An Amish Paradox

by Charles E. Hurst

  Neither caricature—nostalgic or dehumanizing—captures the realities of Amish family life in the Holmes County Settlement. In spite of the uniformities created by shared religious doctrine, Amish families show a surprising degree of diversity. And Amish family life has not been stuck in a time warp. The Amish have not been immune from the powerful pressures that changing patterns of work, schooling, and health care can exert on the form and substance of family life. Even for the Amish, predicting the effects on family life of new occupations, household products, or leisure opportunities has not always been easy.

  At the same time, the shift away from farming has not turned Amish family life and gender identities upside down. But it has introduced changes, some more dramatic than others. As we explore in this chapter how Amish families have followed different moral compasses in navigating new external pressures and opportunities, we begin by looking at the constellation of meanings surrounding family and home. We then examine the quality of interaction and the tenor of emotional ties between parents and children and between husbands and wives. Finally, we look at how the influx of cash and spare time has re-shaped patterns of leisure and consumption in Amish communities. Throughout the chapter we try to show how kinship intersects with educational, religious, and economic forces in complex ways.

  The Freindschaft

  In spite of the centrality of the church in shaping social life and identity, the family remains the basic building block of Amish society. The size of church districts is always calculated in numbers of families, and when the threshold of approximately thirty to forty families is reached, the leaders begin to discuss how to divide the district so as to maintain small, face-to-face communities. Similarly, Amish private schools are organized in terms of the number of families who send “scholars” to them. Throughout the settlement, the Amish community is held together by the presence of interrelated kinship groups. Individuals from the same extended family often grow up in the same neighborhood and attend school together; sometimes they will end up joining the same church and working for the same employer. And although extended families usually cluster in the same affiliation, the presence of kin who have switched to other affiliations provides a powerful countervailing force against narrow sectarianism. Even with thirty thousand Amish of different affiliations in the Holmes County Settlement, two Amish meeting for the first time will usually be able to “locate” each other vis-à-vis their kin networks.

  Compared to non-Amish families in rural Ohio, Amish families retain several distinctive structural features: a taboo on divorce, the near universality of multigenerational households, and large family size. There are cases of single families and widowhood, which we consider later, but most Amish women marry early and for life and see marital conflict as something that should be “worked out.” “There are a lot of marriage problems among the Amish,” commented a New Order preacher, “but they will not at the drop of a hat say, ‘I’m going to divorce you.’” As a result, the large majority of Amish families pass through a prolonged “nuclear family stage” in which father and mother live together with their unmarried children. Although initiating divorce is grounds for excommunication, it does happen on occasion. When one partner initiates divorce and is excommunicated, the spouse and children are allowed to remain Amish, but the Amish spouse may not remarry until the previous partner dies. A small number of Amish (mostly women) in the Holmes County Settlement receive alimony or child support payments from ex-spouses who have been excommunicated.

  Children also grow up with grandparents near them. One retired couple we met had sixty-four grandchildren. “The oldest is 18 and the youngest is 12 days—and each one of ’em’s special,” quipped the grandmother. For the Amish, the “gift of mass longevity”4 does not typically involve the cultural nightmare of living old and alone. Parents usually retire to the attached dawdi haus after gifting their home to one of the younger children. The notion that with age come experience and wisdom is deeply ingrained in Amish culture, and consultation with one’s elderly relatives on matters of health care or business is common even when younger family members are “running the show.” Nevertheless, the Amish use local nursing homes if special care is needed, although this tendency is more pronounced among the “higher” groups.

  In spite of the move away from agriculture, the overall fertility rate for Amish women has remained high. According to our analysis of the 2005 Ohio Amish Directory, Amish families average 5 children, well above the national average of 2.0.5 Most Amish still are born into a large family that includes a vast network of extended kin.6 Consequently, if “the American public has lost the art of visiting,” as one bishop put it, such is not the case for the Amish, where visiting the freindschaft (extended family) is a dominant pastime. Most Amish children grow up in a world filled with uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews; it is not uncommon for an Amish teenager to have forty to fifty first cousins. Paradoxically, the sheer size of Amish kin networks often makes “family reunions” difficult for logistic reasons. One Old Order man noted that his whole family doesn’t get together too often because there are “too many little ones that want to eat right away.” Instead, the sisters will get together, or the brothers. Ties with same-sex siblings are typically very strong, and such get-togethers often revolve around shared activities such as quilting, cooking, or shopping for the sisters and attending auctions or hunting and fishing for the brothers.

  To this general portrait, however, several qualifications must be added. The first is that variations in family size reflect differences in occupations and the affiliations to which members belong.7 In general, farmers have more children than nonfarmers. In Samson Wasao’s study based on the 1988 Ohio Amish Directory, Amish farmers averaged 6.2 children, while the mean for nonfarmers was 4.7 children. Our own study of the 2005 directory showed an even larger gap—more than two children—between farm and nonfarm families.8 These differences stem in part from the decreased need for labor as the Amish move away from the farm.

  Church affiliation also has a dramatic effect on family size. The Swartzentrubers are widely acknowledged to have the largest families, although reliable data is scarce. A study of 144 Amish families in Wayne County in 1984 found that 47 percent of Swartzentruber families had at least nine children, compared to 25 percent of other Amish; thus, it is likely that the Swartzentrubers average at least seven to eight children per family. Of those affiliations included in the 2005 Ohio Amish Directory, the Andy Weavers had the largest average number of children (6.2), followed by the New Order Christian Fellowship (6.0) and the New Order (5.3). Surprisingly, the Old Order Amish averaged only 4.6 children.

  Why the Old Order Amish have fewer children on average than the more “progressive” New Order Amish is a puzzling question. Perhaps New Order spirituality leads them to take more seriously the active nurturing and centrality of the family. Much of the Christian literature that is read by the New Order Amish, such as the quarterly magazine Keepers at Home, glorifies motherhood and celebrates the wife’s place in the home. Having multiple offspring is one way to be proactive in creating a generation of Amish individuals who are spiritually enlightened. Another possible explanation is that the New Order Amish are less likely to use birth control because they feel it is morally wrong.

  In addition, the average number of children per family in the settlement is slowly declining. The steepest decline occurred for the two cohorts of women born in the 1940s and in the 1950s.9 Even over the past seventeen years, however, the average number of children for all Amish affiliations has dropped slightly from 5.3 to 5.0. While the move away from farming is likely the primary catalyst for this gradual decline in fertility rates, another factor appears to be the increased use of birth control and attempts by women to limit the number of pregnancies.10 An Old Order woman commented, “Artificial birth control is wrong if used for selfish reasons, but it’s okay for married couples if used for health or emotional reasons, but only barrier methods.” A New Order father a
greed: “A lot of Amish use birth control even though we have a conscience against it. But most don’t use the pill because it’s seen as taking away life.”

  In recent years, some Amish preachers have said publicly that women should be able to say “No” to more children. Most ordained leaders, however, especially those in the Andy Weaver and Swartzentruber affiliations, still maintain that family size is strictly a matter of “God’s will.” Even today it is rare to hear a conversation among the Amish centered around the question “How many children do you plan to have?”

  Some Amish couples are unable to have biological children (the incidence of infertility [about 3%] is about the same among the Amish as in the general population).11 In such cases, adoption is acceptable. “My sister adopted four biracial children,” noted one New Order bishop. “They just wanted children to lavish love on.” At first, adoption agencies balked at Amish requests because “they used to think we had no technology.” But attitudes have changed, and now there is a small number of Amish families in the settlement who have adopted children; restrictions on air travel have limited international adoptions.

  Naming practices support the idea that the individual is a member of an extended family that is internally differentiated by age and gender and continuous through time. Surnames anchor a person in a patrilineage, they carry the reputation of the extended family, and they even associate a person with a certain settlement. The six most common Amish surnames in the Holmes County Settlement, for instance, are Miller, Yoder, Troyer, Hershberger, Schlabach, and Weaver, whereas in the Lancaster Settlement the list would include Stoltzfus, King, Fisher, Beiler, Esh, and Lapp.12

  Because many people have the same name within a church district or affiliation, the frequent use of nicknames provides an easy method of keeping track of individuals. In the Holmes County Settlement, for instance, most Amish know that Apple Abe is a quadriplegic who fell out of an apple tree as a boy and that Air Force Mose is the Swartzentruber boy who joined the military and then came back to the Amish and became a bishop. One local Amish factory worker is fondly called Pete by his friends because, while on the job, he liked to listen to caustic sports talk radio host Pete Franklin, who broadcast on WWWE Cleveland from 1972 to 1987.

  The increased mobility of some Amish families has created new challenges, however, in keeping track of kin who may be dispersed across dozens of states and settlements. Phone shanties can be used as one option in the attempt, but several other strategies for keeping in touch are common. Local auctions are a popular place to tap into the “Amish grapevine,” including news of kin. In addition, approximately two-thirds of Amish in the settlement regularly read the Budget, a “correspondence newspaper” based in Sugarcreek, Ohio, that includes weekly letters from 450 “scribes” in Amish church districts all over the United States and Canada. These letters, written mostly by women, serve not only to create an idealized “imagined community” for the Amish, but give detailed information about the life-cycle events of church members.13 Circle letters, in which successive contributors add their news, are also popular among spreadout families. Funerals, too, provide a useful, if solemn, occasion for keeping up with far-flung kin. One funeral home director told us that the most distinctive aspect of Amish funerals from his point of view was the large number of “memory cards,” usually 800–1,500, that a family would typically order from them as an announcement that someone had passed away.

  Within this broad context of stable marriages, three-generational households, and large numbers of children and siblings, Amish families are hardly “havens in a heartless world.”14 Rather, they are a crucial nexus of cultural activities. Since “very few life cycle functions have left the home,”15 the family remains a site not only for births, marriages, and funerals, but for numerous other activities as well, including economic ones. Economic innovations often run through kinship lines, as do particular rumspringa traditions, the use of public schools, and reliance on certain forms of alternative medicines.

  The Home: Land, Architecture, and Household Technology

  The term family invokes not only a set of people who are deemed kin but also a sense of place. For Amish families, over most of the past two hundred years, the constellation of meanings surrounding the “home” orbited the farm. In the farming context, growing up Amish meant having roughly one hundred twenty acres of land, daily chores such as milking cows and feeding chickens, and annual rituals such as threshing rings and cutting ice from the pond. These associations still apply for a small minority of Amish. But increasingly, home means a much smaller plot of land and fewer chores for children, as a result of what David Luthy refers to as the “crowd-in policy.”16 In some cases, the original farmstead has been carved up into smaller ten-to-thirty-acre plots for the children who “work out”; for example, an Old Order man who works at a furniture store uses the thirty acres he received from his dad for deer hunting and bird watching, and he leases part of it to a Swartzentruber man for vegetable farming. In other cases, homes are built on very small plots of land, although one real estate agent who works closely with the Amish noted that most of the time “they’re looking for 1.5 acres minimum because they need a house, shop, and barn.” There is nothing in Holmes County similar to the “Amish suburbia” (neighborhoods laid out in grids but occupied solely by Amish) found in Elkhart and LaGrange counties, Indiana,17 but farmhouse and home are no longer synonymous for most Amish.

  The high price of land in Holmes County has prompted several adaptive strategies by Amish families. Some families have moved to the southern edges of the settlement or to other states in search of cheaper land. “If you want to measure the price of land,” commented one real estate agent, “you measure it with the center of Holmes County as the hub and the further you go out the price starts dropping. It’s just like putting a pin in the middle, and it decelerates.” The Amish have also formed an internal market in which they frequently sell to close family members or relatives. “They have an informal appraisal system, three or four guys who are very strong,” noted a local real estate agent. If they can afford it, parents may also buy land in southern Ohio as a kind of insurance policy for their children.

  Sometimes families, especially young couples, have needed economic help in getting started in life. Backed primarily by three Old Order Amish men, the Amish Helping Fund was started in 1995 to assist young couples purchasing their first homes. In 2008, this nonprofit organization had loans out to eight hundred to nine hundred persons and held more than $80 million in funds.18 The loans are for home or land purchases, but the land purchase has to be for livelihood, not for hunting purposes. A list of applicants is kept, with those at the top of the list being first-time home buyers. In 2008 they were charged 5 percent variable interest, and investors in the fund got a return of 4.5 percent. The decision to approve a loan is based on the applicant’s priority in the list and on an analysis of the applicant’s ability to pay back the loan. There has never been a foreclosure on a loan given from the fund. Although Ohio led the nation in the number of foreclosures in 2006, the rate of foreclosures in Holmes County was only half that of nearby Wayne, Tuscarawas, and Ashland counties, a difference that can be attributed to the high number of Amish in the county.19 According to the fund’s administrator, if a family has trouble repaying its loan, church elders will take over the family checkbook for a while to demonstrate sound household management.

  Although Amish of all affiliations are allowed to participate in the Helping Fund, the Andy Weaver group has decided not to take part in it, because the fund promotes household design that runs contrary to the Ordnung of most Andy Weaver churches. Most people currently getting loans are Old Order, reflecting, for one thing, the numerical dominance of the Old Order in the Amish population as a whole. Swartzentrubers do not usually go to the Old Order Helping Fund for home loans. “They’ll go to an English bank first. Or they’ll go to 5–10 other Swartzentrubers and piece together the money,” commented a local real estate agent. “A
nd they are adamant about paying back a debt.” Convinced of the truth of this statement, at least one bank in Kidron offers “congregationally guaranteed” loans to Swartzentruber Amish who are backed by their church district. A representative of one real estate agency noted that they never asked for a deposit on Amish homes, period. “That’s how confident the owner/builder was that they would pay.”

  The architecture, layout, and landscaping of Amish homes varies considerably by affiliation. New Order houses, some with stone facades, paved driveways, and carefully manicured gardens, may be virtually indistinguishable from neighboring non-Amish dwellings. Even Old Order houses, especially if they are built new by Amish construction crews, can be state-of-the-art. As one Amish homebuyer put it, “How could an excellent Amish carpenter possibly build a sub-standard house?” By contrast, Swartzentruber houses are easily identified by their peeling paint and by dirt driveways, outhouses, and dark red barns on the property. Typically, Swartzentrubers sell to other Swartzentrubers, or else “it’s a tear-down job for others.” Whereas Amish of “higher” affiliations may drywall over existing electrical outlets to preserve the value of the house, Swartzentruber families will often remove unwanted conveniences, such as indoor plumbing. A local real estate agent commented that he had just sold a house to a “lower” Amish after a “New Order” looked at it and said it wasn’t good enough. “There’s definitely a difference in tastes,” he concluded.