who today would be described as residents of the Netherlands. Louden, “Pennsylvania Dutch,” offers an excellent overview of the origins and formation of this language. D. Yoder, “Two Worlds in the Dutch Country,” discusses the origin and evolution of the dialect. Related resources include Beam, Revised Pennsylvania German Dictionary, and Haag, Pennsylvania German Reader and Grammar. See also Louden, “Bilingualism and Syntactic Change,” “Covert Prestige,” “Image of the Old Order Amish,” “Old Order Amish Verbal Behavior,” and “Patterns of Language Maintenance,” as well as Seifert, Word Atlas of Pennsylvania German. Enninger’s Language and Language Use provides a comprehensive listing of research on Pennsylvania Dutch.
8. A dialect is a variety of language “defined by both geographical factors and social factors” (Mihalicek and Wilson, Language Files, 689). Linguists generally use the catchall term language variety because the distinction between a dialect and a language is arbitrary; there is no definition of either that will adequately cover all cases. We refer to Pennsylvania Dutch as a dialect because it is a regional/social variant. It is also unstandardized, another common (though not obligatory) attribute of a dialect. At one time Pennsylvania Dutch was widely spoken; however, its use is now largely limited to sectarian groups, primarily the Amish and horse-and-buggy-driving Old Order Mennonites.
There are numerous variations of Pennsylvania Dutch; for example, the translators of Es Nei Teshtament, a translation of the King James Version of the New Testament into the dialect say, “In any Pennsylvania Deitsch publication, dialect variation cannot be ignored. This translation, with minor differences, is essentially the dialect spoken by the Amish in Ohio” (v–vi). Attempts have been made to document (and thus implicitly standardize) Pennsylvania Dutch vocabulary and grammar, notably by Marcus B. Lambert, whose Pennsylvania-German Dictionary appeared in 1924; J. William Frey, whose Simple Grammar of Pennsylvania Dutch first appeared in 1942; Albert F. Buffington and Preston A. Barba, authors of Pennsylvania German Grammar; Lee R. Thierwechter, Das is wie mer’s saagt in Deitsch; Joshua R. Brown and Douglas J. Madenford, Schwetz mol Deitsch; and C. Richard Beam, an indefatigable advocate of Pennsylvania Dutch scholarship (see, e.g., his Revised Pennsylvania German Dictionary). Beam is also the author of Es Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch Eck, a column written in Pennsylvania Dutch that appears regularly in the Budget. Most of these works use the Buffington-Barba orthography, a sound-spelling system devised to present Pennsylvania Dutch in written form (see http://home.ptd.net/~tconrad1/dutch_pronounce_vowels.html). This system was officially adopted by the Pennsylvania German Society (see www.pgs.org/dialect_column.asp). Yet while most varieties of Pennsylvania Dutch are mutually intelligible when spoken, the Buffington-Barba orthography is often difficult for Amish Pennsylvania Dutch speakers to read. Throughout this text, when we use Pennsylvania Dutch words, we have spelled them the way they are generally spelled by Amish writers, although that varies considerably, depending on their affiliation and region. For example, although “church” appears as Gemee in Beam’s dictionary (32), we have spelled it Gmay.
9. The Swiss Amish came to the United States in the 1850s and originally settled in Indiana. See Nolt and Meyers, Plain Diversity, 58–70, 101–20, 146–62. Representing about 6 percent of all Amish, they have 124 congregations in eight states with a total population of approximately 16,750. Swiss Amish speak Shwitsa, or Swiss German, which is difficult for Pennsylvania Dutch speakers to understand. A growing number of Swiss-German speakers are now learning Pennsylvania Dutch as a fourth language.
10. One study estimated that at least 256,000 people in ten traditional Anabaptist groups in 2009 spoke Pennsylvania Dutch (Kraybill, Nolt, and Scott, “Language Use among Anabaptist Groups”).
11. Although the Amish originally were a small minority of the Pennsylvania Dutch–speaking population, they and the horse-and-buggy-driving Old Order Mennonites are now the primary groups using the language and passing it on to their children. See Burridge, “Separate and Peculiar”; Huffines, “Pennsylvania German” and “Strategies of Language Maintenance.” For more research on Pennsylvania Dutch structure, maintenance, and sociolinguistic importance, see Enninger, “Linguistic Markers of Anabaptist Ethnicity” and “English of the Old Order Amish”; Fuller, “Sociopragmatic Values of Pennsylvania German”; Johnson-Weiner, “Keeping Dutch,” “Group Identity,” and “Community Identity”; and Keiser, “Pennsylvania German.”
12. See Das Leicht Büchlein.
13. In Meiner Jugend, 5.
14. M. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, v. The book is handsomely designed, with parallel columns of English and German. Two essays published anonymously in the August 2011 issue of Blackboard Bulletin reflect the concern of leaders about the decline of German: “Preserving Our German” and “The German Dilemma.”
15. Songs of the Ausbund, 1:iv.
16. Such translations are rarely seen in the most conservative communities because their members have a better command of the German language.
17. Johnson-Weiner, “Community Expectations,” 114.
18. “What Is in a Language?,” 15–16.
19. The discussion of clothing is adapted from Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 57–70.
20. 1001 Questions, 130–31.
21. Ibid., 129–37.
22. The verses include 1 Tim. 2:9–10, 1 Peter 3:3–4, and Rom. 12:2. See also “Hat’s a Religious Symbol?” and Luthy, “Women’s Veiling.”
23. “Accepting the Uniform,” 18.
24. “Let’s Not Be Ashamed,” 2. For a contrasting perspective, see Hershberger, “Misuse of Symbols.”
25. 1001 Questions, 129, 136.
26. S. Scott, Why Do They Dress That Way?, 120–26.
27. “Do Bonnets Help?,” 29.
28. S. Scott, Why Do They Dress That Way?, 38–39.
29. S. Scott, Plain Buggies, 44–79. Buggy Builder’s Bulletin, published bimonthly by an Old Order Mennonite, is widely read by Amish buggy makers.
CHAPTER 8. DIVERSE AFFILIATIONS
Epigraph: Adapted from Nolt and Meyers, Plain Diversity, 142.
1. The affiliations are rarely identified in regional Amish directories, and although Amish historians have written accounts of particular groups, they are reluctant to make general comparisons of affiliations for fear of offending people. Some Amish historians and academic scholars have described groups in various regions and states but not at the national level. See Leroy Beachy, Unser Leit, vol. 2; Hurst and McConnell, Amish Paradox; Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish; Kraybill, “Plotting Social Change”; and Nolt and Meyers, Plain Diversity.
2. John A. Hostetler uses the term clan to identify Amish groups in the 1963 edition of Amish Society, 76, and replaces it with the label affiliation in the 1968 edition, 77.
3. About sixty-four districts, thirty-one of which are New Order, use tractors for field work. Settlements with four or more districts that permit tractors are Kalona, Iowa (9), Haven/Yoder, Kansas (4), Chouteau, Oklahoma (4), Meyersdale/Springs, Pennsylvania (5), New Order Fellowship in Holmes County, Ohio (4), and New Order Tobe in Holmes County, Ohio (4). Compiled by Stephen Scott from settlement directories, other documents, and informants.