The Amish

by Steven M. Nolt

  Strive to be an upright servant of Jesus Christ, not only outwardly in public services to hear God’s Word and the religious observances of the Gospel, but also in your whole life by renouncing all sin and in true obedience to live according to all the commandments of God. Do not be satisfied when others think of you as being devout—but truly be in reality what you appear to be. Woe to the man who is not pious yet wants to be considered as such.…

  Avoid idleness as a resting-pillow of the devil and a cause of all sorts of wickedness. Be diligent in your calling so that the devil never finds you idle. Great is the power the devil has over the slothful, to plunge them into all kinds of sins, for idleness gives rise to every vice. It was when David was idle on his housetop that he became an adulterer (2 Samuel 11:2–5).…

  Strive at all times to be respectable in your clothes and have nothing to do with the vexing pomp and display of raiment. It is a great vanity to spend as much on one suit as would clothe two or three persons. If you in your old age were to think back to how much time you spent merely to adorn yourself, you could not but grieve that you ever loved such vain display.

  Read often in God’s Word, and you will find many warnings against pride. You will see that no sin was punished more severely than pride. It changed angels into devils, and the powerful King Nebuchadnezzar into a wild beast. It was because of pride that Jezebel was eaten by dogs (2 Kings 9:30–37).…

  No one is his own master, only a steward over that which he has and possesses. Therefore, you must distribute of your goods to the needy, and do it wisely, willingly, and from the heart (Romans 21:13; 2 Corinthians 9:7).…

  Finally, in your conduct be friendly toward everyone and a burden to none. Toward God, live a holy life; toward yourself, be moderate; toward your fellow men, be fair; in life, be modest; in your manner, courteous; in admonition, friendly; in forgiveness, willing; in your promises, true; in your speech, wise; and out of a pure heart gladly share of the bounties you receive.

  APPENDIX B: Related Groups

  Mennonites, Beachy Amish, Hutterites

  The Amish are perhaps the best known of groups that descend from the Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century (chapter 2), but they are not alone. Mennonite churches in North America today roughly fall into two types: traditional and assimilated. Members of assimilated churches, such as Mennonite Church USA and the Mennonite Brethren, participate in many aspects of mainstream culture. They pursue higher education, live in urban areas, engage in professions, use up-to-date technology, and wear contemporary clothing.

  Plain-dressing, traditional Mennonites include horse-and-buggy-driving Old Order Mennonites. Like the Amish, Old Order Mennonites emerged in the later 1800s and shared many of the same critiques of industrializing society. They have also continued to speak Pennsylvania Dutch. Several customs distinguish the two groups. For example, unlike the Amish, the Old Order Mennonite men do not have beards, and the fabrics worn by Old Order Mennonite women typically have patterns and designs in contrast to the solid fabrics of Amish women. Old Order Mennonites worship in simple church meetinghouses, unlike the Amish, who meet for worship in private homes.

  Other traditional Mennonites, including the Wisler Mennonites and the Weaverland Mennonites, drive cars. They wear plain dress and rarely attend college. They use electricity but limit television and online access.

  The Beachy Amish and the so-called Amish-Mennonites are groups that emerged in the twentieth century from Amish roots. Despite their names and history, these churches lie outside the contemporary Amish orbit because their members drive cars and use a wide range of consumer technology and few speak Pennsylvania Dutch. These groups typically engage in vigorous evangelism and mission work and have gained many converts of non-Amish background. Male members have closely trimmed beards and women wear small head coverings. Some members pursue higher education.

  The Hutterites, who practice economic communalism, branched from the Anabaptist movement in 1528 in Europe. They reject private property and base their communalism on practices of the early Christian church. More than fifty thousand Hutterites live in rural communes in the northern plains states and in western Canada. They wear distinctive garb and speak a German dialect. Unlike the Amish, however, they use the most advanced farm technology and motor vehicles, all of which are communally owned.

  Several other groups are easily confused with the Amish. The Old German Baptist Brethren and the Old Order River Brethren are often misidentified as Amish because their distinctive clothing resembles Amish dress and because Brethren men also grow full beards. However, members of these Brethren groups drive cars, use electricity, and permit higher education and use of the Internet. They do not speak a German dialect. Brethren churches trace their history both to the Anabaptist movement of the 1500s and to a 1600s renewal movement known as Pietism.

  Four other groups are sometimes mistakenly associated with the Amish: the Quakers, the Amana Colonies, the Moravians, and the Shakers. None of these groups has direct historical or religious connections to the Amish. Several of these groups, at least in their past, have had some practices—pacifism, plain dress, separation from the larger society—that resemble Amish ways and have led to the understandable confusion.

  For more detail, see Donald B. Kraybill. Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

  NOTES

  Chapter 1. Meet the Amish

  1. Die Botschaft, April 15, 2013, 80.

  2. The bargaining metaphor is expanded in Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

  3. Amish Studies website provides annually updated data on Amish population by state. http://www2.etown.edu/amishstudies/Index.asp.

  Chapter 2. Amish Roots

  1. The literature on the Reformation is, of course, immense, and the few lines here emphasize an interpretation which the Amish espouse. For a general overview, and one that is less sectarian, see C. Scott Dixon, Contesting the Reformation (Walden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

  2. Songs of the Ausbund: History and Translation of Ausbund Hymns, vol. 1 (Millersburg, Ohio: Ohio Amish Library, 1998), 347–53. This translation was made by a committee of Amish historians. The story of Hans Haslibacher is also included in Martyrs Mirror.

  3. See chapter 2 in Steven M. Nolt, A History of the Amish, 3rd ed. (New York: Good Books, 2015); primary sources are available in English as John D. Roth, trans. and ed., Letters of the Amish Division: A Source Book (Goshen, Ind.: Mennonite Historical Society, 1993).

  4. John Hüppi, “Research Note: Identifying Jacob Ammann,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 74 (April 2000): 332.

  5. Ammann was likely building on a wider Anabaptist renewal movement that included other Swiss preachers. Leroy Beachy, Unser Leit: The Story of the Amish (Millersburg, Ohio: Goodly Heritage Books, 2011), 35–110, gives Ulrich Muller a prominent place in the narrative of Amish origins; most scholarly assessments see Ammann as the key figure in the formation of the Amish as a distinct group in the 1690s.

  6. The Dortrecht Confession is available at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dordrecht_Confession_of_Faith.

  7. Roth, Letters, 24, 118.

  8. Robert Baecher, “Research Note: The ‘Patriarche’ of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 74 (Jan. 2000): 151–52.

  9. Ibid., 152–54.

  10. Robert Baecher, “1712: Investigation of an Important Date,” trans. by Kevin J. Ruth, Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage 21 (April 1998): 6.

  11. What happened to Ammann himself after 1712 is unclear. It seems he had died by 1730.

  12. Nolt, A History of the Amish, 72–84, 122–33.

  13. For more discussion, see chapter 6 in Nolt, A History of the Amish.

  14. John S. Umble, trans. and ed., “Memoirs of an Amish Bishop,
” Mennonite Quarterly Review 22 (April 1948): 101–4.

  15. Leroy Beachy, trans., “Old Set of Rules—Orderly Church Conduct,” Plain Interests (January 2013): 5.

  16. The Mennonites who absorbed the change-minded Amish were the branches more open to adapting to their North American environment, building denominational institutions, pursuing higher education, and so on. There were a number of Mennonite groups in North America, including a traditionalist Old Order Mennonite branch that was similar to the Old Order Amish in several ways. See appendix B.

  17. “Charles F. Richter: How It Was,” Engineering and Science 45, no. 4 (March 1982): 24–28. Richter’s birth name was Charles Kinsinger (a common Amish surname), but soon after he moved to southern California as a boy with his maternal grandfather Richter, he adopted that grandfather’s surname.

  18. Donald B. Kraybill, ed., The Amish and the State, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

  Chapter 3. Living the Old Order

  1. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 281–82.

  2. Sprint “I am unlimited” advertisement, 2013, available at https://youtube/GCUO3-yq3eg.

  3. Connections between technology, efficiency, segmentation, modernity, and culture have been explored by many scholars and thoughtful journalists, including Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013); Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Ecco, 2004); and Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing.to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

  4. The word Gelassenheit is not common in Amish speech because it is a High German, rather than Pennsylvania Dutch, term. But the word accurately sums up central Amish values. The term is not entirely absent from Amish discourse; see a twenty-first century example in Paul Kline (below). Bishop David Beiler, a leading nineteenth-century Old Order Amish writer, used the term Gelassenheit to describe Jesus’s character that should be imitated; see Beiler, Das Wahre Christenthum: Eine Christliche Betrachtung nach der Heiligen Schrift (Lancaster, Pa.: Johann Bär’s Söhnen, 1888), 129.

  5. Paul Kline, “Gelassenheit,” unpublished notes, Holmes County, Ohio, n.d., author’s files.

  6. Ibid.

  7. 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life (Aylmer, Ont.: Pathway Publishers, 1992), 141–42.

  8. J.F.B. [Joseph F. Beiler], “Research Note: Ordnung,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 56 (October 1982): 383–84.

  9. There are a few cases in which aspects of Ordnung might be written down. If a new Amish settlement is formed by people from different communities of origin with different understandings of Ordnung, some potentially contentious points might be reduced to print to make sure everyone shares the same working assumptions.

  10. For discussion of these and other Amish subgroups, see chapter 8 in Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

  Chapter 4. Community and Church

  1. Harvey Yoder, “Remembering My Amish Baptism,” Mennonite World Review, July 11, 2014, available at http://mennoworld.org/2014/07/11/the-world-together/remembering-my-amish-baptism-60-years-later/.

  2. Steven M. Nolt, “Inscribing Community: The Budget and Die Botschaft in Amish Life,” 181–98, in The Amish and the Media, ed. Diane Zimmerman Umble and David L. Weaver-Zercher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). The Budget is published by a non-Amish publisher in Sugarcreek, Ohio. The description here is of the “National Edition” of The Budget, which is an Amish correspondence paper. The publisher also issues a “Local Edition,” also titled The Budget, for residents of the town of Sugarcreek; that paper is a conventional newspaper with headlines, photos, and so on. Die Botschaft is published in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, and today has an Amish publisher.

  3. For more detail on Amish religious life and spirituality, see Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, and David L. Weaver-Zercher, The Amish Way: Patient Faith in a Perilous World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010).

  4. “Church Services in the Home,” Family Life, June 2013, 11.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Data on retention rates in various communities are reported in Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 162–68.

  Chapter 5. Rumspringa: Amish Gone Wild?

  1. Gil Smart, “Hitchin’ Up Buggy and … Facebook,” Lancaster Sunday News, June 19, 2011, A-1. Richard A. Stevick’s comprehensive study, Growing Up Amish: The Rumspringa Years, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), includes results of his study of Amish social media use; see esp. pp. 124, 139, 142, 150, 178, 189, and 201–7.

  2. Bart Yassos, “Running with the Amish,” Runners World, March 2012, 92–102.

  3. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 228.

  Chapter 6. Family and Schooling

  1. Loren Beachy, “The Plain Side: A Hearty Parlor Tussle with Pictionary,” Goshen News, April 19, 2014, A-3; http://www.goshennews.com/lifestyles/x2117339809/PLAIN-SIDE-A-hearty-parlor-tussle-with-Pictionary.

  2. Almost every family also has one or more English-language King James translations of the Bible. About 6 percent of the total Amish population descends from a cohort of Amish immigrants who came from Switzerland in the 1850s and settled in certain pockets in the Midwest. These Amish speak a distinctive Swiss-German dialect that Pennsylvania Dutch–speaking Amish find hard to decipher.

  3. Marriage Meeting, October 20 & 27, 2007 (Dundee, Ohio: Family Helpers, n.d.), 37.

  4. Sam S. Stoltzfus, “Our Plain Folks and Their Spirituality,” The Connection: Connecting Our Amish Communities, August 2009, 55.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Joseph Stoll, Who Shall Educate Our Children? (Aylmer, Ont.: Pathway Publishing, 1965), 23.

  7. Indiana Amish Directory: Elkhart, LaGrange, and Noble Counties, 2012 (Middlebury, Ind.: Jerry E. Miller, 2012), 13.

  8. Quoted in Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 162.

  9. Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 263–64.

  Chapter 7. Work and Technology

  1. All quotations in this section are from Horse Progress Days: Something for Everyone, 20th Annual Event, July 5–6, 2013, program book, 165 pages. The 2015 program booklet, 22nd Annual Horse Progress Days, July 3–4, Daviess County, Indiana, includes several essays on the event’s origins.

  2. 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life (Aylmer, Ont.: Pathway Publishers, 1992), 138–39.

  3. Randall E. James, “Horse and Human Labor Estimates for Amish Farms,” Journal of Extension, 45, no. 1 (February 2007), at http://www.joe.org/joe/2007february/rb5.php.

  4. Jerry L. Miller, “Change to Organic Farming,” Family Life (January 2007), 34.

  5. Many of the observations that follow are detailed in Donald B. Kraybill and Steven M. Nolt, Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

  Chapter 8. The Amish and Their Neighbors

  1. Katie Klocksin, “Passing Through: Chicago’s Union Station as Amish Transit Hub,” Curious City, a production of WBEZ Chicago, July 7, 2014; archived at http://www.wbez.org/series/curious-city/passing-through-chicagos-union-station-amish-transit-hub-110453.

  2. David O’Connor, “Thousands Flock to Penryn for Annual Mud Sale,” Lancaster Online, March 15, 2014, http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/thousands-flock-to-penryn-for-annual-mud-sale/article_f8a26d24-ac6e-11e3-9d63-0017a43b2370.html.

  3. J. Tyler Klassen, “MCC Mobile Canner Provides Food Relief around the World,” Elkhart
Truth, Jan. 11, 2015, p. 1; Iowa Amish Directory, 2004 (Millersburg, Ohio: Abana Books, 2004), 159.

  4. Dan Stockman, “Buggy License Fees Shoot Up; County Cites Heavy Cost of Road Repair,” [Fort Wayne, Ind.] Journal Gazette, February 22, 2014; http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20140222/LOCAL/302229982.

  5. 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life (Aylmer, Ont: Pathway Publishers, 1992), 157–59.

  6. “Bloomfield Safety Committee Meeting,” The Grapevine, 9, no. 2 (Jan. 15, 2014), 10.

  7. See James A. Cates, Serving the Amish: A Cultural Guide for Professionals (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), for an excellent introduction to constructive approaches to these and other issues.

  Chapter 9. Amish Images in Modern America

  1. “Romancing the Recession,” Publishers Weekly, November 16, 2009, accessed at http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20091116/28360-romancing-the-recession.html.

  2. Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 13.

  3. New York Times, August 15, 1937, 36.

  4. Joseph Stein and Will Glickman, Plain and Fancy: A Musical Comedy (New York: Random House, 1955), 91.

  5. David L. Weaver-Zercher, The Amish in the American Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 185–96. Other sources that have informed this chapter are Janneken Smucker, Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Susan L. Trollinger, Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); and Thomas J. Meyers, “Amish Tourism: ‘Visiting Shipshewana Is Better Than Going to the Mall,’ ” Mennonite Quarterly Review 77 (January 2003): 109–26.

  6. http://www.theonion.com/articles/amish-woman-knew-she-had-quilt-sale-the-moment-she,6888/.

  7. Benuel Blank, “Being a Witness to Tourists,” 151–56, in The Scriptures Have the Answers: Inspirational Writings by Ben Blank (Parksburg, Pa.: The Blank Family, 2009).