A History of the Amish

Skyhorse Publishing

Contents

A Reformation Heritage

"We have been united to stand fast in the Lord."

— Anabaptist leaders, 1527

A peculiar people in a land of grand expectations

For many Americans, the early 1960s seemed an era of buoyant optimism and impressive progress. Poverty rates were falling, life expectancy increasing, and modern medicine promised to end a host of dread diseases. A decade and a half of economic growth had boosted national and personal incomes to new heights and with it remarkable new consumer goods, from air conditioning to transistor radios. Weather satellites, jet airplanes, and other technological wonders gave people confidence that President John Kennedy was right when he vowed that humans would walk on the moon before the decade ended. Undergirding national prosperity was an expanding system of education and technical know-how, and the security that came from residing within the boundaries of a superpower whose global influence and military muscle supported an "American way of life." Cold war tensions could put people on edge, but in the years before a deepening war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, or the cynicism of Watergate, the spirit of the times was one of grand expectation.

Near the crossroads community of Winesburg, in eastern Holmes County, Ohio, thirty-one-year-old Elizabeth Miller was not so sure. That year, Miller, an Old Order Amish farm wife and mother, penned several essays on church history and contemporary life. Apparently well-read and familiar with current events, Miller was nonplussed by many of the developments that others took to be progress. She had heard the puzzled questions often enough: "Don't [you] care for the use of electricity and the pleasure of owning an automobile?"

"Surely Christ would not have led a homeless poor life as he did" if it wasn't "necessary for a follower of Christ to live a humble life" as well, Miller reasoned, but in a society celebrating abundance it was difficult to explain why her family did not seek "anything more than what is needed to live." Yet modernity bore more than curious questions. It had a coercive edge. Miller felt mounting pressure on Amish parents to send their youth to consolidated high schools that featured "basketball games, dances, [and] shows" and that assumed one can "learn to plow straight by reading how to do it," rather than getting one's hands dirty through experience. In response to state demands, faithful Amish "mothers and fathers sorrowfully have been apprehended and served prison terms" rather than subject "their beloved children" to such higher schooling.

In some ways, Miller's reflections on life in the 1960s expressed noticeably American themes. She condemned "godless communism," for example, and gave money to the Red Cross and to fund a cure for polio. But her brand of patriotism differed from those who "believe in fighting for their country ... with guns and bombs." She knew that the pacifist Amish "are looked upon with scorn because they refuse to take up arms." She had attended the court hearings of Amish men sent to prison by military draft boards. Rather than seeing better days ahead, Miller wondered aloud whether her people could persevere in an environment where those "in high places who administer the laws" considered the Amish "ignorant, illiterate, and unlettered."

A half century later, Miller's community of faith has not only persisted in the midst of hypermodern society, but is a growing, vibrant group. As a "plain and peculiar people," in Miller's self-description, the Amish attract the attention of tourists and mass marketers who see the Amish as everything from examples of nostalgic conservatism to icons of postmodern environmentalism. For their part, the Amish insist they are not exactly any of these things. They are not timeless figures frozen in the past, nor the poster-children of political activists. Taken on their own terms, the Old Order Amish are a community that takes seriously the task of personal discipleship and collective witness to a particular Christian way of life that values humility, simplicity, and obedience. From their 1693 beginnings in Switzerland and the south Rhine Valley, to their immigration to North America and settlement in thirty U.S. states and the province of Ontario, the Amish have charted a distinctive history. At times, like Elizabeth Miller's musing on current events, that story has been recognizably North American, yet it has also been markedly different from the dominant narrative of individual achievement and scientific progress that has shaped modern life.

One of the striking features of Elizabeth Miller's writing was the ease with which she invoked the past. Her reflections on the present instinctively and repeatedly turned to stories from Amish history and accounts from old church martyr books. That Miller situated her people's contemporary life in a long tradition of dissenting and suffering forebears is no surprise. The Amish are one of several spiritual heirs of the Protestant Reformation's Anabaptist movement, and the source of Miller's faith had roots deep in sixteenth-century Europe.

Turbulent times

In the early 1500s, an array of political and economic woes troubled Western Europe. For more than fifty years, a population explosion had seemed to outstrip the continent's ability to feed itself. The Spanish conquistadors, who brought news of exotic "new worlds" across the sea, also brought shiploads of silver, plundered from the Americas. This destabilized European economies, producing inflation of prices and rents that drove land-owning peasants into poverty. In towns and cities, a growing class of wealthy merchants and craftspeople challenged the authority of hereditary nobles, while university scholars and disgruntled students voiced sharp criticism of public corruption.

The growing power of the Ottoman Turks to the east threatened Western Europeans' sense of security. Kings struggled not only to wrest power and authority from local nobles, but also from rival monarchs. Anxiety only grew as the printing press seemed to shrink the European world. No longer were events in Paris and Vienna so distant. The printed page relayed messages of trouble, defeat, and social unrest from city to city in a matter of days. Free from direct state control, the new press circulated ideas and arguments in a way that often increased unease and discontent.

Amid all the turbulence, however, the church had still stitched the social fabric together. For more than a thousand years, Western Europe had been united in "One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church." During the fourth century, with the support of the Roman emperors, Christianity had evolved from a persecuted movement to the only sanctioned religion in the Roman Empire. Under a now presumably Christian empire, bishops and priests received special privileges, and eventually the bishop of Rome was accorded particular prestige. The church and the imperial state were linked in building a common, unified, and Christian civilization. Dissent against the One Church also became a crime against state and society.

In time, the western half of the Roman Empire crumbled, but the church remained to pick up the pieces. Throughout the Middle Ages, the pope, as bishop of Rome, led Christians in building a holy civilization in Western Europe. The church offered God's salvation to all who sought divine grace through participation in the sacraments (especially the Holy Communion), which the church regulated carefully. But the church did more than oversee the way to heaven. The church mediated national conflicts, crowned rulers, patronized the fine arts, sponsored higher education, and encouraged trade and exploration.

The church had led Western Europe for a millennium, but now, in the early sixteenth century, as society was splintering, the church itself was breaking up — and that fact unsettled many people as much as any political or economic bad news.

To be sure, some medieval popes had been pawns of French kings and German emperors, and church councils had frequently called for churchly reform of one kind or another. But after 1517, the trouble in the church was different. The Roman Catholic Church was actually losing its moral and political authority in some parts of Europe. That year, the Wittenburg monk and lecturer Martin Luther had proposed a whole set of changes, not only of church structure — as many reformers had done before — but also of the interpretation of key church doctrines.

Luther and the Protestant Reformation

Luther proposed revolutionary challenges to some of Rome's basic teachings. Luther insisted that "salvation by grace through faith alone" meant that God's saving grace comes directly to each Christian on the basis of his or her individual faith, and that it is not mediated through the church's sacraments. Such thinking undercut the church's importance and authority. By the time he officially broke with Rome in 1521, Luther was also championing church decision-making based solely on appeals to the Bible instead of tradition or canon law, and the use of the German language instead of Latin to make worship more understandable to lay people.

Printers promoted Luther's ideas throughout German-speaking Europe and beyond. A number of German princes also supported him, both for political and theological reasons. Church leaders in other places began introducing some of Luther's teachings into their own parishes. An important fellow-reformer was Huldrych Zwingli, priest at the Great Church in the Swiss city of Zurich. Like Luther, Zwingli preached salvation by grace through faith alone, rejected the doctrine of purgatory, and advocated the marriage of clergy. Zwingli also taught the symbolic, rather than physical, presence of Jesus' body and blood in the bread and wine of communion.

As early as 1518, Zwingli's teaching attracted reform-minded young men and women in the Zurich area. By 1522 small groups of these students and craftspeople began meeting in private homes for Bible study. They were excited by the ideas of the Reformation, but were also troubled because they feared Zwingli's reforms were losing momentum and might even be reversed by the Zurich city council. Zwingli, like Luther, often relied on the government to implement religious change. Luther and Zwingli seemingly could not imagine a society without a strong leader. When they removed the pope from their social scheme, they replaced Rome's power and authority with that of a local prince or magistrate.

Radicals in Zurich

This state-church strategy troubled the young people around Zwingli. They feared the Zurich city council was now controlling the church. When Zwingli's reforms strengthened the council's power (such as his rejection of Rome's authority over Zurich), the city fathers readily agreed. But when the changes involved the council's own sacrifice (such as relaxing the unjust tithes that the city extorted from the surrounding rural villages), the council balked.

Moreover, because the church routinely baptized all infants, it automatically included all citizens among its members. In practical terms this meant that the church had to adjust its moral expectations downward, seeking a lowest common denominator to support its inclusive character. Virtually everyone was a member of the church, regardless of their commitment or interest. The church could not expect the rigorous ethics of Christ's Sermon on the Mount from those who were nominally Christian simply because they were citizens. Instead it settled for expedient personal and social ethics, and Jesus' teachings often were disregarded in the face of political realities. In Catholic lands monks and nuns still aspired to biblical "counsels of perfection," but reformers such as Luther and Zwingli had done away with those religious orders.

The course of reform in Zurich bothered the young dissenters. If the Word of God was to form the church, they contended, no human government should stand in the way. In 1524, when Zwingli concluded that aspects of the Catholic mass should be discarded, the city council stalled. Zwingli conceded to the council, irking the radicals.

Gradually the dissenters realized that the recovery of the church as they understood it from the New Testament could occur only on radically different grounds from those being used both by Rome and by the reformers. These radicals, it turned out, were working with a different concept of the church. For them the church was a community of Christians voluntarily committed to imitating Christ and to supporting one another. Baptism — the sign of church membership and commitment — was only for those old enough to choose the path of discipleship. Moreover, the state should have no part in controlling or directing the activities and doctrines of the church.

Salvation came by grace through faith, these radicals believed, but it was more than a future ticket to heaven. It transformed one's present life with God and with other people. Since Christ taught peaceful nonresistance to worldly enemies, radical Christian obedience rejected participation in either the military or the judicial arms of the state. The New Testament church demonstrated sharing of personal goods and practicing mutual aid among Christians, and the dissenters took those examples seriously as well.

Anabaptism is born

Before long, the ideas of the "free church" radicals clashed with the Zurich council, which demanded a unified church and state on its own terms. Some dissenters refused to have their infant children baptized because the children were not yet old enough to understand the implications of Christian discipleship. The city demanded that the radicals stop meeting, have their children baptized, and expel the non-Zurichers from among them. Snubbing the council, the dissenters met on January 21, 1525 and baptized one another, signaling their own conscious decision to follow Christ and form a church apart from the state. Since they all had been baptized as infants many years earlier, these new adult baptisms were literally second baptisms (in Latin, anabaptismus). For their part, the Anabaptists, as they were now called, claimed that their infant baptisms had been meaningless.

Such disobedience was intolerable in Zurich. Both Zwingli and the council sensed that Anabaptist ideas challenged the unity of the church and the state and was politically and socially subversive. In rejecting infant baptism, the Anabaptists separated the political tie between church membership and citizenship. By challenging the unity of the church, the Anabaptists shredded the social fabric. In rejecting the state's authority in matters of religion, the Anabaptists threatened anarchy, and, by refusing military service, the Anabaptists made the city vulnerable to foreign attack.

Anabaptists were imprisoned and exiled, fined and threatened. Meanwhile, their ideas, already present in the rural countryside around Zurich, spawned a number of rural fellowships beyond the city walls. Even the threat of the death penalty failed to halt the movement. Within several years, Anabaptist groups emerged elsewhere in Switzerland and in southern Germany, the Austrian Tyrol, and Moravia. Itinerant preachers, dissident booksellers, and traveling merchants spread the message, calling people to receive God's grace and form a faithful church free of state interference and practicing Jesus' teaching in their ordinary lives.

The predicament of persecution

Anabaptists faced fierce opposition from both Catholic and Protestant authorities. Some Anabaptists were imprisoned and tortured, others were burned or beheaded, and still others were sold as galley slaves forced to row themselves to death on the Mediterranean. Swiss city-states employed "Anabaptist hunters" who tracked down suspected citizens and were paid by the head. When Anabaptist groups sprang up in northern Germany and the Netherlands, authorities there also reacted harshly. As many as 2,500 Anabaptists were killed in the decades after 1525, accounting for 40 to 50 percent of all Western European Christians who were martyred for their faith during the sixteenth century.

As a result, Anabaptist meetings might take place at night, in the woods, or only in small groups. Leaders traveled secretly and had to hide precious and illegal tracts and devotional materials. Members lived in fear and some recanted their beliefs, returned to the state churches, and even betrayed one-time associates. This period of nearly a century of persecution shaped the Anabaptist movement in important ways. The re-baptizers developed a deep distrust of larger society and a fairly negative view of government, which they encountered most often in the form of judicial brutality. Generations later and half a world away in North America, Anabaptist descendants still recounted the stories of those who suffered.