An Amish Paradox

by Charles E. Hurst

  In addition to the dawdi haus, outbuildings are a common feature of Amish homes. Although it is commonly believed that all Amish hold church services “in their homes,” these days it is usually more accurate to say that church is held in the shop or the barn. In farm families, benches that have been transported via the bench wagon will often be set up under the hayloft and amid farm equipment in the barn. For nonfarmers, the “pole barn” is more often a spacious, cement-floored, well-insulated building that is temporarily transformed from shop or buggy parking garage on the Sunday when the family hosts church. Outdoor play equipment for children also varies by family and affiliation. Swartzentruber and Andy Weaver children have few visible playthings in the yard, but some Old and New Order homes sport basketball hoops, trampolines, and swing sets. Reflected one Old Order man, “Sometimes you go by an Amish home and see all those play things out there—different colored playhouses and swings and slides—and it rivals the play area at McDonald’s.” Most Old and New Order Amish are allowed to use power lawn mowers, weed eaters, bicycles, and electric typewriters, whereas Andy Weaver and Swartzentruber Amish are not.20

  The disparity between the stately homes of progressive Amish and the farmhouses of more conservative Amish has become more noticeable in recent years. Photographs courtesy of Charles Hurst.

  Regardless of affiliation, the interior of an Amish home evokes quiet warmth and an orderliness that seems to transcend the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The Amish love of fine woodworking is seen in the cabinetry and furniture of most houses. Interior colors are muted, although the younger generation is increasingly comfortable with pastels and bolder decorating schemes. Kitchens are typically very spacious and feature a large, centrally located table, where meals are taken. The living room may include several chairs—upholstered chairs in the more progressive affiliations—where family members congregate to read, sew, play games, and socialize in the evenings. Many homes have a walk-in basement, where the washing machine (usually a Maytag) is kept and where members of the congregation can be fed after a family hosts church. Bedrooms are usually upstairs. Stipulations about curtains for the windows vary by church district and affiliation. A local real estate agent noted, “When they [the Amish] buy a home, they know what they want. A pie safe, a walk-in pantry, a 30-square foot kitchen.” One Old Order home we visited even had a wine cellar regulated by solar power and a sauna in the basement.

  The use of general household technology varies considerably by affiliation and by church district. Acceptance of telephones is an especially revealing example. Most New Order members have landline phones in their homes, whereas Old Order and Andy Weaver Amish typically use a phone shanty (often shared with neighbors and thus called a “community phone”) at the end of a driveway. Swartzentrubers try to avoid phone use except in emergencies. The logic is that the phone must be separate from the house or one’s business, but as Diane Zimmerman Umble has shown, most shops now have a phone in an adjacent building or shanty.21

  The recent diffusion of cell phones into some segments of the Amish community has created further complications. One New Order leader observed that most New Order members do not have cell phones, although some use them for business only, whereas “75 percent of those people [Old Order] have cell phones.” Asked why cell phones had proliferated, an Old Order man noted that “everyone was using them” before church leaders realized what was happening. Many districts have forbidden cell phones in the home, but controlling portable, handheld electronic devices has become a real challenge for many church leaders.

  The Amish use of household appliances has also changed markedly over the past half century. The discovery and use of natural gas in the 1950s revolutionized Amish home life for Old Order and New Order families. Gas stoves gradually replaced wood-burning and kerosene stoves for all but the Andy Weavers and the Swartzentrubers.22 Lighting methods have also shifted from the flat-wick kerosene lamps and pressure lamps, still used by the more conservative groups, to centralized gas lights for most Old Order and New Order groups.23 For plumbing, old-fashioned hand pumps and windmills are still used when possible by the Swartzentrubers, but even they will use diesel engines to pump water from the well at times. A large majority of the Holmes County Amish use pressurized water systems (air that has been compressed by a gas or diesel engine forces water through the pipes), resulting in “indoor bathrooms with flush toilets and built-in bathtubs and showers.”24 Wood-burning, kerosene, or gas water heaters, depending on church Ordnung, allow for hot water as well. And nearly all Amish groups in the settlement use motorized wringer washing machines (usually motorized by a gas engine). Dryers are rarely used, but “spinners” to wring out the water in washed clothes are becoming more common.

  Several relatively recent developments have affected Amish home life. One is the electrical inverter, which converts 12-volt direct current from a battery into 110-volt alternating current that is no different from the current supplied by public utility lines. New Order and some Old Order Amish use battery inverters to run mixers, food processors, sewing machines, blenders, and even word processors. A New Order businessman noted, however, that “the church wants people to keep the appliances small.”

  Home freezers also have come into common use. In most cases, Amish families rent a freezer and space to keep it in the basement of a local store or church. Sometimes, families who live near one another fund construction of a small “freezer barn” (with electrical outlets) that is located some distance away from their homes. A woman who worked for Wayne-Holmes Electric Cooperative remembers that the firm installed more service drops to freezer barns than to homes in the winter of 2003–4, after several Amish bishops approved the use of freezer barns for their congregations. Only the Andy Weavers and the Swartzentrubers still rely on ice for refrigeration. An unintended consequence of the adoption of home freezers is that the traditional wedding months of November and December have, since the mid-1980s, given way to May, June, September, and October. Now that farming is on the wane and food can be kept cold year round, there is no need to coordinate weddings with the harvest.25

  In addition, as noted above, the increasing availability of handheld, battery-powered devices that can be recharged has created enormous challenges for the Amish. One English owner of a lumber business whose workforce is mostly Old Order Amish had this to say when asked about the image of the Amish families as backward: “And elephants fly! They’re not backwards. They’ll have a charger in every outlet in our office. And they won’t buy any old cell phone. They’ll have the cameras and texting. Their kids will have Game Boys and all the games.” Many products of the electronics revolution such as iPods, GPS devices, and cell phones are not easily detected by bishops and, in any event, may not have been anticipated when church Ordnung were formulated. In some cases, usage of these devices has been explicitly forbidden, but in other churches and districts, church members and leaders alike simply “look the other way.”

  In general, if an innovation encourages pursuit of individual interests over those of the church or community, it is discouraged or outlawed. Some New Order churches, for example, decided against ownership of cell phones because they had heard that Mennonite and Beachy Amish youth were using them to text message during church services and were not paying attention to the service. Other church leaders recognize that acceptance of some technology may help to keep youth within the fold. Maintaining a balance between concern for youth and concern for community requires continual sensitivity.

  The introduction of cell phones into some Amish church districts has led to a spirited debate about their pros and cons. Photograph by Doyle Yoder.

  If technology that has been permitted is later abused, it may then be banned. In one New Order church, members were using walkie-talkies for necessary communications during hunting, with church approval, but when it was discovered that a few adolescent boys were using them to talk with girls, the church decided to ban the devices.

  Taken together
, the carefully thought-out use of alternatives to electricity from public power lines has enabled many families to keep technology at arms length while still benefiting from some household comforts. Even though comfort and efficiency are not the overarching values on display in Amish homes, church Ordnung have been surprisingly flexible in accommodating incremental changes. Amish throughout the settlement have drawn the line at televisions, radios, and CD/DVD players, but it only takes one visit to an Amish home to see that the Amish are not living in museums.

  How do Amish manage the succession of their homes and belongings from one generation to the next? Unsurprisingly, Amish approaches to inheritance are intensely practical. One might expect a strong patrilineal bias, whereby sons are favored in matters of succession, but land, dwellings, and other assets are usually divided equally among the children or in ways that all family members agree is most pragmatic. Husbands and wives typically own homes or farms jointly, and they tend to be proactive about deeding their assets to their children before they reach old age. In visiting one elderly Amish couple in their home, for example, we were surprised to hear their two daughters describe in great detail, in front of their parents, precisely which pieces of furniture they would inherit when the parents passed away. To avoid inheritance taxes and to preempt any family squabbles, these parents, like many others, had divided up their assets well in advance of declining health. A quick perusal of public filings at the Wayne County Recorder’s Office reveals numerous deeds indicating that elderly Amish parents have “gifted” their land and home to their children for a token fee of one dollar or ten dollars, while reserving to the grantors “for and during the term of their natural lifetimes, the right to exclusively possess and occupy the residence on the above-described property.”26

  Amish families are not as residentially segregated from non-Amish families as the frequent references to “Amish Country” in the tourist literature might suggest. Rather, the degree of residential segregation depends a lot on where one lives in the settlement. Asked how many of the 20 homes “closest to your house” are non-Amish, 48 percent of respondents in our survey responded 1–7 homes, while 46 percent indicated that 8–15 of their closest 20 neighbors were non-Amish. Five percent said that all 20 of their closest neighbors were Amish, and 2 percent said all 20 of their closest neighbors were non-Amish. For just over half of the Amish in the settlement, then, the majority of their neighbors are Amish, and as the population grows, the intensification of mostly Amish enclaves is on the rise. Nevertheless, these figures suggest that the Amish and the non-Amish are still interspersed throughout much of the settlement. The occasional prank or hate crime notwithstanding, it is not hard to find English and Amish who highly value each other as neighbors and who share food and advice on a regular basis as well as assistance in times of crisis.27

  Residential integration between Amish families who belong to different church districts or affiliations is also fairly common. Contrary to popular belief, church districts are not always mutually exclusive geographic units. Particularly in the northern part of the settlement, church districts may be highly interspersed rather than existing in clusters of contiguous farms or homes. Within a several-square-mile block, for instance, there may be families from up to five different church districts and three different affiliations. In these areas, the sharing of schooling and of “frolics” or other events to help neighbors in need acts as a powerful integrative mechanism. In other areas, however, contiguous church districts of one affiliation are the norm. This latter pattern is growing as the geographic size of church districts in the settlement shrinks with population growth and the movement away from farming. Church districts today rarely span more than 2–3 miles compared with 5–10 miles in the recent past.

  Discipline and Emotion in Early Child-Rearing

  What is it like to grow up in an Amish home? Scholars show remarkable agreement in their assessment of the underlying goals and the emotional tenor of Amish parent-child relationships. All point to a widespread assumption that children have a sinful nature but that they are lovable and teachable. “Training up a child” thus requires the inculcation of obedience and self-control. Kraybill, for example, describes the ultimate goal of socialization as the development of “the yielded self” and argues that Amish work as hard to “lose themselves” as the English work to “find themselves.”28 Meyers and Nolt describe Gelassenheit as submission to God, to others, and to the church, and they note that this quality “emerges in a primary disciplinary task of parents who seek to ‘break the will of the child’ in order to promote a sense of collective consciousness in place of individual willfulness.”29 Our interviewees expressed very similar sentiments, summed up nicely by a New Order minister: “We don’t have to teach them [children] to be angry. They already inherited that carnal nature. So we have to break them of that. A child receives training of his soul. If a child’s carnal nature has not been broken at a young age, he’ll have problems in school and when he comes to baptism, it’s way too late.”

  Consistent with Hostetler’s observations, we found that for the first two years of life, a baby, whose arrival is a cause for joy, is given lots of love by multiple caregivers in a fairly permissive environment.30 Some mothers breast-feed for a year or more, but others do so for only a few months, leaving one New Order man to lament, “What has happened over the past generation is that all of us completely gave up breastfeeding and went over to bottle feeding, and I don’t know why!” As Amish mothers share advice with one another about how to handle colicky babies, co-sleeping is usually not considered as an option. One reader of Family Life magazine wrote, “Rarely do I hear someone who is not ashamed to encourage having the baby with the parents at night.” Beginning around age two, discipline is given continuously till adolescence. Although the specific dos and don’ts vary from family to family, there is wide agreement on the general approach: “Children are made aware of what behavior is acceptable and what is not, and the line between the two is non-negotiable.”31

  Amish of all affiliations are similarly united in their agreement that this “training of the soul” must be done in the context of the family and that the mother-child bond is the bedrock for a proper upbringing. Women are discouraged from working outside the home for precisely this reason. One New Order man put it this way: “We feel strongly about putting children in daycare centers—we’re not saying there are not good daycare centers, but the mother-child bond is so strong that we feel it should not be broken. Our children will not die physically if they’re not at home with the mother, but they will die somewhat inside if they’ve never been taught integrity and responsibility.” To our knowledge, there is not a single Amish child enrolled in institutionalized day care in the Holmes County Settlement.

  Children, surrounded by extended family members from birth, grow up in a world in which interconnectedness and service to others is still emphasized. Photograph by Doyle Yoder.

  Amish views of the ideal mother and father rest on the assumption that men and women have discrete roles. Regardless of order or age, the Amish we interviewed described the ideal mother and wife as one who is a “keeper at home”: she takes care of her family and her husband. Several drew from the Bible, especially the Titus 2:4–5 standard for young women: “to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.” The ideal mother and wife is repeatedly described as being loving, gentle, patient, kind, humble or submissive, and attentive to the needs of others rather than her own. The ideal father complements the ideal mother. He is the head of the home, a “good worker and provider” who “saves time for the family,” “spends time with the children,” and is consistently “showing leadership.” He “pitches in and helps around the house.” It is important that he be kind, patient, and “tenderhearted” with his family. Christ, family, and church are more important than his work. One Old Order woman summed it up t
his way: “It’s the kind of father who, when the children can get anything, for example, candy, an orange, they share it with their dad. Usually they’ll give him the biggest piece.” Together, parents are continually exhorted to be shining examples for their children and to remember that “attitudes are caught, not taught.”

  In this context, Amish youngsters quickly learn that a “good child” is one who exhibits “a tame, gentle and domesticated self, yielded to the community’s larger goals.”32 The specific qualities that are desired are captured in the many aphorisms and moral imperatives that saturate Amish homes, schools, and churches: A truth told with bad intent is worse than any lie. Never belittle those in authority. Don’t gossip. Be cheerful. See the cup as always half full. Help the less fortunate. In addition, from a very young age, children are taught to control their bodily impulses. One Old Order man half-jokingly told us that the reason there are so many good deer hunters among the Amish is “because they are used to sitting still for three hours in church.”

  Consistent with the belief in separate roles for mothers and fathers, the qualities of a “good child” differ somewhat according to gender. Boys are typically given more leeway to engage in rambunctious behavior and to “tag along” with dad in the shop or in town. Girls are expected to be reserved and to show restraint and purity. “Where are your little girls when shop customers come? May they tag along with Dad and their older brothers anytime they choose?” wrote one concerned mother to Family Life. Since “a girl with a loud mouth is headed for trouble,” she concluded that “they must know they are girls and not boys.”33 Assigning different chores for boys and girls is one way in which this training is achieved. Although the main goal of any chore is teaching responsibility (“One of the grandchildren has to feed the chickens and if he doesn’t, no eggs”), the “hidden curriculum” teaches boys and girls their respective roles.