Amish Confidential (10 page)

I told Chris I’d managed to quiet the busybody brushy. “We can keep driving like we always do,” I assured my brother. “I don’t think we’ll hear any more out of him.”

Ah, not quite.

The next thing I knew, Chris was being shunned over riding with me in the devil’s Chevy truck.

I don’t think Bishop Fisher wanted to do it. I know my father didn’t, but our neighbor hadn’t backed down at all, and the bishop must not have thought he had a choice. So he summoned my dad, who was still a deacon in the church, and told him all about Alvin and Chris and me and the truck.

My father already knew about our driving to work, and he didn’t care as long as we didn’t call attention to ourselves. But now Brushy was causing a ruckus. My smart-mouthed comments had probably made things worse. And the bishop was coming down on my dad, who, being a deacon, really didn’t have much choice but to come down on Chris.

“I guess we’ll have to shun you,” my dad said to my brother. You could hear the pain in his voice. I could tell he didn’t like the idea any better than Chris did.

My own brother! Shunned! For something as trivial as riding to work with me!

It seemed so ridiculous, but shunned he was.

T
he rules of
Meidung
are very specific and very clear. Church members are required to make the shunned understand he has forfeited his place in the Amish fellowship. He isn’t “one of us” anymore. He doesn’t belong. The shunning is supposed to be enforced by the person’s neighbors, coworkers, friends and, worst of all, family—
everyone
. Amish are polite, of course, so no one has to say anything openly hostile. Church members aren’t expected to confront or abuse or beat the shunned or cut their beards off. But in a
community where belonging is as important as it is to the Amish, a physical beating might be more pleasant. For people who’ve always lived in a big, tight-knit community, poorly equipped for life outside, being shunned can be a horrible, horrible experience. But it’s the method the Bible supposedly dictates to deal with those who break rules, big or small. Justice is rarely a big consideration, any more than balance is.

The shunned can still live at home with his family—where else would he go?—but even there the contact is tightly controlled. They can speak with each other when absolutely necessary, but that’s about it. Families have no choice but to shun the person by not even eating at the same table.

The purpose of shunning is not to be cruel. That might be the result, but it’s not the purpose. Shunning is meant to redeem the sinner. It’s meant to make the person change—quit sinning, seek forgiveness, do what it takes to get back into the good graces of the church, the community and God. It is a very high-pressure tactic, which makes it a powerful one, at least initially.

I’ve been around quite a few people who’ve been shunned over the years. Maybe that says something about the friends I keep. But even for those who pretend not to care, it is very lonely to be shunned.

When my brother Chris was shunned, these rules applied. He lived in a house with his wife and two small daughters. Often, they came to our house for dinner. But none of us was supposed to talk directly to him. When it was time for supper at his own house or ours, he could stay in the same room, but he had to eat alone at a little table off to the side. No one was allowed to hand anything directly to him. If he wanted us to pass him the vegetables, we had
to set them down first. Only then was he allowed to touch the bowl. Shunning was uncomfortable for everyone, but what else could we do?

There’s no getting around it: Whatever the stated purpose of shunning—redemption?—the practice is still deeply humiliating. And also hugely effective. Shunning is what Amish parents hold over their children, the harshest threat of all. It’s how the Amish church keeps people in line.

C
hris’s shunning seemed especially unfair to me. Lots of other Amish were driving all over Lebanon and Lancaster counties. Why should Chris get singled out? Just because of one busybody with binoculars who couldn’t control his own children? Now our family had to pay?

I felt guilty. I knew the answer to “Why Chris?” was mostly his association with me.

My brother didn’t argue with my dad or the bishop. He didn’t complain at all. He just ate silently at the side table in the dining room and moped around the house. I could tell it was wearing on him. Shunning is isolation warfare, separating the sinner from the group. It says sternly: “As long as you keep on sinning, we won’t talk to you. We won’t respect you. You won’t be part of this family. You are all but dead to us.” I felt terrible, and I wasn’t alone. It was also killing my father that we were shunning Chris.

He knew how dumb the whole thing was.

Chris couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning, where it was just him and me and things could be relatively normal again. When he was at our house, I did what I could to make Chris feel better. I
whispered to him every chance I got. “We’ll get you out of this somehow,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”

And we did.

In order to end a shunning, you don’t just have to persuade your family. An official Amish shunning is in the hands of the preachers and the bishop. You have to meet with the preachers on three separate Sundays. In that time, you have to convince them that you are truly, truly sorry for the sin you have committed—whether it’s murder, doing bad things with the livestock or riding in an inappropriate vehicle—promising never, ever to commit that sin again. Only then can the shun be lifted.

That’s what the rules say, anyway. Then there’s the approach that Chris and I dreamed up. I wouldn’t call it extortion. Let’s just say I offered not to shine a headlight on a bad case of hypocrisy.

It was low, I know. But it was effective. Under the circumstances, I think it was the right thing to do.

I got word to the preachers that I wanted a meeting. I didn’t think Chris’s shunning was fair. My brother was riding to work with me in the morning, not on some crazy joyride. If the preachers didn’t find a way to lift Chris’s shunning, I announced, “maybe we should have a big public discussion about this whole driving thing—start naming a few names.”

I knew the preachers wouldn’t like that. Some of those names, I was certain, would hit close to home for them. If I had to, believe me, I could draw up a nice, long list.

I didn’t plan to stop with the car drivers. There was plenty more hypocrisy to discuss. The prominent Amish business owner who’d been importing made-in-China blankets and calling them “Amish.” The preacher’s son who’d been keeping a red Corvette in the barn of
a nearby English family. A red Corvette! And they were mad at Chris and me and our Chevy work truck?

“Which way are we going with this?” I asked one of the preachers.

“Don’t be hasty,” he pleaded. “I’m sure we can work something out.” Turns out he was right, and an accommodation was reached that very afternoon. It was all laid out in a little script.

Chris went to see the preachers before church on Sunday. He told them he was very sorry for what he had done. He said he would hire a non-Amish driver, which he did—for exactly one day. No one asked what would happen the following day.

With that, the shun was lifted.

Everyone seemed relieved. The preachers shook Chris’s hand, and then they hugged him. They told him they were happy to have him back in the fold. We rushed home together to share the news with our father. Even without cell phones or text messages, he had already heard. After using the English driver for one day, Chris climbed back into the work truck with me, and that’s how we continued to get back and forth to work.

I’m not sure who told Brushy Alvin, but I’m pretty sure somebody did.

Every now and then, I still see him out on his porch with his binoculars. He’s watching carefully, but he never said another word about driving again.

CHAPTER 10

WAY TOO CLOSE

A
respected Amish father keeps seeking forgiveness for fornicating with his daughter—then keeps slipping back into her bedroom.

An Amish teen beds not just his cousin but a horse
and
a cow.

An Amish girl says that when her oldest brother finally stopped molesting her, her second-oldest brother stepped in—and her mother blamed
her
!

What is it with Amish guys and their sisters, their daughters, their cousins and the girl next door? What is it with Amish guys and their livestock? Are the back-road hormones that wild? Let me put this as delicately as I know how to: Some Amish families are much too close for comfort—and way outside the law.

Religious law or civil law, take your pick!

The Bible doesn’t leave any room for doubt. Leviticus 18:6–18 includes a detailed roster of all the family members a child of God isn’t supposed to have sex with: “You must never have sexual relations with a close relative, for I am the
LORD
. Do not violate your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your
mother. You must not have sexual relations with her. Do not have sexual relations with any of your father’s wives, for this would violate your father. Do not have sexual relations with your sister or half sister, whether she is your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born into your household or someone else’s. Do not have sexual relations with your granddaughter, whether she is your son’s daughter or your daughter’s daughter, for this would violate yourself. Do not have sexual relations with your stepsister, the daughter of any of your father’s wives, for she is your sister. Do not have sexual relations with your father’s sister, for she is your father’s close relative. Do not have sexual relations with your mother’s sister, for she is your mother’s close relative. Do not violate your uncle, your father’s brother, by having sexual relations with his wife, for she is your aunt. Do not have sexual relations with your daughter-in-law. She is your son’s wife, so you must not have sexual relations with her. Do not have sexual relations with your brother’s wife, for this would violate your brother.”

The passage goes on and on like that, listing just about anyone who’d have any excuse to appear at the next extended-family reunion. The message is unmistakable. Do not do it with anyone but your spouse, and that rules out incest and adultery.

Nonetheless, it’s the dark, dirty secret of Amish family life, the volume of unsanctioned sexual activity that keeps occurring. Actually, it’s not even that big a secret. You won’t read much about it in the
Budget
,
Die Botschaft
or the
Amish Country News
—and certainly not in the shiny tourist brochures. But these forbidden pursuits are a relentless topic of Amish Country whispering. I’ve known people, heard talk and seen it in my own extended family. It’s never pretty. Everyone knows someone who did something they shouldn’t
have out behind the barn. Any thorough tour of the Amish experience can’t possibly skip the perverted stuff.

Let me tell you: There’s an unholy lot of it to choose from. Brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, people and livestock—it’s hard to know even where to begin. And don’t get me started on door handles, horse tackle and rolling pins. The strange Amish couplings are limited only by the imaginations of people with little practical experience and too much time on their hands.

There are no good statistics on the frequency of unsanctioned Amish sex. How could there be? Amish boys don’t alert the bishop every time they slide into their sisters’ bedrooms. Amish teens don’t check in on Foursquare when tiptoeing into a horse stall late at night, even the ones who are secretly trolling the Internet. The state might have data on those who get caught, but the church keeps no registry of Amish pedophiles. Still, I can say this much without any fear of contradiction: When a religion treats normal sex like a guilt-laden obsession, natural human desires will come out in all kinds of twisted ways. There are God-fearing Amish who follow the Ordnung every day of their lives. Then there are people like Chester Mast.

A twenty-six-year-old Amish father of two from Curryville, Missouri, whose wife was pregnant with their third child, Chester Mast was accused of sexually assaulting six girls, one of them his cousin, in a case that thrust the insular Missouri Amish community into an unwelcome public spotlight. Over the years, Chester was said to have abused girls aged five to fifteen.

What was unusual about his case wasn’t the accusations. Lots of Amish men have been accused and found guilty of things like that. What was unusual was that the claims finally ended up in regu
lar criminal court. That doesn’t happen as a matter of course. The elders in the Pike County Amish community had done everything they could to prevent the English world from interfering in what they considered a church matter. They’d excommunicated him several times over a period of six years as Chester moved around, giving him years to rack up fresh victims along the way.

“We’ve seen this coming for years,” said Noah Schwartz, one of Chester’s uncles. “The church worked desperately to get behind him, but it was a lost cause. I don’t think we realized the seriousness of the crimes.”

“We tried to work with it ourselves,” said Joseph Wagler, the bishop for a neighboring church. “We punished him, and he owned up to it.” But Chester just kept sinning. The Amish elders say they excommunicated Chester at least three times: in 2004 when he returned to Missouri amid accusations that he’d raped a cousin in Wisconsin, in 2009 after a new round of allegations surfaced and again in 2010, when the bishops had a lengthy debate among themselves and finally called the police. That almost never happens with the Amish, no matter how serious the crime.

There’s a lot to be said for the Amish spirit of forgiveness: forgive, forget and move on. But while that may work when someone is accused of petty theft, there’s also no doubt in my mind it’s a whole different story when someone is committing serious, ongoing crimes. How many horrible things happen to innocent people while church elders wait around for the bad guy to repent, making a conscious decision not to get the law involved?

It’s a troubling question, and the answer is depressing.

Once they knew what happened, the police questioned Chester. He denied everything at first, but he finally pleaded guilty at the
Pike County courthouse to charges of felony statutory rape, statutory sodomy and sexual misconduct involving a child. He was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Later, he also pleaded no contest in Wisconsin to repeated acts of sexual assault on a child.

And the investigators, knowing the Amish predilection to keep things private, still aren’t sure that covers everything. “There is still the thought that there are other victims out there,” said Sergeant Sean Flynn of the Pike County sheriff’s department, the lead investigator in the Missouri case.

Many of Chester’s relatives stuck by him all the way. He just needed repentance and forgiveness, they said. Prison was a waste of energy and time. “No sin is so bad that you can’t recognize it and take total responsibility,” said his uncle Noah. After all, what mattered was Chester’s heart—not the length of his confinement. “We’re concerned that Chester is honest, not how many years he gets. If he lies and gets out of prison, then he’s still a prisoner to his own self.”

T
here is nothing, no matter how innocent or how heinous, that can’t be forgiven at church—sometimes over and over again. That might make sense for some kinds of sins, but for something as deeply perverted as incest or rape, that’s just wrong. There’s always the simple “I slept with my neighbor’s wife” and also the “I went to town and hired a prostitute,” but then there’s the hard-core stuff. The Amish often have trouble telling them apart. People are constantly confessing some perversion, then going on to commit it again.

What’s incredible, even to someone like me who was raised Amish, is that in the rare instances that these cases end up in regular
court, the judges often bend over backward being sympathetic to the Amish defendants. They figure the Amish have it covered. Take nineteen-year-old Christian G. Stoltzfus of Fennimore, Wisconsin. He was arrested in 2010 for a laundry list of sleazy sexual acts that he was accused of committing over a four-year period on Amish farms in Hickory Grove and Mount Ida.

According to Grant County sheriff Keith Govier, the victims included at least six family members, a cow and a horse. Christian must have missed Bible study on Leviticus 20 day: “If a man has sex with an animal, he must be put to death, and the animal must be killed.”

After a three-month investigation by the Grant County sheriff’s department and the Grant County Department of Social Services, Christian was buried in an avalanche of eleven sex-related criminal counts—incest, repeated sexual assault of a child, attempted first-degree sexual assault of a child under the age of thirteen without great bodily harm, exposing his genitals and sexual gratification with an animal—the horse and the cow.

While Amish having sex with animals is definitely something people talk about more than occasionally, it’s far less prevalent than the other large perversion we have in our midst. Amish having sex with people in their own close family is something I’ve heard about so many times that, no matter what it says in the Bible, I don’t know for sure that everyone thinks it is wrong. Believe me, it is wrong. Of this, I’m certain, and it’s sad to me that with incest being the dark secret of the Amish family, far too many victims suffer in silence for years—sometimes for the rest of their lives.

No one should have to do that.

A large part of the problem is how strongly the Amish believe in handling these issues entirely inside the community—without police or social workers or anyone else from the outside world. The bishops might intercede. Someone might be briefly shunned and then quickly forgiven.

The case of Christian Stoltzfus is a good example. The judge must’ve thought Christian, with his horse-and-buggy ride, wasn’t a flight risk. The court decided he did not have to wait in jail for his trial date. He was freed on a $1,000 signature bond. The only conditions were that he not have unsupervised contact with any children younger than eighteen or with any live animals. I guess he was supposed to walk everywhere.

The case kicked around the Grant County courthouse for a while. His family and the victims’ families wrote to county circuit judge Robert VanDeHey, saying what a good guy Christian was and how sorry he felt. On March 29, 2011, Grant County prosecutors agreed to a deal, allowing Christian to plead guilty to lesser charges and putting his future in the hands of Judge VanDeHey.

Under Wisconsin law, the judge noted, Christian faced more than 250 years in prison. Then, instead of 250 years in prison, the judge gave Christian one year of work release. It was as far away as you could get from the death penalty the Old Testament lawgivers had called for—no prison time at all!

“It’s difficult to not send you to prison,” the judge fretted. But he said prison might not be a good thing—
for Christian
! “Sending you to prison would take away the outstanding support system” he had in the Amish community and might turn young Christian into “a much more dangerous person.”

The victims’ families weren’t out for blood, the judge said. And the Amish community “took steps” to get him into treatment as a “safety plan.”

Call it Amish justice, courthouse style!

Christian’s eighteen-year-old-brother, Dannie, also received a similar rash of charges for molesting family members—though his case involved just a horse, no cows. He got a similarly gentle result: no jail time and no probation. But the brother was fined one hundred dollars and given sixty days to pay up. Or if that was impossible or too much trouble, the judge invited Dannie to set up a more convenient payment plan.

O
ccasionally, outsiders try to help.

Prosecutors encourage victims to come forward and testify. Some battered-women’s shelters try to get the word out: They are a safe haven for Amish women who need one. Concerned English neighbors occasionally offer a sympathetic ear. And there are good-hearted people like Judy Jonke of Ohio’s Geauga County Domestic Violence Task Force, who passes out free purple-and-white paper cookbooks to Amish women around the community.
Recipes from an Amish Kitchen
, the books are blandly called, but scattered among the recipes for ham casserole and beefy barbecue macaroni is lifesaving information on domestic and sexual violence.

That includes safety tips and phone numbers for local shelters and the county sheriff’s office. “They’re scared of the violence in the house and don’t have a way out,” Judy says of the Amish women she hopes to reach. “Men are the supporters. You listen to them. You don’t say anything. It’s a man’s world.”

If a husband happens to notice one of the special cookbooks, maybe he’ll just think it’s a cookbook. Chances are he wouldn’t want to be caught leafing through a woman’s recipe book.

With the old slap-on-the-wrist mentality, it’s often the victims who are blamed. That’s one of the reasons why it’s extremely rare for Amish women to tell stories of sexual abuse to the larger world.

One who has spoken out is Anna Slabaugh. In an interview with
Dateline
on NBC, she says she was forced to endure years of sexual abuse by her brothers in Ohio Amish Country.

The eighth of nine children in an Ohio Amish family, she says she was sexually abused for years. It started with an older brother, when she was eleven and he was nineteen. “He dared me to touch him in an inappropriate way and also dared me to let him touch me,” she said.
“And I took up his dare.”

It wasn’t a one-time thing. She recalled being assaulted “at least once a week.” “If I told him it hurt, he’d just call me a wimp.” When that brother moved out of the house, her seventeen-year-old brother stepped in, often catching her in the family barn on Sundays after church. “He went much further than my oldest brother had,” she said. “He wanted to do things. You know, he wanted to have intercourse and everything. And at that point, I was pretty sure that was wrong. For one, I was too little.”