Amish in the United States

Introduction to Amish

To the hordes of tourists who travel to Pennsylvania Dutch country each year to go to quilting bees and shop for crafts, the Gentle People, as the Amish are known, represent innocence. They are a people apart, removed in place and arrested in time. They reject the corruptions of modernity—the cars that have splintered American communities and the televisions that have riveted the country’s youth. The Amish way of life is grounded in agriculture, hard work, and community. Its deliberate simplicity takes the form of horse-drawn buggies, clothes that could have come from a Vermeer painting, and a native German dialect infused with English words.

The myth of the Amish is amplified in movies like Witness and television shows like Amish in the City. It’s also fed by a series of practices that reinforce the group’s insularity. The Amish want to be left alone by the state—and to a remarkable extent, they are. They don’t fight America’s wars or, for the most part, contribute to Social Security. In 1972, noting their “excellent record as law-abiding and generally self-sufficient members of society,” the Supreme Court allowed the Amish to take their children out of school after eighth grade.

The license the Amish have been granted rests on the trust that the community will police itself, with Amish bishops and ministers acting in lieu of law enforcement. Yet keeping order comes hard to church leaders. “The Amish see the force of law as contrary to the Christian spirit,” said Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and an expert on the group. As a result, the Amish shy away from sending people to prison and the system of punishment of “the English,” as the Amish call other Americans. Once a sinner has confessed, and his repentance has been deemed genuine, every member of the Amish community must forgive him.

This approach is rooted in the Amish notion of Gelassenheit, or submission. Church members abide by their clergymen; children obey their parents; sisters mind their brothers; and wives defer to their husbands (divorce is taboo). With each act of submission, the Amish follow the lesson of Jesus when he died on the cross rather than resist his adversaries.

But can a community govern itself by Jesus’s teaching of mercy alone? It is sinful for the Amish to withhold forgiveness—so sinful that anyone who refers to a past misdeed after the Amish penalty for it has ended can be punished in the same manner as the original sinner. (…)

THE AMISH CHURCH TRACES ITS ROOTS TO THE 16TH CENTURY, when a group of Swiss dissidents decided the Protestant Reformation was moving too slowly. They embraced baptism of adults rather than children, a practice that was seen as a threat to the civic order and punished by execution. The Amish faced persecution and torture, which they relive in their prayers and hymns every other Sunday, when they worship in each other’s homes.

Today, most of the church’s 200,000 members live in the United States, and about half of them are in Pennsylvania and Ohio, concentrated in rural counties that are the heart of Amish country. There is a sameness to much of the region, with its white shingled homes, dark buggies, and repeating surnames.

As Donald Kraybill explains in his book The Amish and the State, there are two kingdoms in Amish theology: the kingdom of Christ, inhabited by the Amish, and the one in which everyone else lives. To maintain the boundary between the two worlds, the Amish hold themselves apart from the secular state as much as they can. In the mid-1900s, dozens of Amish fathers went to prison rather than agree to send their kids to public schools with non-Amish children. The community opened its own one-room schoolhouses, where the curricula ignored subjects like science and sex education. A woman who now lives near the Amish in Ohio’s Guernsey County reports that many of her neighbors weren’t taught that the earth was round. “A lot of Amish will tell you they don’t want their kids to be educated,” she said. “The more they know, the more apt they are to leave.”

The Amish tightly circumscribe their world in other ways as well. For the most part, they don’t file lawsuits, serve on juries, run for political office, or vote (despite Republican efforts to enlist them in the 2004 election). In 1993, Martin France, the district attorney in Wayne County, Ohio, prosecuted a case against a driver who killed five Amish children. France got little support from the victims’ families. “They didn’t want anything to do with me. They would just say, ‘This was God’s will and we’re not going to interfere,’ ” he recalled. An Amish woman who lived next to the site of the accident told France that while she was pinning up her laundry, she saw the driver’s car race down a hill and hit the children, who flew as high as a nearby telephone pole. But the woman refused to testify; her bishop wouldn’t allow it.

That bishop was a man in his late 20s who worked in his family’s chair factory. Amish church leaders are chosen by lot—or, as the faithful believe, by the unseen hand of God. The bishop is the highest clergyman in the hierarchy of each church, and he oversees two ministers and a deacon. Men and women propose candidates for minister and deacon, and in most districts any man with two or three nominations is considered. The “elected” clergy is chosen according to a biblical method of casting lots: each man chooses from a pile of identical hymnals, and the one who chooses the book marked with a piece of paper bearing a verse from the Bible becomes a church leader.

The bishop, who is chosen the same way from a field of three ministers, has awesome authority. He interprets the Ordnung, the unwritten rules that govern each church district, stipulating everything from the size of a man’s hat brim to the paint color on the outside of a house. When a church member violates the Ordnung, the bishop determines the punishment. (…)

The 92,000 Amish who live in Ohio and Pennsylvania generate hundreds of millions in annual tourism revenue.

By Nadya Lab.

Resources

Further Reading

• Information about Amish in the Gale Encyclopedia of American Law.