A group of lay leaders, known as the National Amish Steering Committee, functions as a liaison with government. At a national level, the Steering Committee began in 1966 to negotiate conscientious objection provisions during the Vietnam War–era military draft. Later it broadened its agenda to all sorts of issues, and today there are Steering Committee members active at the state and often local levels across the country, seeking to interact with officials and address open and potential conflicts. The Steering Committee cannot speak definitively for all Amish, but it has smoothed many disagreements—with the Amish often, but not always, getting what they bargain for.
One reason the Amish cannot always speak to government with one voice is that Amish churches themselves do not always agree. Highly tradition-minded groups, such as those of the Swartzentruber affiliation, object to affixing bright orange slow-moving-vehicle (S.M.V.) triangles to their buggies. They view the emblems as a pagan talisman that betrays their faith in God’s protection on the road. Some states have allowed the Swartzentrubers and other highly conservative affiliations to eschew the S.M.V. triangles, but other states insist on its use. Some of these Amish have spent time in jail for refusing to display the emblem and often have ended up moving to states that are more lenient. Generally, however, Amish welcome the S.M.V. triangles and believe they serve to protect non-Amish drivers from the risk of accidents. They cannot understand the Swartzentrubers’ aversion to the triangles and publicly criticize that segment of the Amish world. “It is a privilege and not a right to be on the road,” Amish leaders in Bloomfield, Iowa, routinely remind their community, and “a respectful, courteous attitude goes a long way on road safety.”6
A buggy in the Swartzentruber Amish settlement near Hartshorn, Missouri, does not display an orange slow-moving-vehicle triangle. Members of the highly conservative Swartzentruber affiliation object to the use of the triangles, which has led to conflicts with officials in some states. Credit: Don Burke
In general, the Amish seek to be law abiding. Amish-perpetrated crime is rare. If an individual is arrested, the default response, drawing on values of Gelassenheit and deference to authority and the practice of confession in church settings, is to waive the right to a lawyer and cooperate with prosecutors. In some cases, church leaders have insisted that Amish defendants not mount a serious defense in court but rather accept whatever sentence is meted out as their punishment for wrongdoing. Court-appointed attorneys for Amish clients have been frustrated with Amish defendants’ readiness to confess to whatever the prosecutors throw at them. Plea-bargaining for a lighter sentence strikes many Amish people as dishonest and an exercise in compounding one wrong with another.
When a more abstract legal principle is at stake, such as the free exercise of religion or (in the 1950s and 1960s) the desire of parents to withhold their children from high school, Amish individuals have allowed themselves to be named as plaintiffs in cases being argued by others.
As in any community, some of the most painful Amish legal cases have been those involving domestic or sexual abuse. On the one hand, members of the Amish community have no sympathy for such crimes, which they consider first and foremost profound sin. At the same time, they are often frustrated with or confused by the legal and social services systems that misunderstand or disregard extended family systems, church authority, and the dynamics of community shame when handling such cases. These vibes of distrust, not unlike the distrust toward law enforcement and the judicial system seen in some other minority communities in the United States, can, in turn, be interpreted by criminal justice professionals as Amish disregard for the serious nature of abuse. The result can be a cultural communication impasse that is difficult to bridge.7
Health Care and Medicine
With very few exceptions, Amish do not purchase commercial health insurance or participate in public health insurance programs, as described in chapter 4. But that does not mean that they do not engage the health care system, which in the United States is among the most complex social systems. The Amish engage health care on their own terms and mix traditional folkways with modern scientific approaches.
Religious values and convictions shape their understanding of health and medicine. Submission to God’s will and a strong belief in life after death mean that, in many cases, Amish people are more apt to accept death as a part of life and not engage in procedures or therapies that prolong the life of a dying person or spend large amounts of money on end-of-life support. As people steeped in the natural world but not schooled in modern science, the Amish are likely to view the purpose of medicine as curing an illness or repairing a broken bone rather than preventing illness or employing invasive therapies. But even in the realm of health care, there is something of a spectrum of Amish practice. Conservative-leaning families, for example, often ignore immunization campaigns, while those on the more change-minded side conscientiously vaccinate their children.
Since no Amish attend college or medical school, there are no Amish doctors, nurses, physical therapists, or other health care professions. In some communities there are Amish women who serve as informal midwives.
Amish communities draw on various resources when facing illness. Folk customs and remedies passed on within families might suggest ways of warding off colds with herbal remedies, for example, or treating minor burns with homemade poultices. In face-to-face communities, knowledge shared among people who have been in similar circumstances is often more plausible than medical advice given by a doctor one does not know and communicated in medical jargon that can easily confuse those with limited formal schooling and for whom English is a second language.
In addition, Amish people tap alternative health care services from non-Amish providers, such as homeopathic treatment, unlicensed midwives, dietary supplements, and the like. The high-touch, low-tech approach of chiropractors and reflexologists make them popular with many Amish people.
Standard health care providers, including hospital emergency rooms and medical doctors and dentists, are also part of the Amish health mix. Most families have a family physician, although the regularity with which they visit the doctor may be less than that of their neighbors, both because Amish families are also drawing on folk and alternative therapies and because many Amish are frugal and view rising health care costs with concern. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to find Amish patients in the hospital and receiving chemotherapy for cancer, skin grafts following a serious burn, and cataract surgery or hip replacement among the elderly.
Amish-initiated birthing centers and mental health treatment programs illustrate the sort of hybrid approach to care that creatively draws on conventional and alternative health care resources. The Mount Eaton Care Center in Ohio, a childbirth center opened in 1985, offers a birthing environment that combines professional physicians and nursing staff with a low-tech and homey atmosphere that approximates home birth situations. Without having to travel to a more distant hospital obstetrics ward, extended family can more easily visit mothers and babies at Mount Eaton. The professional staff welcomes the involvement of midwives and accepts, without judgment, the non-scientific folk remedies and herbal teas that Amish women believe hasten postpartum recovery. Similar birthing centers have opened in other settlements.
A similar hybrid approach is apparent at Rest Haven, an Amish-conceived and -constructed facility for mental health care that opened in Goshen, Indiana, in 2002. Located on the campus of a professional community mental health center, Rest Haven provides a space for Amish patients to live in a culturally friendly atmosphere devoid of television and other worldly markers. Amish house parents involve patients in meal preparation, lead morning and evening devotions, and welcome visiting family and friends. Patients, meanwhile, have full access to mental health services by walking across the lawn to keep appointments with psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors.
In the past, some Amish leaders have been wary of mental health professionals, who were seen as promoting an individualistic and high
ly secular vision of self-fulfillment. Other Amish simply did not share modern psychiatry’s understanding of the brain as an organ treatable with drugs or they worried that talk therapy perilously separated thoughts and feelings from soul and spirit. In contrast, Rest Haven has created a trusting relationship among doctors, patients, and patients’ families, and has done a great deal to raise awareness and understanding of mental health issues among the Amish. Its approach and format has been replicated in other places.
Dr. Heng Wang, an expert in genomic medicine, consults with a patient at the DDC Clinic Center for Special Needs Children in Middlefield, Ohio. The clinic serves more than seven hundred patients from over thirty states and several countries. Credit: DDC Clinic / Larry Buehner
Despite their one-armed embrace of modern medicine, Amish people have, perhaps paradoxically, contributed significantly to advancing modern medical knowledge through participation in groundbreaking genetics research. Because of their detailed genealogical records, limited number of immigrant founders, and relatively uniform lifestyle and diet, the Amish are a perfect population for genetic study—a fact that pioneering geneticist Dr. Victor McKusick of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine recognized in the 1960s when he initiated the first Amish genetics studies. More recently the Clinic for Special Children, directed by Dr. Holmes Morton near Strasburg, Pennsylvania, has been conducting major genetic research with Amish patients, as does the University of Maryland and the DDC Clinic Center for Special Needs Children in Middlefield, Ohio.
Owing to their limited gene pool, the Amish have a higher incidence of some kinds of genetic disorders, for example, limb-girdle muscular dystrophy among the Swiss Amish of Adams County, Indiana. At the same time, a limited gene pool also means that some hereditary disorders are nonexistent in the Amish world. So although the Amish have higher rates of certain disorders, they do not necessarily have higher rates of genetic disorder as a whole.
Amish participation in genetic studies has advanced understanding of genomic medicine, heritable diseases, and metabolic disorders. Amish participation in these studies has been remarkable and deeply satisfying to the researchers who work with them. Some Amish have eagerly participated because they know the results may benefit their communities directly, while others participate because they view such work as a way of contributing to the welfare of people everywhere.
Medical research among the Amish also offers the possibility to connect the social and biological components of human health and well-being. For example, an Amish individual with bipolar disorder may be undiagnosed or misdiagnosed because symptoms are culturally bound or culturally expressed in ways that do not match mainstream expectations. Amish studies of the genetic predisposition of bipolar disorder, then, have uncovered issues and questions of culture and diagnosis with implications for the health care of other minority groups.
Cutting-edge genetic studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind when outsiders think of the Amish, but they have become another site of Amish interaction with the modern world. In recent years, those interactions have multiplied and intensified, from tourism to television, with implications for the Amish and the rest of us, alike.
CHAPTER NINE
Amish Images in Modern America
Publishers Weekly labeled them “bonnet rippers”—romance novels with Amish protagonists. With covers featuring young women in plain dress smiling shyly at the reader, the books were a publishing sensation.1 In 2008 a dozen Amish-themed romance novels hit retail shelves. Two years later there were forty-five releases, and by 2012 publishers were issuing a new Amish romance novel every four days.
Popular interest in the Amish as a people is perhaps nowhere so clear as in the millions of copies of bonnet fiction being snapped up every week in the United States. But just as surely, the mushrooming size of the genre points to the employment and manipulation of the Amish image in modern America, an image that says as much—or more—about America as it does about the country’s plain people themselves.
On the one hand, the Amish have become remarkably recognizable. Even as Americans tell pollsters they are less sure what distinguishes one religious denomination from another, the Amish stand out more than ever. Everyone from politicians to late night comedians can make reference to the Amish with the confidence that listeners will know whom they are talking about. Without any organized public relations plan, promotional budget, or celebrity spokesperson, a small and self-effacing group has become exceedingly well known. At the same time this recognition, engineered by those outside Amish circles, has transformed them into icons—images through which viewers see something else.
In the case of Amish romance novels, literary critic Valerie Weaver-Zercher has argued that the popularity of these books exposes contemporary readers’ weariness of hypersexualized society. Most Amish romance fiction is written and read by evangelical Christians, and the books offer these Americans “chaste texts and chaste protagonists living within a chaste subculture.”2 And although that chaste image comports with Amish values in general, the books rarely stop with an affirmation of Amish religious beliefs. Instead, many of the narratives also critique, at some level, Amish faith and life from an evangelical Christian perspective, often by including characters who leave the Amish world to find personal or religious fulfillment elsewhere or who, at least, entertain those thoughts and thereby affirm the readers’ religious sensibilities.
The Amish image in modern America is complicated. And it is a narrative that has been developing for quite some time.
Life in the Public Eye
For much of their history in North America, the Amish attracted scant attention. The Amish were a small group and, if they were noted at all, were lumped with other Pennsylvania German ethnics who were seen as possessing curious customs or peculiar foods. In the early 1930s, for example, restaurant owners in southeastern Pennsylvania who hoped to capitalize on regional cookery sometimes included drawings of Amish people, and occasionally the word “Amish” itself, in cookbooks and menus featuring Pennsylvania German specialties.
The Amish first drew national media attention, however, when their choices pegged them as a people who were not quietly assimilating behind a veneer of distinctive dinner dishes. In 1937 the New York Times ran a series of articles on Amish opposition to a consolidated school building then under construction in East Lampeter Township, Pennsylvania. In the midst of the Great Depression, as communities across the country fought for a share of government money to rebuild aging infrastructure, the Amish rejection of a new building—a building that would spell the end of rural one-room schools—was incomprehensible to journalists. Under headlines such as “Amishmen Battle to Keep Drab Life” reporters described a people who represented the last gasp of unenlightened rural backwardness.3
The controversy in East Lampeter fostered a popular perception of the Amish as stubborn people fighting a futile war against progress. In the mid-1900s, as the foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population fell to historic lows, owing to strict immigration laws, academics and civic officials alike were smitten with a national narrative of assimilation and the quiet fading of ethnicity and regionalism. Even the midcentury civil rights movement, which shined a light on minority interests, initially championed social integration rather than cultural differences. In such a context, the image of the Amish as distinctive folk served two related purposes: it affirmed a memory of romantic agrarian independence that harkened back to the nineteenth century, while at the same time reminding the public that progress marched on, despite the dissent of those who were, unfortunately, stuck in the mud.
The Amish way, then, symbolized historic virtues, but virtues that would not be allowed to call into question the country’s twentieth-century destiny. The 1955 Broadway production of Plain and Fancy presented Amish in such a light. Written by Joseph Stein—later known for Fiddler on the Roof, which also traced the decline of traditional communities even as it celebrated their charm—the musical Plain an
d Fancy pictured Amish traditions as needing to give way, sooner or later, to contemporary habits. Lead character Papa Yoder was allowed to criticize some aspects of Cold War America: “Look in your world, and look here! Poor people you have plenty, and worried people and afraid.”4 But in the end, he agreed that Amish ways had no long-term future in the modern world. And why wouldn’t he? In a nation pouring millions of dollars into a new interstate highway system and engaged in a space race to place a human on the moon, people who rode in buggies pulled by horses seemed hopelessly out of touch with the times.
Assuming the Amish were soon to disappear, tour guides and travel promoters scrambled to offer visitors one last glimpse of traditional life before it faded into history. In 1955, the same year the curtain went up on Plain and Fancy, the Amish Farm and House opened in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as the first paid-admission Amish tourist attraction (the site was not Amish-owned). For East Coast urbanites, especially an older generation who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, the Amish as an image of a lost peasant past tapped into deep wells of nostalgia.
Then in the 1970s, as an oil embargo, energy crisis, and emerging environmental movement all began to suggest that “small is beautiful,” the image of Amish as people behind the times was suddenly turned on its head. As a people living off the grid and burning fewer fossil fuels, the Amish suddenly seemed to be a people ahead of their time. Amish-themed tourism now shifted gears and turned on the possibility that the Amish might be carriers of cultural wisdom that the rest of the world had discarded in a hurry toward homogenization. At the same time, the revival of mass immigration to the United States was beginning to raise questions about the adequacy of a national assimilationist narrative and the possibility that minority groups, including the Amish, might be here to stay. The 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case legitimating Amish schools was one example of this new narrative of the Amish as a part of pluralistic America.
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