In addition, the
Ordnung
is actually enforced. Unlike many twenty-first-century religious communities, Amish churches expect compliance with their teachings. Once a member vows at baptism to uphold the
Ordnung
, there is no turning back without serious consequences. Should a member decide to leave, he or she will face another significant cost: excommunication and shunning. This prospect likely keeps some people in the Amish church who might otherwise exit. For them, the cost of leaving appears greater than the price of staying.
A related cost involves limited options. Consider the options that are generally closed to Amish children and youth: attending high school, taking music lessons, going to science camp, participating in youth sports leagues, watching television, playing video games, going to the prom, getting a driver’s license. These limits continue into adulthood and sometimes become magnified. Without college, adults are blocked from pursuing many professions. They cannot design their own wedding ceremony, buy a house in a city, shop around for the most appealing church, engage in social activism, or enter politics. Amish men cannot opt out of ministerial roles, and Amish women cannot fill them. Most women are excluded from outside-the-home careers once they marry and begin to bear children.True, most Amish people, socialized from birth into the Amish way, accept these limits as part of God’s ordained order and do not find them oppressive. Some, however, find the restraints hard at times.
Lack of convenience is yet another price of Amish life. The Amish accept some labor-saving devices, but they also reject many conveniences typical of modern society. We sometimes ask our college students, “If there were an affordable device that would cut your work time in half, would you buy it?” To them, the question is a no-brainer, and they invariably say yes. For the Amish, however, reducing labor is not always the highest priority. If it were, they would be plowing with tractors, driving to town in minivans, tapping the electric grid, and eating prepackaged foods for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Being Amish means limiting conveniences that most Americans take for granted. More often than not, such limits require more time, more sweat, and more patience.
Still another cost is loss of personal privacy. We’ve described the Amish
Gmay
as a community where “everybody knows your name,” but it could just as easily be tagged as a place where “everyone knows your business.” One of our friends who converted to the Amish told us that giving up his car was easy compared to losing his privacy. Accustomed to a life where no one cared what he did, he found it hard to live where everyone did. Non-Amish people in small-town America know something of this feeling, which the renowned storyteller Garrison Keillor depicts in his yarns about Lake Wobegon. But even in Lake Wobegon the social ties are not nearly as tight as they are in an Amish church.
We could identify other costs of the Amish way: a lack of ethnic diversity, limits on intellectual exploration, a ban on various entertainments, the prohibition of Sunday money-making possibilities, and so on. Our point here, however, is not to list all the costs of Amish life but to note that the benefits of Amish life come with costs—necessary ones.
Blessings Worth the Price?
Is it possible to have our “Amish” cake and eat it too? That is, can we gain the benefits of Amish life without paying the bill? Is there a tie between the gains and losses of the Amish way?
Consider the benefit of contentment. That, writes one Amish minister, is the “feeling of fulfillment and happiness that comes from . . . letting [God] decide what our needs are.”
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Many non-Amish Christians would agree with this man’s sentiment, for it echoes an important biblical theme: God meets the needs of those who trust in God’s promises. Amish people believe that their primary spiritual task is to align their desires with God’s will. Of course, part of doing that for them means bending their desires to the dictates of the
Ordnung
: no cars, no designer clothes, no iPods, no satellite television . . . the list goes on and on.
From the standpoint of personal choice, the church’s advice on how to live a fulfilling life seems constraining, but it also brings a benefit: it frees Amish people from feeling overwhelmed by choices and the pressure to consume more clothing and high-tech goods. “The fact that
some
choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that
more
choice is better,” psychologist Barry Schwartz explains in
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
. Although Schwartz isn’t recruiting for the Amish, he and other researchers have found that although most Americans are sure that having more options is the key to happiness, an “overload of choice” in modern societies actually contributes to “anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction.”
10
This connection between costs and benefits is one reason the Amish are skeptical of seekers, the outsiders who trickle into Amish communities and ask to join. The Amish wonder whether these visitors grasp the full gravity of becoming Amish—whether they have done a thorough cost-benefit analysis. Some Amish communities give seekers a communal cold shoulder, though others may encourage them to move nearby, attend church services for a year, and test-drive their way of life. This testing time, which impresses upon seekers the cost of becoming Amish, usually results in decisions not to join. In fact, only several hundred outsiders have become Amish in the last hundred years, and some of those converts later left. For them, the blessings of being Amish were not worth the price.
More common are the selective seekers: outsiders who wish to borrow some benefits from Amish faith without signing up. They see virtues in the Amish way and hope to graft some of them onto their own lives without paying the full price of baptism: obedience to the guidelines of the church. Given the numerous books on this topic, it’s clear there are many people who are drawn to the Amish in this fashion. “We don’t need to ‘go Amish’ to bring true peace into our lives,” assures one outside observer. “Their principles can be our principles,” and “their peace . . . can be our peace.” To validate her claim, this author cites the reassuring words of an Amish convert. Not everyone is “cut out to be one of the plain people,” writes “Uncle Amos,” but they can nonetheless improve their lives by emulating the Amish way.
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Learning from the Amish
But what does it mean to emulate the Amish way? What does it mean to adopt Amish principles? Although the Amish may have lessons to teach the rest of us in other arenas of life—how to start a small business, for example—we focus here on what they have to teach us about spirituality. The six ideas we offer are not quick and easy solutions, and considering our warnings about mending modern life by sewing on a few Amish values, we offer them in a spirit of humility. We think that these principles are both relevant and applicable for those who desire greater spiritual grounding in their lives without becoming Amish.
The first principle is this:
spiritual vitality comes at a price
. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary religious community that asks more of its members than the Amish. To be Amish in twenty-first-century America is to be peculiar, an object of stares, curiosity, and sometimes even derision. Being Amish also demands a hefty spiritual commitment. Three-hour church services are only the tip of the iceberg, but they symbolize the serious way Amish people tend their spiritual lives. The high price of being Amish strikes some outsiders as the worst kind of religious legalism.We’re not willing to say that, but we will say this: whether one is Amish or not, the cost of spiritual vitality is high, and those who pay the price are often perceived as paying too much.
The Amish way also demonstrates
the importance of taking spiritual perils seriously
. As we said in the Preface, spirituality offers resources for facing life’s perils. Some of those are physical, some emotional, but others are spiritual perils that detract from people’s sacred duty or purpose. Of course, what the Amish count as perilous may not strike their non-Amish neighbors as particularly dangerous. Amish or not, however, the principle is the same: spiritual perils must be taken seriously, and addressing them requires time, effort, and intentionality.
This leads us to a third lesson from the Amish way:
the importance of practices
. By practices we mean regular, sustained activities that involve the body as well as the mind and heart. Spiritual practices are everywhere in Amish life, pointing people to key spiritual realities and shaping their beliefs and affections in lasting ways. One Amish mother, Sarah, writes about teaching her children to sing old hymns long before the children could comprehend the words, for she knew that “repetition of the words [would] plant something in their hearts that will remain there for life, . . . reminding [them] of what is right.”
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The same could be said for other recurring practices in Amish life: preparing for communion, fasting, dressing in distinctive clothing, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, kneeling on the kitchen floor to hear prayers read from
Christenpflicht
, participating in footwashing, and so on.
It’s tempting to see these practices as mindless rituals, performed without meaning or passion, but they are actually rigorous training in the Amish way. Amish people know that the world offers many enticing paths to pursue, and each path has its own set of practices that shapes its travelers. For example, the life of a devoted shopper includes making regular trips to the mall, poring over circulars in the Sunday newspaper, and browsing online retailers to find out what’s popular this season—practices that cultivate particular desires. If the Amish have anything to teach us in this regard, it’s this: consistently performing certain practices—and forgoing others—is the most effective way to shape one’s spiritual life. “The world is set on drilling its music into [our children’s] hearts if we don’t,” warned the Amish mother. For her, family hymn-singing is an important form of resistance to the world’s charms.
Related to this emphasis on practice, the Amish way reveals
the importance of patience
. Many aspects of Amish life force them to be patient. Amish people can’t hop into a car to get a quick bite to eat, they can’t surf the Internet to get the latest weather report, and they can’t turn up the thermostat to heat a chilly house. It’s not that they don’t experience these deprivations as deprivations, but their way of life forces them to wait—often—and in ways that would probably make the rest of us frustrated, anxious, or unhappy.
Amish resistance to a hurry-up world both shapes and is shaped by their spiritual practices. Rather than offering a fifteen-minute homily in a forty-five-minute worship service to satisfy parishioners in a rush, Amish corporate worship continues at its slow pace year after year. Their twenty-minute hymns do not hasten toward an emotional climax but deliberate on important themes. Ministers do not promise quick fixes to life’s problems, and in fact they discourage members from sampling religious fare that promotes “an instant gospel.”
13
All this stands in sharp contrast to American consumer culture, in which credit cards have replaced layaway plans and tweets span the world in microseconds. This culture of swift satisfaction offers consumers many pleasures, but it also breeds an impatience that can undercut spiritual vitality. In contrast, the Amish way reminds people that many good things in life come slowly, through practices that nourish everyday life.
If patience means proceeding slowly into the future, the fifth principle of the Amish way is its counterpart:
the importance of the past
. In fact, valuing the practices and wisdom of their spiritual ancestors—singing from the
Ausbund
, reading from prayer books, wearing traditional garb, driving horse-drawn buggies, living rural lives, and so on—is the most obvious element of the Amish way. Despite what some critics have said, these traditions are not dry, empty rituals left over from bygone days. Rather, Amish faith is strong precisely because it’s rooted in practices that have proven fruitful over time.
At the very least, the Amish spurn the assumptisson that “new” and “improved” are always synonymous. As one Amish man likes to put it, the Amish “do not deny that change should occur but [think] that it should be checked by an experienced past.”
14
Although the new may be easier and more pleasing in some ways, it may also be more shallow, transient, and less potent in shaping people’s religious lives. Racing after the new may ultimately lead to distraction rather than spiritual depth.
Finally, the Amish way demonstrates
the importance of people
. By this we mean something more than friendship and camaraderie. We mean sharing in a common purpose, a common set of values, and a common set of spiritual practices. In Amish life, religious commitments are inextricably linked to a people, and the consequences quickly become clear when individuals abandon the community’s way for their own way. More than any religious group we know, the Amish hold one another accountable to the community’s purpose and the practices that sustain it.