An Amish Paradox

by Charles E. Hurst

  Documents

  A final source for our data consisted of various publications that serve as windows into Amish culture. Historical documents were available from the Heritage Historical Library in Aylmer, Ontario, Canada, which, with the kind permission of David Luthy, we visited a few years ago, and from the Ohio Amish Library in Berlin, Ohio, administered by Ed Kline, which we visited on several occasions. These libraries gave us access to materials on the roles of women, the activities of the Old Order Steering Committee, and church schisms in the settlement.

  Content analyses of representative textbooks in mathematics, health, history, and geography, as well as story books used by Amish teachers and analyses of the Blackboard Bulletin (a newsletter for Amish teachers published by Pathway Publishers in Ontario) helped us identify central themes, subjects, and values focused upon in Amish classrooms. Family Life, another Pathway publication, provided an additional source for uncovering Amish attitudes about gender roles and family values. The local Amish newsletter, the Budget, was used to analyze the content of advertisements of products, such as medical goods, whose market is the Amish community. In addition, a miscellaneous group of newsletters and pamphlets published for the Amish by the Amish on mental health, hospital aid, business listings, and education were used as data sources for particular chapters.

  Systematic random samples from the 1996 and 2005 editions of the Ohio Amish Directory were used to detect shifts in occupational structure and examine the relationship between occupation and family size on the one hand and occupation and retention on the other. We were interested in overall results on each of these for the Holmes County Settlement as a whole and for each affiliation. The Directory allowed us to uncover similarities and differences among the different orders.

  APPENDIX B

  Ohio Amish Settlements, 2008

  APPENDIX C

  Holmes County Settlement Amish Church Schisms, 1900–2001

  Source: Adapted from Ohio Amish Directory: Holmes County and Vicinity (Sugarcreek, OH: Carlisle, 1996). Courtesy of Mary Schantz.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. Olshan, “The Opening of Amish Society,” 383.

  2. All Bible verses quoted in the book are from the King James Version.

  3. Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, xi–xii.

  Chapter 1. Discovering the Holmes County Amish

  1. Information on the size and value of the farms comes from the Wayne County Web site, www.waynecountyauditor.org.

  2. See Christine Pratt, “Witnesses Recount Night of Cornfield Shooting,” Wooster (Ohio) Daily Record, March 4, 2004.

  3. Yoder was never prosecuted, because the judge in Millersburg said the case would have to be retried in the same county in which it was declared a mistrial, and the original witnesses could not be rounded up. Yoder was temporarily excommunicated by his church district as a punishment but was reinstated based on his confession and apology.

  4. In the early nineteenth century, dressing in white, not black, was considered an expression of conservatism, because white more closely resembled the color of natural flax without any dyes. Stutzman’s views were considered strange by most Amish, however.

  5. Although Mount Hope is an “Amish hub,” it is less popular among tourists than Walnut Creek and Berlin, which present an architectural style and “cultural memory” more consistent with tourists’ expectations of the Amish as relics from a bygone era. See Biesecker, “Heritage versus History,” 122–23.

  6. Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, vii.

  7. Kraybill and Nolt, ibid., 22, refer to this set of circumstances as the “demographic squeeze.” External forces such as land scarcity, rising land prices, urbanization, and tourism combined with internal factors such as high birth and retention rates and attachment to the region to create the need for a solution such as micro-enterprises.

  8. Ericksen, Ericksen, and Hostetler, “The Cultivation of the Soil,” 50.

  9. Kraybill and Nolt use the phrase “from plows to profits” as the subtitle of their book Amish Enterprise, which describes the transition away from farming among the Amish.

  10. Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, 191.

  11. Greksa and Korbin, “Key Decisions,” 388–89.

  12. Olshan argues that home businesses expose Amish children and parents to non-Amish strangers with increasing frequency because the “open” or “for sale” sign invites the outsider into a “state of talk” with the Amish seller. Using Erving Goffman’s work on “interaction ritual” to describe the difference between an Amish farmer, who was free to remain aloof, indifferent, or contemptuous toward the outside world, and an Amish shop owner, whose “open” sign represents an implicit invitation to enter the Amish world, he concludes that the result of this loss of institutionalized avoidance is that the Amish man must have “a greater concern with how to manage a more or less constant interfacing with the public” (“The Opening of Amish Society,” 381).

  13. Kraybill and Nolt, for instance, seem somewhat less skeptical than Olshan about the negative influence of micro-enterprises, which they describe as “an ingenious negotiation with modernity” (Amish Enterprise, 34).

  14. As just one example, Donnermeyer and Cooksey argue that “today, the distance between the Amish and mainstream North American society is much greater [than in the past]” (“Demographic Foundations,” 12). In contrast, Stambach sees a rapidly increasing “slippage of non-Amish practices into what has become Amish custom” (“The Silence Is Getting Louder,” 39).

  15. Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, x.

  16. In Plain Diversity, Nolt and Meyers offer a similar account of increasing diversification among the Indiana Amish.

  17. Kraybill notes that “there have been surprisingly few studies conducted on the Holmes County Settlement” (“Plotting Social Change,” 264n3). His 1994 article is still the best social scientific account of the Holmes County Settlement. Donnermeyer and colleagues have also published several papers from an analysis of the Ohio Amish Directory. A Quiet Moment in Time, by Kreps, Donnermeyer, and Kreps, focuses on the Holmes County Settlement but is written largely for tourists, as is Miller’s Our People.

  18. We have drawn extensively on both Nolt’s A History of the Amish and Kraybill’s The Riddle of Amish Culture in this summary.

  19. Ammann’s view of shunning was not new; it applied an earlier understanding based on the teachings of Menno Simons and the Dordrecht Confession of Faith in 1632.

  20. The Amish share the Anabaptist label with three other groups: the Mennonites, the Hutterites, and the Brethren. Of these four groups, the Mennonites (42%) and the Brethren (34%) make up about two-thirds of the total Anabaptist population in the United States. The Amish account for 22 percent and the Hutterites 2 percent. See Kraybill and Hostetter, Anabaptist World U.S.A., 33.

  21. Louden, “Pennsylvania German in the 21st Century.” Pennsylvania German is the term preferred by linguists, but we use Pennsylvania Dutch to reflect common usage. The dialect spoken in the Holmes County Settlement is known as Schwäbisch.

  22. Ibid. Ex-Amish who still speak the language on a regular basis are a rapidly aging group. Younger people who leave tend to switch quickly to English as their sole means of communication.

  23. The Swiss Amish, the majority of whom live in Indiana, speak a different dialect called Swiss. See Meyers and Nolt, An Amish Patchwork, 60–62, for a useful overview of language and dialects. It is also worth noting that the comfort level with speaking English varies somewhat depending on affiliation, school background, occupation, and general exposure to the English-speaking world.

  24. Linguists use the term diglossia for this situation in which a very prestigious language reserved for formal occasions coexists with a vernacular.

  25. Among the New Order Amish and a few “progressive” Old Order church districts, the Holy Kiss is shared between all church members of the same sex. At funerals and weddings attended by Amish of different
affiliations, however, the New Order typically refrain from the Holy Kiss to prevent awkwardness. Interestingly, although most church members in conservative affiliations do not exchange the Holy Kiss, elderly members sometimes do, a practice that seems to reinforce the status hierarchy.

  26. The use of the lot to choose ordained leaders involves an interesting mixture of divine providence and congregational input. In Ohio, male and female church members whisper the name of a candidate to the deacon, and the men who receive three or more votes (usually a half dozen or less) are placed in the lot. The man who chooses the song book with a slip of paper in it bearing a Bible verse becomes a deacon, a minister, or a bishop. The service is usually very emotional, since being chosen to serve is a heavy burden to be carried (without pay or training) for the rest of one’s life.

  27. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, 112.

  28. Hostetler, Amish Society, 108.

  29. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, 36.

  30. In this respect, we follow several Amish scholars, such as Kraybill (“The Amish Encounter with Modernity”) and Nolt and Meyers (Plain Diversity).

  31. The Amish even formed a three-person National Amish Steering Committee (which reports to “state directors” who serve as intermediaries with each settlement) in the 1960s in response to concerns about the effects of the draft. This committee has helped negotiate nationwide compromises favorable to the Amish on such issues as alternative service, occupational safety, education, and federal income tax exemptions for the self-employed. See Olshan, “Homespun Bureaucracy.”

  32. Property owners installing wastewater systems are required to get permits from the county health commissioner to ensure that runoff does not adversely affect the surrounding environment, but some Swartzentruber Amish have installed systems without obtaining a permit. When they refuse to pay the seventy-five-dollar assessment fee, their tax bills are tagged as delinquent. See Marc Kovak, “Amish Balk at Wastewater System Assessment: Wayne Stands Firm,” Wooster (Ohio) Daily Record, September 8, 2005, A1.

  33. See Stambach, “The Silence Is Getting Louder.” We see many parallels between the situation of the Amish and ethnic groups that are struggling to maintain a collective sense of identity in an ever-changing world. We reject the idea that ethnic identity is a never-changing, innately given fact of social life, and agree with Tambiah: “Ethnic identity unites the semantics of primordial and historical claims with the pragmatics of calculated choice and opportunism in dynamic contexts of political and economic competition between interest groups” (“Ethnic Conflict,” 336).

  34. Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” 131.

  35. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community.

  36. Turner, “Betwixt and Between.”

  37. In Purity and Danger, Douglas notes four kinds of social pollution: danger pressing on external boundaries, danger from transgressing the internal lines of the system, danger in the margin of the lines, and internal contradiction, “when some of the basic postulates are denied by other basic postulates, so that at certain points the system seems to be at war with itself” (531). Douglas argues that clearly defined boundaries of purity reinforce a society’s common definitions and reduce the stress, helping members know who they are and what is expected of them.

  38. William Watson, “The Things That Are More Excellent,” in One Hundred and One Famous Poems, edited by Roy J. Cook (Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1958), 132.

  39. Quoted in Giddens, Emile Durkheim, 115.

  40. Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

  41. Kraybill, “The Amish Encounter with Modernity,” 25–32. In contrast, Olshan argues that to the extent that the Amish reject fatalism and “self-consciously manipulate their path of social development,” they are more accurately viewed as a “modern people” rather than as a “folk society” (“Modernity, Folk Society, Old Order Amish,” 189). As early as 1956, Huntington described the Amish as a “consciously maintained folk society” (“Dove at the Window,” 144) to acknowledge the self-imposed nature of their isolation.

  42. Stambach, “The Silence Is Getting Louder.”

  43. On telephones, see Umble (Holding the Line); on bureaucracy, see Olshan (“Homespun Bureaucracy”); on health care, see Huntington (“Health Care”); on tourism, see Luthy (“Amish Tourism”); on transportation, see Zook (“Slow Moving Vehicles”). While awareness of Amish cultural compromises has increased, many observers still mistakenly assume that the Amish reject technological comforts out of a religious asceticism (seeking hardship as a means to redemption). Instead, as Kidder and Hostetler have observed, “each decision about accepting or rejecting a ‘modern’ convenience is based on a consensus about the effect a new product would have on the social patterning of the community” (“Managing Ideologies,” 905).

  44. Meyers and Nolt, An Amish Patchwork, 2.

  45. Nolt and Meyers, Plain Diversity.

  46. Nolt, A History of the Amish, 132–33. Although there are a few accounts of Amish being attacked by Indians, most stories passed down through Amish families about the Indian encounter are ones that emphasize goodwill.

  47. Ohio Amish Directory, xvi.

  48. Nolt, A History of the Amish, 158.

  49. David Beiler, quoted in Nolt, A History of the Amish, 170. Some conservative leaders decided not to attend, and others claimed they were not notified of the meeting.

  50. Nolt, A History of the Amish, 172.

  51. Nolt (ibid., 269) reports on this incident and others. Yoder showed up in civilian clothes the next day, and the officers never carried out their death threat.

  52. “Amish Farmer Jailed,” New York Times, March 19, 1960.

  53. See Nolt, A History of the Amish, 297–98, for a detailed description of this incident.

  54. In Amish Grace, Kraybill, Nolt, and Weaver-Zercher provide a compelling account of how forgiveness transcended tragedy in the Nickel Mines shooting.

  55. Donnermeyer and Cooksey, “Demographic Foundations,” 8.

  56. One result of the high fertility rate among the Amish is that Holmes County has the youngest average age of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties.

  57. “Amish Population Growth 2007–2008: One-Year Highlights,” Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, www2.etown.edu/amishstudies/Population_Trends_2007_2008.asp (accessed June 29, 2009).

  58. Office of Strategic Research, Ohio Department of Development, “Per Capita Personal Income 2006,” www.odod.state.oh.us/cms/uploadedfiles/Research/g201.pdf (accessed July 29, 2008). It is important to note, however, that in terms of median household income, Holmes County ranks 42 among the eighty-eight Ohio counties.

  59. Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, “County-Level Unemployment and Median Household Income for Ohio,” www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Unemployment/RDList2.asp?ST=OH (accessed March 30, 2009).

  60. Shasta Mast, interview by David McConnell, October 27, 2006, Millersburg, OH.

  61. Office of Policy, Research, and Strategic Planning, “Ohio County Profiles,” http://development.ohio.gov/research/files/so/Holmes.pdf (accessed July 8, 2009).

  62. The Brethren branches in the area include the Grace Brethren, the Conservative Grace Brethren, the Church of the Brethren, the Brethren Church, and the Brethren in Christ.

  63. Kraybill and Hostetter, Anabaptist World U.S.A., 70. Most Beachy Amish also have Sunday school, use church buildings, and are deeply involved in mission work. Many of the Beachy Amish do consider themselves “Amish” in spite of these differences. According to Nolt, by 2002 the Beachy Amish had expanded to include “more than 150 congregations in 23 states and one province, along with 39 other churches in 10 countries on four continents” (A History of the Amish, 330).

  64. Kidder, “The Role of Outsiders,” 214.

  65. Interestingly, however, fundamentalists have had to work a lot harder at affirming male authority and female submission, because there is a long history of women as Sunday school teachers, mission workers,
and fund-raisers. The gender rhetoric is stronger because gender relations are so much more contested in these communities (Jennifer Graber, personal communication).

  Chapter 2. The Origins of Religious Diversity

  1. 2000 Ohio Amish Directory: Holmes County and Vicinity (Walnut Creek, OH: Carlisle Press, 2000), xvii.

  2. Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, 104.

  3. Ibid., 105.

  4. Byler, “The Geography of Difference.”

  5. Meyers and Nolt, An Amish Patchwork, 50.

  6. As a result of the Swartzentrubers’ insularity, reliable accounts of their life have been hard to find. Recently, however, several scholars have gained limited access and published informative accounts of Swartzentrubers’ lives. In Plain Secrets, Mackall provides a sensitive and humanizing account of Swartzentruber life based on a ten-year friendship with one family in the Lodi Settlement in Ohio. Johnson-Weiner’s Train Up a Child gives a detailed description of Swartzentruber schools based on site visits and interviews with key informants in several states. In “The Geography of Distance,” Byler argues persuasively that there is a high degree of social distance between Swartzentrubers and other Amish in the Holmes County Settlement.

  7. Luthy, “The Swartzentruber Amish,” 19.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Notes from Jacob Mast entitled “Of the Yoder Spalt” from the Amish library in Aylmer, Canada, reported, “At that time, he [Yoder] and Dan Wengerd were sweet as honey towards each other, but not long afterwards they were like cats and dogs.”

  10. The five points raised by Wengerd are summarized in Weaver, “Glimpses of the Amish Church,” 9–10. Roy Weaver and Kline (“Research Notes”) provide quotes from many of the letters and reports during that difficult time. As for the last grievance, according to local historians, the feeling was that Sam’s wife was “running the show” behind the scenes and thus overstepping her calling as an “obedient wife.” A related story that has circulated in the settlement as a cautionary tale about motherhood purports that Yoder’s wife had an illegitimate child. When the boy was ten or eleven years old, she put him on a train to visit relatives in the West. Apparently, she did not give the boy proper instructions, and without the help of non-Amish on the train, the boy never would have arrived. Some time later, Yoder’s wife was on the way to Wooster with visitors when a train hit her buggy. According to the story, it was the same train that she had put her son on. The case of Sam Yoder’s wife is the only instance we discovered in which gender played a role, albeit a minor one, in a church schism, but it clearly reveals the social disapproval that awaited women who tried to step out of the confines of their socially prescribed roles.