Exploring the Social Theology of Amish Lancaster

I recently had the opportunity to visit Lancaster County, Pennsylvania where 34,000 Amish live and work.  I have lived an hour south of Lancaster for most of my life, but as my interests in marginalized religious communities grew, I only recently “rediscovered” the Amish. The Lancaster Amish in this part of the country are part of the Old Order Amish and are what most people think about when they imagine Amish communities, although it should be noted that the Amish differ in self-governance from one "church district" to another so there can be quite a variety of factions and differences in communal prohibition. 


I decided to take a few day trips to Lancaster over the past few weeks, tour some of the county, talk with locals and visit a few Amish sites where I came into contact with a few working families.  I do not intend the following to be any kind of scholarly treatment of the Amish, just an attempt to work out initial impressions of this very unique people.

I think what struck me most about the greater Lancaster community where Amish and “English” mix is how the latter is often territorial about their Amish community. Both I and my guests felt the tour guides were doing their best to preserve and balance the quaint and quirky self-exile of the Amish community despite the fact that our guides themselves were coming out of conservative evangelical Christian communities that have very robust opinions on right and wrong living and the requirements for salvation.

Lancaster is about as conservative as a county can get, which aside from a reverence for biblical Christianity includes all the subsequent feelings of patriotism that come with the typical conservative profile today. As we toured the countryside, our guide was peppered with a question about the Amish stance on nonviolence, which took us back to World War II in which the community either served in non-combat roles or paid individuals to fight for them. Asked about it, the guide suggested that the Amish were patriotic insofar as “they recognized that others were fighting for them and that without that they could not enjoy the life they have today.” I found it interesting the way this guide absolved the Amish from patriotism and wondered if the same scenario presented itself with people of Middle Eastern descent, how the community might react.  Nevertheless, I saved such questions for myself but remain hopeful that evangelicals in Lancaster appreciate the comparisons.

As the tour continued, a pattern began to develop that I caught on quickly. The Amish will work in English-owned businesses that use electricity provided they aren’t supplying it themselves. The Amish can ride in vehicles provided they are not the ones driving. The Amish can own a rental property to turn a profit but will hire the English (i.e., those outside the community) to enforce any late payment retrieval or eviction because they reject confrontation.

This idea of using an intermediary is a social theology which has the effect of absolving the Amish of the responsibility and risk required in moral decision making where retreat or inwardness is not possible. It does not seem very different than the Jewish Orthodox community which use Shabbatgoyim to take care of business they themselves cannot on Sabbath.  Bringing the English in to do the work the Amish cannot because of the rules imposed upon them by their Ordnung (order or law) brings into question their own moral righteousness.  To put it bluntly, the Amish believe that the English are not on the path of salvation because they embrace the world. Rather than evangelize them to their form of salvation, the Amish seem contented with allowing them to continue along a path of perceived disobedience and self-destruction. When spun positively, it is only that the Amish are a non-proselytizing group so that the English way of life should not be of concern for them. To speak into their way of life would be as presumptuous a task as the English attempting to convert the Amish. Yet it is precisely because they let the English continue in their “error” that, with regard to biblical theology, the Amish are blame-worthy. They do not act as their brother’s keeper and do not believe the world around them is worth saving. Neither do they believe that against the Ordnung, one should seek to save someone outside the community in the same way an oxen that has fallen into a ditch should be saved on the Sabbath despite the midrash teaching.

This perhaps is the conversation that the million-dollar tourism industry does not want you having coming out of Lancaster. The tourism industry has continued to grow, so much that land developers have “spared” a few tour companies positioning themselves on historic Amish property because those businesses represent a growing channel of revenue. Instead, they want you leaving with a superficial feeling that the Amish don’t reject you and your existence, or think of you as hell-bound reprobates, but that they are just people minding their own affairs in a world gone off the rails. In fact, there were multiple times one tour guide reminded us that the Amish read all the English newspapers and observe how bad the world around them is--a position with which our tour guide agreed. Indeed, the Amish are the largest participants in the local English fire departments. And no one can forget the Amish response to their own tragedy in 2006 when the world forced its way through their closed doors and five girls were shot dead in Lancaster by an outsider in a now razed one-room schoolhouse. Yet separation is not a response that simply rejects a way of life that they believe is not in keeping with righteous living, but involves a tacit rejection of the people around them. Righteous biblical living has never just been about living in the midst of one’s enemy, but participating in the life of the community outside your own.  One recalls that in the legendary Amish story of Dirk Willems, a Dutch Anabaptist whose pursuer fell through ice, everyone tends to focus on the fact that the fleeing Amish man turned and saved his pursuer's life, and forget what the Amish have not; namely, that at the end of the tale, Willems is apprehended and put to the stake for his faith. The "strangers-and-sojourners" lifestyle of the Epistle of 1 Peter has been replaced by an alternate social order that seeks to set up camp in the land, but doing so outside the gates of the enemy. The early connection, most likely lost on generations of English that have come and gone, is that the Amish were victims to terrible religious persecution, a mindset that was brought and remains here. Within the evangelical community, there is plenty of room to commiserate with their Amish cousins even as the evangelical church has moved more to the fringes with regard to setting up activities, social events, and commerce that is self-interested and self-sustaining. Both communities share a "martyr mentality" and both have their place.

Amish Lancaster can be a mystifying, romanticized experience or it can be viewed as a social derivation of a theology gone wrong. Rejection of the world should remind those versed in Christian theology how far the Amish are from scriptures that are fundamental to the mission of the eschatological Jesus. Amish that have left the community and found English communities have complained that the Amish have replaced the salvation gospel of Jesus Christ with a gospel of social inwardness, family, and good works. It is hard to read Matthew chapters 5 through 7 and not see places where the Amish completely fail. These are a people who have hidden their lamps under bushels.  They do not go out into the world and preach the gospel and therefore they cannot act as lights to the world or salt for the unsavory, because in all of these cases, there is risk involved, one which threatens the Amish with a loss of identity and self.  So while thousands of people visit the Amish every year, the impressions they leave with from tours and local lore, while helping to demystify some misconceptions, never get to the heart of the people and their social theology.