THE AMISH
YOUNG CENTER BOOKS IN ANABAPTIST AND PIETIST STUDIES
Donald B. Kraybill, Series Editor
THE AMISH
A Concise Introduction
Steven M. Nolt
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore
© 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2016
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nolt, Steven M., 1968– author.
The Amish : a concise introduction / Steven M. Nolt.
pages cm. — (Young Center books in Anabaptist and Pietist studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1956-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1956-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1957-2 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1957-2 (electronic)
1. Amish—United States—Social life and customs. 2. Amish—History. I. Title.
E184.M45.N65 2016
289.7'3—dc23 2015028198
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].
Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.
CONTENTS
* * *
1 Meet the Amish
2 Amish Roots
3 Living the Old Order
4 Community and Church
5 Rumspringa: Amish Gone Wild?
6 Family and Schooling
7 Work and Technology
8 The Amish and Their Neighbors
9 Amish Images in Modern America
* * *
Appendix A: Amish Spirituality
Appendix B: Related Groups
Notes
For Further Reading
Index
THE AMISH
CHAPTER ONE
Meet the Amish
In 2013 an Amish father placed a notice in an Amish newspaper for a meeting of parents and teachers involved with Amish schools. Information about the gathering, to be held in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, ended with this reminder: “If you are planning to attend and are using a GPS, you must use the correct spelling [for Punxsutawney].”1
The Amish use global positioning systems?
For many Americans, the image of the Amish as reclusive, dark-clad, horse-and-buggy-driving folks conjures notions of the nineteenth century and hardly comports with twenty-first-century satellite technology. In fact, most observers would either be perplexed by the notice or decide that it reveals some secret hypocrisy among a people who present a publicly plain life but behind the scenes are actually no different from the rest of us.
The truth is something else, as we will see, but the Punxsutawney school meeting lays bare distinctive aspects of Amish life in the modern world. None of the Amish reading the announcement has a driver’s license. All of them rely on horse-drawn transportation for local errands. But for longer trips, most Amish families turn to non-Amish neighbors, hiring them to act as informal taxis. And many of those drivers rely on GPS, which the Amish recognize and understand.
That sort of give and take—refusing to own a car but hiring outside drivers and being aware of what those drivers want and expect—reveals the dynamic Amish relationship with the wider world that we’ll explore in this book. The Amish are a separate people, to be sure, but they are not as socially or technologically isolated as we often imagine. Instead, they interact with the wider world by bargaining with modernity.2 The Amish participate in modern life on their own terms. They might use batteries, for example, but not electricity from the public grid. While such choices may seem confusing from an outside perspective, this sort of flexible negotiating with the forces of modern life has allowed them to flourish.
Yet the Amish give-and-take extends only so far. The Punxsutawney meeting brought together Amish parents and teachers from across western Pennsylvania to discuss the day-to-day operations of Amish schools. Across the country some two thousand one- and two-room Amish schools exist in silent testimony to the refusal of parents to bow to the demands and promises of modern modes of education. Amish schools educate children only through the eighth grade, use a curriculum from the early 1900s, and employ teachers who themselves have had only eight years of schooling. During the 1950s and 1960s hundreds of Amish parents went to prison rather than send their offspring to consolidated public schools or to high schools of any kind. Their refusal to budge on this issue ultimately landed them before the U.S. Supreme Court, which in the case Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) affirmed the Amish dissent from mass education and contributed to the jurisprudence of American religious liberty and minority rights.
An Amish woman loads her grocery purchases into a cargo van driven by a non-Amish neighbor who brought her to town. Credit: Joel Fath / Mennonite Historical Library
Combining a stubborn commitment to old-fashioned education with knowledge of GPS and the flexibility to hire drivers who use such systems, the meeting in Punxsutawney embodies aspects of Amish life that intrigue and perplex the rest of us.
Amish Myths
Popular images of the Amish sometimes resolve the puzzling aspects of Amish life with simplistic half-truths or outright misconceptions. These myths stem, understandably, from the potentially confusing diversity of Amish customs, as well as from the fact that the multi-million-dollar Amish-themed tourism industry (dominated by non-Amish players) sometimes offers up highly romanticized images of Amish life. And some of the misinformation derives from intentionally skewed presentations of Amish society that appear in reality television or Amish-themed fiction geared toward public entertainment.
Myths about the Amish include:
The Amish are shut off from meaningful interaction with the wider world. They live in isolated colonies and shun all outsiders.
The Amish are Luddites who live without technology and reject all modern conveniences. If you see an Amish contractor using a cell phone or an Amish teenager with in-line skates, they are acting on the sly and would be severely punished if Amish leaders caught them.
Amish don’t pay taxes or use modern medicine. They rely on mafia-style gangs to maintain order and they have very high rates of genetic abnormalities due to “inbreeding.”
All Amish are farmers. They grow or hand-make nearly everything they use and rarely shop in stores.
At age sixteen Amish children are sent out into the world to explore life in big cities before deciding if they want to come back home.
Amish people have few choices in life. Bishops within the Amish church make all the decisions and women, especially, simply do as they are told.
The Amish may live a bit differently than the rest of us, but they share the same basic cultural assumptions that the rest of us do and they represent the best of traditional American values.
As relics from another age, the Amish are slowly but surely dying out.
Amish Reality: Diversity and Commonality
In the chapters that follow we unpack these and other misconceptions about Amish life, but for now we’ll look at the last one—the idea that the Amish are a dying breed. In fact, the Amish population is growing rapidly, doubling about every eighteen to twenty years. Today more than 300,000 Amish people—adults and children—live in the United States and eastern
Canada. The largest Amish populations are in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, but growing numbers live in Wisconsin, New York, Michigan, Missouri, and Kentucky, and smaller communities are scattered from Montana to Maine and from Texas to Florida.3
Fig. 1.1. Counties in the United States with Amish Communities in 2015. There are also small numbers of Amish in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. In addition, there are sixteen Amish settlements in the Canadian province of Ontario and one in New Brunswick. Map prepared by St. Lawrence University Libraries GIS Program
The Amish population is growing rapidly, fueled by large families and the fact that the vast majority of Amish children choose to join their parents’ church. Credit: Don Burke
On the one hand, there is no mystery behind Amish growth. Amish families are much larger than those of mainstream U.S. households. The average Amish family has seven children, and households with ten or more children are not uncommon.
Yet birth rates alone do not explain the group’s rapid growth. Amish babies do not automatically grow into Amish adults. Children born to Amish parents must choose to join the Amish church through the ritual of baptism in their late teens or early twenties. (Those who do not join might affiliate with some other religious tradition or with none at all.) Today 85 percent or more of these children elect baptism and become adult members of the Amish church, and that percentage is notably higher than it was in the mid-1900s. Amish populations are growing because more children than ever are choosing to align themselves with a way of life that is at odds with surrounding society—a phenomenon we will explore in chapter 5.
Population growth has brought new challenges. For example, burgeoning demography puts pressure on Amish farming communities to acquire more land and, eventually, to consider abandoning their plows for nonfarm jobs—jobs that, in turn, raise new questions about what it means to be Amish (chapter 7). Booming populations have also prompted the establishment of new settlements in more states and in far-flung portions of states with existing Amish communities. As a result, today Amish people are rubbing shoulders with neighbors in more and more places, forging new connections and sometimes generating conflict (chapter 8).
Numeric growth has gone hand-in-hand with increasing diversity in Amish lifestyles. As they spread to new areas, Amish families find themselves in a wider range of settings that color their lives—from suburbanizing Delaware and tourist-attracting eastern Ohio to depopulating pockets of upstate New York and remote regions of the Rocky Mountains. In many places today Amish women are more likely to be found behind Walmart or Target shopping carts than around an old-fashioned quilting frame. More men are trading milk cows for small business entrepreneurship or, in some communities, punching a time-clock on a factory floor. Amish buggies in some locations trek nighttime backroads with a single oil-burning lantern hanging to one side, while others travel busy byways with red LED lights and bright orange slow-moving-vehicle triangles, and still others sport a flashing white strobe light on their roof. A summer afternoon picnic may be the most notable diversion some Amish families enjoy, while others winter in Florida or stay in motels on cross-country vacations they arrange with drivers to visit national parks in the West.
One feature of Amish life that fuels diversity is the group’s tradition of small-scale community. Amish society has no bureaucracy that can impose complete uniformity. The church has no national or regional conferences, dioceses, or headquarters, no offices, seminaries, or think tanks. Instead, the basic unit of Amish life, beyond the family, is the local church comprised of twelve to eighteen households. Since there are some twenty-two hundred such churches, each with its own leadership and making its own decisions about technology and other expressions of faith, there are potentially more than twenty-two hundred different ways of being Amish!
TABLE 1.1: PRACTICES COMMON TO ALL AMISH GROUPS
Yet there remains a core of common features across the Amish world. The Amish are a Christian church that traces its origins to the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s. Their theological beliefs, as we’ll see, are codified in the Bible and in key religious texts that all Amish churches use to instruct their youth in the faith. As well, all Amish use horse and buggy and do not hold driver’s licenses. All speak a German dialect as their first language, but they also learn to read, write, and speak English as their second language. None pursue higher education. All wear distinctive clothing—though the particular patterns and colors vary from one group to another—and adult men grow beards. All of these factors make the Amish a distinctive ethno-religious group, but one whose growth, spread, and localized organization militate against complete uniformity.
The Amish and American Society
The Amish may stand apart from the American mainstream in many ways, but their identity is also shaped by how the rest of us imagine and treat them. Government regulation and media representations influence the relationship of insider and outsider and contribute to the formulation of Amish identity.
For example, government decisions to grant minority dissenters certain rights or exemptions necessarily define who is eligible for special treatment and, in turn, affect internal group dynamics. When the U.S. Congress granted the Amish an exemption from participating in Social Security, an exemption based on long-standing Amish opposition to insurance and their documented practice of caring for their elderly, Congress assumed that the Amish were an economically self-sufficient community with few ties to outside employers. So the exemption covered self-employed Amish workers or Amish employees of Amish employers.
The Amish were not as economically isolated as Congress imagined, but the legal exemption had the effect of providing an economic incentive for Amish employees to avoid working for outsiders. Since the Amish church strongly discourages members from collecting Social Security benefits, those who choose to work for outsiders—and are thus not exempt under the law—must pay into a system from which they receive nothing in return, while those who work for a fellow church member are not encumbered with Social Security payroll taxes.
Likewise, when non-Amish drivers provide taxi service to Amish families who won’t own cars, the Amish choice to reject driving is made easier and reinforces the Amish sense that not having a driver’s license is an essential element of Amish identity—after all, outsiders facilitate the decision to forego car ownership! And when non-Amish advertisers use horse-and-buggy silhouettes to sell products they label “Amish,” the wider world reveals its dependence on an Amish identity linked to horses. The cachet of Amish-themed tourism and television shows exists to the degree that Americans perceive the Amish to be different, and that desire for them to remain exotic provides a sort of social space in which the Amish can be acceptably nonconformists—though not always in ways the rest of us think they should be, as the Punxsutawney GPS story suggests.
The countercultural example of the Amish—an example that defies mainstream American ideas about progress, the role of individuals in community, and even the sources of happiness—acts as both a lens and a prism, focusing the cultural assumptions the rest of us hold dear while revealing a spectrum of Amish practices that expand our understanding of their way of life. Understanding the Amish involves taking them seriously on their own terms, even as we recognize that those terms are never entirely their own. In that sense, the Amish story may say something about the broader dynamics of multicultural America.
Finding Our Way
As we begin our journey, familiarity with a few terms and definitions will help us find our way. As mentioned above, the basic religious unit in Amish life is the church district, an entity that is somewhat akin to a Protestant congregation or a Catholic parish. The Amish do not have church buildings, however. Instead, members gather for Sunday worship in one another’s homes or in a family’s barn or shop, rotating meetings from one household to another. Church districts are laid out geographically, with the families living in a particular place—often defined by rural roads, streams, railroad tracks, or other l
andmarks—constituting the district. As children are born and new families move into the district, the number of people may grow too large to meet comfortably in homes. At that point, the district divides and forms two districts from one. As a result, church districts nationwide are roughly the same size—there are no Amish “mega-churches”—with an average of about 150 people (adults and children) in each.
TABLE 1.2: THE TWELVE LARGEST SETTLEMENTS, 2015
A cluster of church districts in a particular geographic location is known as a settlement. In 2015 there were 500 settlements across thirty-one states and the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick. Some settlements, such as those in Holmes County, Ohio, or Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, include several hundred districts and thousands of Amish people. Other settlements are quite small and might contain only one or two districts. In neither case—large settlements nor small ones—do the Amish live in isolation. Everywhere they live mixed among rural neighbors of other faiths and traditions. The Amish do not live in exclusive colonies. When non-Amish chambers of commerce use a line like “Visit Amish Country!” to boost regional tourism, they are pointing to a real phenomenon—a concentration of Amish people living in a given place—but there is nothing like an Amish “country” in the sense of a set-aside reservation or bounded space.
Finally, the Amish often refer to those who are not Amish as the English. All Amish people are bilingual, but their first language is a German dialect and English is their second language—one that they use especially as they interact with the wider world. As a result, they refer generally to all outsiders with the “English” label. This text will use the terms non-Amish and the English as synonyms.
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