Amish Confidential (2 page)

PART I

BEATING
MY PATH

CHAPTER 1

BECOMING US

Y
ou can’t get much more Amish than we were.

When the actress Kelly McGillis was preparing for her role as a widowed Amish mother in the 1985 movie
Witness
with Harrison Ford, she moved into our house. She slept in the guest bedroom. She got up at four in the morning and had my brothers teach her to milk cows. “This is when I’m used to going to bed,” she said, laughing. She planted rows of potatoes by hand but had trouble keeping the rows straight. She stared for hours at my mother, herself an Amish widow, mimicking my mom’s hand gestures, learning her recipes, trying to get the Pennsylvania Dutch accent just right. That last one took some effort, but Kelly really nailed it. The boy in the film is called Samuel, my oldest brother’s name.

When it came to being Amish, no one doubted the Stoltzfuses. Of course, we didn’t think we were special. Most of the people we knew were just about like we were.

When I was little, we lived on a farm outside Quarryville in rural Lancaster County. That’s in south-central Pennsylvania, the very heart of Amish Country. We spoke a language called Pennsylvania
Dutch, which isn’t Dutch at all. It has nothing to do with Holland or wooden shoes or legal pot in Amsterdam. Pennsylvania Dutch is actually a kind of German—or “
Deutsch
,” as the Germans say it, which the Americans heard as “Dutch,” thereby confusing generations of baffled Amish Country tourists. To this day, they still show up in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and Holmes County, Ohio, and other Amish strongholds, and ask: “Where are the tulips and the windmills?”

On the farm, we grew corn and tobacco and raised dairy cows. My brothers and sisters and I were strictly forbidden to look at television, play video games or even listen to the radio. In fact, we had no electricity. Eating homemade ice cream after supper or reading Bible stories by kerosene lamp—that’s what passed for prime-time entertainment at our house. School, we knew, would end for each of us after eighth grade, and that was totally legal under a special agreement the Amish have with Washington. In 1972, seven years before I was born, the United States Supreme Court said that the freedom of religion enjoyed by Amish families outweighed the state laws that kept most children in school until at least the age of sixteen. With that decision, the court ended for the foreseeable future any prospect of Amish doctors, Amish lawyers or Amish college professors. It also obliterated the whole concept of Amish high school and, with it, the possibility of ever hearing a bashful Amish homecoming queen say:
“Don’t take my picture! I’m wearing a very, very plain dress!”

We were Old Order Amish, the most traditional kind. We had running water and a diesel tractor, but we didn’t have a telephone. If we had to make a call in an emergency, we went to a neighbor’s house. And we didn’t have a car. If somewhere was too far to walk, we rode in a black, horse-drawn buggy, which averaged five miles
and one bucket of oats per hour. Our version of stepping on the gas was yelling at the horse.

From the time I could walk, my parents dressed me in a black hat, black pants, black suspenders and a plain white shirt with hand-sewn buttons. I dreamed of having snaps. God, I wanted snaps! But snaps were considered too fancy in an Amish family as plain as ours was, same as barbershop haircuts. We were strictly bowl-and-scissors kids. When the tourists stared at us or tried to take our pictures, we were taught to turn our heads away and look down.

L
ike many Amish families, our heritage went back into the mists of Switzerland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In those ancient days, a fiery group of students in Zurich had grown incensed that the Protestant Reformation was taking so long. It’s a story I’ve heard my whole life. These young Swiss students thought Martin Luther, John Calvin and the other “reformers” had done a solid job slamming the corrupt practices of the Catholic Church, but where was the actual reform?

These complaints were not appreciated by Europe’s Protestant leaders or the monarchs they loyally supported. The authorities arrested the young rabble-rousers, jailed them, tortured them, drowned them and warned everyone else not to be like them. The critics did what they could to survive. They hid out, fled the cities, abandoned their various trades and moved to the sparsely populated Low Country near the Swiss-German border, where they cultivated small farms. To them, big cities, big government, big religion and new technology represented nothing but threat and danger, and they and their followers would carry this suspicion of modern life for cen
turies to come. They wanted to worship in their own way and mainly to be left alone.

They called their faith Anabaptism, and they followed it fervently.

Unlike many other Christians, who baptized their children soon after birth, the Anabaptists declared their faith in the Lord when they reached adulthood. In fact, that’s what
Anabaptist
means—“rebaptized” or “baptized again.” Infant baptism didn’t make sense, they believed, since a little child can’t possibly understand the real meaning of good and evil. “Believer’s baptism” was just one of many practices that set the Anabaptists apart from more conventional Christians.

The Anabaptists of Switzerland and Germany led very tough lives. The farm work was backbreaking. The winters were harsh. The local Catholics and Lutherans had absolutely no use for them. Life pretty much sucked all around. And their religion asked a lot of them. The Anabaptists had rules. Many, many rules. Rules about who they could marry (only each other). Rules about how they should pray (frequently, piously and not just at church). Rules about how to speak (softly) and how to have fun (hardly at all). They had rules for almost everything. With all their rules, the Anabaptists made the rigid German Catholics, who hadn’t yet discovered guitar Masses or started calling the priests “Father Günther” and “Father Hans,” seem loosey-goosey by comparison. Even though everyone prayed to the same Jesus, the Anabaptists knew Him as a score-keeping God, someone who demanded constant proof of moral righteousness. This was sackcloth-and-ashes Christianity with some hellfire and brimstone on the side. Heaven was up, and hell was down—with a very slippery slope in between.

Despite their move to the country, the Anabaptists were still being tormented by their old oppressors. The local authorities looked at the Anabaptists and thought: “Now, those are some people who are just begging for more persecution!” And so they got it. In 1526, the Zurich Council declared rebaptism punishable by drowning. “The third baptism,” the punishment would come to be known as. That next year, Felix Manz, cofounder of the original Swiss Brethren congregation, became the first Anabaptist martyr. Four months later, Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine monk who’d become an Anabaptist leader, was executed by Roman Catholic authorities for the crime of heresy. His sentence read: “Michael Sattler shall be committed to the executioner. The latter shall take him to the square and there first cut out his tongue, and then forge him fast to a wagon and there with glowing iron tongs twice tear pieces from his body, then on the way to the site of execution five times more as above and then burn his body to powder as an arch-heretic.”

The Anabaptists were easy targets. They were dedicated pacifists. They actually believed the line in the Bible that said to “turn the other cheek.” Also there weren’t too many of them, and in their rugged isolation, they always seemed a little strange. England’s Edward VI and Elizabeth I were especially ardent persecutors, as was Spain’s King Ferdinand, who famously said that drowning was “the best antidote to Anabaptism.”

And just when things couldn’t get any worse for the battered Anabaptists—well, they did. They had their very own schism. Now it wasn’t just the other Christian denominations they were fighting with. They were also squabbling among themselves over just how strict their religion should be. The more tolerant Anabaptists, influenced by the theologian Menno Simons, became known as Menno
nites. They didn’t believe that every single word in the Bible had to be taken literally. Some parts, they thought, were more for general guidance. That sounded like blasphemy to the stricter Anabaptists, who followed the teachings of a stern-faced Jakob Ammann. He preached that true believers needed to “conform to the teachings of Christ and His apostles.” Ammann was dissatisfied with what he saw as a loosening of rules and an acceptance of things too modern. He believed in stricter and longer church discipline and thought the Mennonites had gone recklessly soft.

“Forsake the world,” he told his followers, who came to be known as the Amish.

Like his grandfather Ulrich and father, Michael, Jakob was a tailor. All the Ammanns were a little fixated on clothing. Jakob noticed that what a man wore was a good way to identify how successful he was. He also noted that stylish clothing allowed an individual to stand out. That’s when he decided that his followers should always dress as plainly as they possibly could.

The Mennonites and Amish had much in common, but it was the narrow differences that everyone seemed to focus on. Jakob Ammann was a big believer in excommunication for anyone who didn’t strictly follow the Bible’s teachings, as interpreted by him, of course. The two groups also took sides over communion and foot washing. These were not gentle doctrinal discussions among people of largely similar beliefs. Anger ran hot and feelings were hurt.

Things in Europe didn’t get any better for the Anabaptists. The grinding poverty, the relentless persecution, the internal strife—actually, it’s amazing they lasted so long. Some Anabaptists tried moving to other parts of the continent, and the hostility followed them there. Things couldn’t go on like this forever.

Finally, many of them had had enough. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, they pulled up stakes in Europe. A massive wave of Anabaptists collected their meager belongings and set sail for America, that famous place of religious liberty. That promised land of possibility. That growing, young country far, far away. They had the dream that other pilgrims had. Anabaptists settled first in south central Pennsylvania, in the rolling fields of Lancaster County, where the land was plentiful and comparatively fertile—and there was no one in the neighborhood hell-bent on persecuting them. The other local farmers were busy enough raising their own crops. There were plenty of strange people already in America. As different as the Amish were, they blended without much fuss into the patchwork of new settlers.

Lancaster wasn’t the most obvious place to settle. It was a two-day buggy ride from New York or Philadelphia. But that was actually a plus for people who wanted a little distance between their new homes and anything “modern” or “worldly.” Compared to the rigors of the Swiss-German border region, America appeared blessedly hospitable to them. They could live and farm and worship as they wanted, while mostly being left alone.

Far more smoothly than they expected, the Amish newcomers began putting down roots in their adopted homeland. They built farmhouses, tilled the fertile land, and got busy having children. They avoided going into town. They didn’t build churches, not the physical kind. They didn’t believe special buildings were required to worship. They gathered in small congregations and held services every other Sunday—rather than every week—in one another’s homes. Each one of these congregations, twenty or thirty people, was its own Amish church.

Quickly, some of them found the scattered settlements of Lan
caster County a little close for comfort. They hadn’t come all the way to America to live on top of one another. Some Amish families migrated to eastern Ohio, settling on land that was deeded to them by President Thomas Jefferson. Others pressed into Indiana and beyond. And so the Amish fanned across the American countryside, finding new places where they could farm, live and worship as they chose.

They were deeply suspicious of central church government, so they didn’t have any. Europe had been choked with that sort of thing, and it hadn’t worked well for the Amish. In the Anabaptist tradition, each small congregation was its own little universe, answerable to its own bishop, a couple of preachers, perhaps a deacon or two—and to God. This local bishop truly was the master of his own little domain. The bishop baptized and married church members, same as the bishops do today. He imposed church discipline. He ordained new ministers. He settled disputes. He upheld and interpreted the Ordnung.

Ah, yes, the Ordnung.

The word in German means “order,” “discipline,” “rule,” “arrangement” or “system.” The Ordnung is the set of rules, based on biblical teachings, that all baptized Amish are supposed to live by. Everything Amish traces back one way or the other to the Ordnung. Beards, marriage, divorce, shunning, pacifism, dressing plainly, avoiding modern technology—matters large and small, subtle and obvious, all reside somewhere in the Ordnung.

I say “somewhere” because the Ordnung can be maddeningly difficult to pin down.

It is said there are two Ordnungs—one that is written and one that is not. In all the years I’ve attended Amish church ser
vices, I have never once laid eyes on any written rules. And yet they define the very essence of Amish life. It’s the bishop’s job to declare what the Ordnung says and means. This is where the bishops get a lot of their power.

Each local bishop gets to decide how the Ordnung applies to the issues of his congregation. He gets to decide when rules might have to change. He gets to decide who gets shunned and who doesn’t. He gets to decide whose clothing is plain enough and which colors are allowed. He gets to decide who can have a telephone or a television or an automobile and who cannot.

Believe me, the list goes on.

It’s an awful lot of power in the hands of one individual. But that’s what it means to interpret the Ordnung. And often the bishops don’t even agree among themselves, though they share the same core principles. Some are stricter than others. Some are quicker to change. Some consult closely with their congregations. Others are dictators.