Amish Confidential (9 page)

PART II

MAKING
OUR STAND

CHAPTER 8

FAIRY TALE

W
ho cares about the Amish?

For a good long while, hardly anyone in America did, which was perfectly fine with the Amish. They hadn’t come to America seeking attention. They’d left Europe hoping to avoid it. But as time rolled on, more and more people began to hear the story of the peculiar religious communities where time almost stood still. People wanted to see this firsthand. The good news for the Amish was that curious visitors didn’t come to drown them or torture them or throw them into jail. Mostly, the visitors just came to stare.

And come they did, by the millions. Today, more than twenty million visitors descend each year on a handful of Amish communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and other states. Eleven million of these visitors will find their way to Lancaster County, which has remained the center of gravity for Amish American life, even though Holmes County, Ohio, actually has a slightly larger Amish population. These visitors arrive by tour bus, family car and airplane from across America and around the world. They include families with
children, older couples, college students, church groups—you name it, they come.

Those of us who live in Amish Country grumble about the cluelessness of tourist hordes, the way people in tourist areas always complain. We roll our eyes and joke to each other, “You think they’d like to come and watch me pull weeds from the garden? Maybe they’d like to help!” Then we thank our lucky stars the visitors keep coming and pray to God they will never grow tired of us. They eat in our local restaurants—fast food and slow food. They sleep in the area’s chain motels. The visitors explore re-created Amish villages and go on endless house tours. They sample handmade chocolates and many kinds of pie. They drive the country roads and look for horse-and-buggies. (They don’t always remember to slow down.) They patronize local tour companies and—this is the latest thing—spend hours at high-priced new-age spas, where they are rubbed, buffed, soaked and steamed to the smell of sassafras and the sound of wind chimes. Not my thing, but I hear it’s relaxing. They bargain-hunt at giant outlet malls out on the highway, immediately forgetting the Amish lessons they just learned about the dangers of rampant materialism. They haul their squealing children to popular water parks. Before they head back to wherever it is they came from, many of them pick up a jar of apple butter or a loaf of fresh-baked bread or, if they’re feeling a little flusher, maybe a hand-sewn Amish quilt or a smaller “quillow.” Some creative types might snag an old farm implement—a nicked-up rake or a hoe or a pitchfork—to display as an art piece back home. In a thousand different ways, these visitors do what they can to soak up the unique story of the Amish while also squeezing in some more conventional American-vacation fun.

God bless ’em all! They see a unique part of the country, experience something different from what they’re used to and leave a lot of money behind. Really huge of piles of money.

The economists put the figure at more than $2 billion a year. That’s billion with a “b.” Coming to see the Amish is the biggest thing going in these quiet rural towns. And the business of Amish tourism keeps growing every year.

Since
Amish Mafia
and the other knockoff shows came on television, there’s been a whole new wave of interest in the Amish. People are traveling from farther than ever and staying longer and spending more. They keep asking, “Where’s Levi?” and “Is Merlin really as scary as he seems on TV?” (The answers, just so you’ll know, are “I’m around” and “yes.”)

I can almost guarantee you that the tourist count, in dollars and in bodies, will be even higher next year. I’m certainly no economist, but I can see the cars at the Lincoln Highway Travelodge in Strasburg and the lines outside the Shady Maple Smorgasbord on Toddy Drive in East Earl. There’s no denying the obvious: An awful lot of people are making an awful lot of money off the heartwarming story of the Amish.

I know this much: Those tourists aren’t coming just for the Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s on Columbia Avenue. They’re coming to see
us.
They could just as easily OD on cholesterol at home. If it weren’t for the powerful lure of the Amish, downtown Lancaster would be a ghost town. The busy Park City shopping mall would be about as empty as Boyd Cemetery on a moonless night, and all those tourists would be hanging around Branson or Orlando or, I don’t know, maybe the Jersey Shore.
Where’s
Snooki!

I
t would be nice if a few more of those Amish-tourism dollars ended up in Amish hands. Some days it seems like the Amish are the only people who aren’t making money off the popularity of the Amish. The Amish are little more than extras in someone else’s movie—baling hay, picking tobacco, driving buggies and growing beards—while people they hardly know sell the tickets and keep the receipts. Put it like this: The Amish are less the beneficiaries of Amish tourism and more the bait.

The Amish don’t own Wendy’s franchises. They don’t even own most of the restaurants serving “Amish” food. They don’t run conference centers or family-style motels. They certainly aren’t administering the loofah scrubs in the high-priced new-age spas. They don’t drive tour buses or staff the chamber of commerce. They’re back on their farms, plowing their fields and ducking tourists with cell-phone cameras. They do operate a few farm stands.

Some of those tourist businesses are operated by Mennonites, whose rules about mixing with outsiders and benefiting financially are looser than those of the traditional Amish. And some of the “Amish” crafts sold in the “Amish” craft stores are made by actual Amish craftspeople. Those people get paid. Some Amish construction crews are hired to build new stores and houses that the tourist boom has created a demand for. That’s paying work. But the vast majority of these tourist-fueled businesses are owned and run by people whose main connection to the Amish is, well, that that’s the lucky business they’re in. They love the Amish the way a farmer loves his cow. He’d hate for someone to steal it, and he wants to keep the milk production high.

The tourism money goes mainly to non-Amish business owners and the Wall Street investors who control all those big national
chains. Then some of that money trickles across the nearby communities in sales receipts and tax revenues, paying for fire protection the Amish seldom rely on, police departments the Amish rarely call and public schools the Amish don’t send their children to.

The tourists themselves don’t tune in to much of this. They are kept purposely in the dark. They have no easy way of telling if the quilt they just bought was sewn by Mrs. Hardcastle in Bird-in-Hand or by a sweatshop worker on the outskirts of Shanghai. And either is perfectly possible. (Here’s a hint: If the tag on the “Amish hand-stitched quilt” features a super-bargain price, chances are the item isn’t really Amish. A lot of time and work goes into the real ones.)

Even the giant tour companies that scoot guests around in minivans and walk them through the re-created Amish villages—hardly any of those businesses are Amish owned. Don’t be fooled by all those Amish-heavy names. Amish Acres. The Amish Experience at Plain & Fancy Farm, Amish Heartland Tours. The Amish don’t own those companies any more than Mickey owns Disneyland.

T
ourism is a time-honored tradition in Amish Country. For almost as long as there have been Amish in America, there have been people coming to look at them. From the day they arrived, the Amish were different from most other people. They lived with their own unique customs. They worshipped in their own special ways. They weren’t super friendly when strangers came calling, but they were friendly enough. They were a far cry from Appalachian moonshiners—another band of rural exotics—who tended to greet their curious visitors with shotguns and growling dogs. If the Amish seemed a little odd or offbeat—well, that was part of their charm.

There are scattered reports from the 1800s of visitors arriving in rural Pennsylvania and Ohio by stagecoach, eager to see the Amish. They came from places like Philadelphia, Boston and New York. Back then, horses were everywhere. So Amish buggies didn’t stand out like they would in later years. In those pre-auto, pre-telephone, pre-electricity days, the Amish didn’t live all that differently from most people—just differently enough to be interesting.

Slower, quieter perhaps and with very long beards.

It wasn’t until the late 1930s that the earliest hints of an organized Amish-tourism industry began to take shape. The Great Depression still had Americans feeling frugal. A brewing world war had everyone on edge. When mothers and fathers took the big step of planning a family vacation, they tended to want a sensible, wholesome, not-too-distant place to go. Amish Country! So close and yet so far! The Amish were self-sufficient. They didn’t depend on handouts, Wall Street or the banks. The Amish seemed unthreatening and quaint. And they were convenient. By train, bus or family automobile, their settlements were a few short hours from the largest population centers in the United States. Plus they weren’t running off to war.

Much of America was doing just that, but the Amish are pacifists—they were registered conscientious objectors. As World War II ramped up, many young Amish men took advantage of farm deferments and stayed at home. Others were sent to civilian work camps where they wouldn’t have to handle weapons, but they were ready to rejoin their families as soon as the war was done.

In those pre-Expedia, pre-Travelocity, pre-TripAdvisor days, travelers relied on printed tourist brochures. I wouldn’t call them slick. One popular 1938 version—
The AMISH and the MENNO
NITES: A Study of the Social Customs and Habits of Pennsylvania’s Plain People
—was a wordy thirty-two pages, printed in black and white with no photographs. That pamphlet was as plain as the Amish themselves. The author was a Pennsylvania writer named Ammon Monroe Aurand Jr.—not Amish, of course, though he did have a full white beard and his name made him sound like something of a throwback.

“These Odd Folk Called Amish” was the title of chapter one. “ISN’T IT TRUE,” Aurand wrote, “that the average person likes to know something odd or curious about the ‘other fellow,’ while assuming that there is little or nothing odd about himself?”

The rest of the pamphlet was more of a history lesson, but with supposed inside information and its own unique, can-you-believe-this plot twists. Aurand explained that the Amish are “severely plain” in the way that they live. “An informant,” he wrote, “says that these people have no pictures on the walls—only mottos and gaudy calendars.” He then attempted to lure families with promises of beautiful farmland. “The Amish and Mennonites are generally agriculturalists, which include grain, vegetables and that ‘horrible weed’ tobacco!”

For some reason, Aurand felt compelled to include his own speculation about how the Amish got that way and how they compared to other groups he described as “plain.”

“Plain people,” he wrote, “have numerous notions in common. It appears that they have little time for either Negroes, lawyers or rum. They also believe that bad fences (poorly kept) cause trouble between neighbors.”

I’m not sure what other “plain people” he was talking about, but on the subject of Amish notions, I would say not all Amish feel that way. Personally, I have no problem with any people, no matter what
race or occupation they come from. As for lawyers, I actually like mine, Todd Shill, very much. And as for rum, I like that even more than I like my lawyer.

I’m not sure anyone would have predicted that this early brochure would help kick off a multibillion-dollar tourist industry. But word did get around, and from that time forward, the numbers mostly kept going up. The only real dip came in the disastrous tourist year of 1979. Some of the problem came from Mother Nature. There were record-breaking rains that year. There were also fuel shortages and gas rationing. Traveling anywhere just seemed like a hassle. Then the real blow came. The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island suffered a partial meltdown, the worst nuclear accident in American history. The plant was only twenty miles from Lancaster. The lieutenant governor, William Scranton III, suggested that residents stay indoors and farmers keep their animals under cover.

And if that weren’t enough, national headlines also announced that year: “Polio Epidemic Strikes Amish Community.” That was true. Though the church had no explicit policy against immunization, many large Amish families had decided to skip the polio vaccines because of the expense. Though polio was all but gone from America, eleven cases of the deadly virus were reported among the Amish by the end of that year.

There were three million fewer visitors in 1979 than in 1978.

Ever since, it’s been up-up-up for Amish tourism, some of the biggest jumps coming after
Amish Mafia
and its spinoffs hit the air. Really, how could tourists not want to visit the land of beards, bonnets and yours truly?

CHAPTER 9

SHUN THIS!

M
y brother Christian got shunned, and it was partly on account of me. Okay,
mainly
on account of me. I felt terrible when it happened, and I swore I’d get him out of it—even if I had to play outside the traditional Amish rules.

Christian is five years older than I am. He’s a hard worker, an excellent brother and a very good guy. Unlike me, he was baptized in the Old Order Amish Church. He and I had a business together building decks on peoples’ houses and doing roofing jobs. Farming and construction—those are the two main choices for Amish people, the ones who aren’t churning butter at an “Amish” tourist village or selling hand-stitched quilts and shoofly pies. When no one’s educated past eighth grade, what do you expect us to grow up to be? Computer programmers? NASA engineers? Chris and I had C & L Siding and Treated Decks. You learn a thing or two about good construction when you raise a few barns. We made some really nice decks. Every morning, I would leave the house to pick up Chris. Then, I’d drive us to the job site in our beat-up Chevy work truck.

Now, everybody knows the Amish frown on motor vehicles. If you need to go someplace that’s too far to walk, take the horse-and-buggy. But if it’s too far for the horse-and-buggy, don’t go. If it’s somewhere you really want to go or really need to go, you’re supposed to hire an English taxi driver. Let
him
risk eternal damnation for hauling you around. But here’s a dirty little secret about the Amish, something outsiders aren’t supposed to know. Even after Rumspringa, lots of Amish people own and drive cars. That’s right. There are Amish who’ve been baptized who have both a family buggy and a family car. They leave the car at a neighbor’s house or hide it in a field somewhere. They won’t drive to church on Sunday or throw their forbidden driving into the bishop’s face. But they still drive.

Driving, even if everyone knows you’ve been doing it for months or years, even if a lot of other people are doing it, can ruffle some feathers. And that’s exactly what happened. Chris and I had gone to work in the truck as usual, but suddenly there was trouble.

One of Chris’s Amish neighbors, a brushy who had a farm across the road, spied us driving to work. Brushies are what the Amish call married men, who start growing a beard right after their wedding day. Amish men aren’t even supposed to trim or shape their beards once they take a wife. So, ladies, if he’s sporting scruffy facial hair, he’s taken—don’t even think of making a fuss over him.

Well, this particular brushy—Alvin is his name—had been sitting out on his porch with his binoculars, staring across the road at us. Nobody’s as nosy as the Amish are. Without TV, radio and social media, sometimes folks go looking for their own drama. For some Amish people, binoculars are even more popular than cars. Binoculars and even telescopes are not banned by
the Amish. I’ve known a lot of nice families who use them to bird-watch, and I’ve known just as many who use them to neighbor-watch. Brushy Alvin saw what he saw and probably didn’t take the time to even put his binoculars back in their case before he went running straight to Bishop Fisher. I bet their conversation went something like this:

“The Stoltzfus brothers are driving,” the brushy probably whined. “That’s not right. You have to do something.”

“Levi’s not even baptized in the Old Order Church,” the bishop might have answered. “What do you want me to do?”

“But Chris is,” Brushy Alvin would have immediately shot back. “It’s not right that Chris is driving with Levi. Levi should know better, and if he doesn’t know better, Chris should.”

“It’s his brother.” Bishop Fisher now trying to calm my nosy neighbor. “It’s for work. This isn’t the worst thing that ever happened.”

“It’s still not right,” the brushy must have insisted, refusing to give an inch of ground. “He’s risking a shun.”

Technically speaking, Brushy Alvin was right. Since Chris was baptized Old Order Amish, he shouldn’t have been riding with me. It would have been fine if he’d ridden with an English taxi driver or anyone else who wasn’t from an Amish family. But not this. Brushy Alvin seemed hell-bent on getting the bishop to act.

“All right,” the bishop would finally say. “I’ll see what I can do.”

M
eidung.
That’s the word in Pennsylvania Dutch for shunning. Literally, it means “avoidance.” Like many parts of being Amish, shunning comes straight out of the Bible—in this case, from a lit
eral reading of two verses in the New Testament. The main one is I Corinthians 5:11. I call this the sin-is-thicker-than-blood verse. For the sake of religious purity, it has created painful divisions in many families over the years. In that Bible passage, Paul is telling the Corinthians that they should keep their distance from “brothers” who have committed certain sins.

Warns Paul: “But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a one.”

Bible scholars say the apostle recognized that unrepentant sinners might be a bad influence on the Christians. I am very familiar with that theory as people have sometimes applied it, unfairly, to me. Paul was also worried that if Christians hung around people who were misbehaving, other people would think the Christians were no better than the sinners they were with—just hypocrites preaching one way and acting another. That’s where the shunning comes in.

They were “not to keep company with these sinners . . . even to eat with such a one.”

The same shunning message is hammered home in Romans 16:17: “Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them.”

Those in your life who are “contrary to the doctrine . . . avoid them.”

Originally, the Anabaptists were a little less harsh, but just a little. They followed the principles of the Schleitheim Confession, a statement adopted in 1527 by Michael Sattler, the leader of the Swiss and German Anabaptists. In this statement, it was written
that “those who slip and fall into sin should be admonished twice in secret, but the third offense should be openly disciplined and banned as a final recourse. This should always occur prior to the breaking of the bread.”

They banned sinners but not eating together.

Maybe one of the reasons that rule didn’t stick was that soon after Sattler officially adopted it, he was arrested by Austrian Roman Catholic authorities. After a quick trial, he was executed.

Jakob Ammann, always among the strictest Anabaptist leaders, preferred the Dordrecht Confession of Faith, written in 1632. The seventeenth article is very clear: “Concerning the withdrawing from, or shunning the separated, we believe and confess, that if any one, either through his wicked life or perverted doctrine, has so far fallen that he is separated from God, and, consequently, also separated and punished by the church, the same must, according to the doctrine of Christ and His apostles, be shunned, without distinction, by all the fellow members of the church, especially those to whom it is known, in eating, drinking, and other similar intercourse.”

Ammann’s followers were taught that Christians must not associate at all with sinners who refuse to repent—even close family members. Not even to share a meal. The consequences of that, we have learned in the centuries since, can be enormous. From those two lines of tough love in the Bible to the interpretations of the confessions, families have been fractured, feelings have been hurt, countless lives have been ruined.

That brings up a huge issue—the whole question of interpreting what is a sin. Other religions struggle with the meaning of scripture, but not the Amish. It is as it is written, and that’s that.

But hold on a second!

What do the Amish bishops and preachers know?

How do these Amish Bible experts know the real meaning of the Bible? How do they even know what the Bible says? I ask this because there isn’t just one version of the Bible. There are hundreds. And they use different words in different languages to say different things. Which words are the true ones? And what’s their true meaning?

This might not matter so much for religions that are inspired by the Bible or take broad themes from the Bible. The issue can be crucial, though, for a religion where words of the Bible can be—must be!—taken literally.

Okay, which words?

It turns out there are no easy answers to any of this. For one thing, the Bible wasn’t written in Pennsylvania Dutch or English, the two languages most Amish people speak. I looked this up to be sure. I found out that the Old Testament was written first in Hebrew. I guess I remember learning that in school. Anyway, by the third century, the Old Testament was translated into Greek. By the fifth century, it was translated into Latin. As time went on, it was translated into many other languages, including English and many forms of German—but oddly, not Pennsylvania Dutch. The New Testament was written in Greek. Like the Old Testament, the New was translated into many other languages over the centuries—though again, not Pennsylvania Dutch. In most Amish homes and churches, you’ll find the Gothic-script High German Bible. That version was translated into German from Hebrew and ancient Greek in the early 1500s by Martin Luther, the German friar and theologian whose criticism of the Catholic Church helped to spark the Protestant Reformation and inspired what is today the Lutheran Church.

There have been many, many translations of the Bible since the mid-1400s, when the first book ever printed was a Bible written in Latin. With each translation into another language, the writers took various liberties and used different words, which often have very different meanings. Bible experts are constantly arguing, even today, over which translations are more and less accurate. For the Amish, the debating has always started and ended with what is on the written page of the Bible they’ve chosen to use.

One fresh development has been stirring up a lot of interest lately. Amish-born Hank Hershberger and his wife, Ruth, spent twenty-five years in Australia, where they translated Bibles for the Gugu-Yalanji Aboriginal people. One day, Hank started thinking about the Bibles he’d been brought up with back home. They were Luther’s Bibles, written in German. That’s when he realized he’d never seen a Bible written in Pennsylvania Dutch.

He was inspired immediately. “The Lord seemed to tell me,” he said, “ ‘Your own folks don’t have the Scriptures in their own language.’ ”

He and his wife got busy. In 2012, they finished translating both the Old and New Testaments into the language most Amish speak at home and in church. You’d have thought that Amish church leaders would have immediately substituted the Pennsylvania Dutch version for the one they’d been using (and that few people could read, anyway). The Hershbergers, after all, are highly respected Bible translators. And Pennsylvania Dutch was one of the last languages on Earth to get its own Bible, which is strange when you think about it since the people who speak Pennsylvania Dutch are so dedicated to every last word in the Bible.

Up to now, not too many Amish church leaders seemed very interested in using the new Pennsylvania Dutch Bible. “This is
relatively new to them,” Hank said not long ago when he was asked about his translation. “As a result, they view it somewhat with suspicion.”

That’s too bad, I think. Pennsylvania Dutch is not that close to High German, and that means words are open to misinterpretation. I’ll give you one example: Martin Luther used a certain word,
gesegnet,
in his translation to mean “blessed.” The same word is also used in Pennsylvania Dutch, but there it means “saved.” The confusion over this one word is very important to the Amish. It’s where the whole idea of “works salvation,” getting to heaven by doing good works, comes from.

Says Hank: “Instead of ‘blessed are the people,’ it means ‘saved are the people’ who do so-and-so, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” It might sound like a small difference. But when every syllable is carefully measured and turned into rules, no difference is small. Wouldn’t it be better, if you’re going to follow the word of God as closely as the Amish are supposed to, to understand exactly what the words say?

I don’t know, maybe some shunning could be avoided that way.

W
hen I heard about Brushy Alvin ratting us out to the bishop, I marched straight over to the nosy neighbor’s house and confronted him.

“Why can’t you leave us alone?” I demanded.

He knew as well as I did that lots of Amish people were driving cars. And believe me, they were going a lot more places than just to work. Brushy Alvin and his binoculars must have seen me coming across the field. He had an answer ready for me. Three or four answers, really.

“It’s wrong,” he said. “You shouldn’t be driving your brother.”

“That’s my family, not yours,” I told him. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“My kids grow up,” he said, “and they’re gonna see this, and they’re gonna want to drive, too. That’s not right.”

He backed that up, as the Amish often do, with a snappy proverb. “We pass our convictions to our children by the things we tolerate,” he said.

“Your kids do everything they see other people doing?” I shot back at him. “Is that how you raise your children? Maybe you should worry more about your own family and stop worrying so much about us.”

He just looked at me. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. He had the Ordnung on his side.

It was a typical Amish squabble. Amish people may seem humble and reluctant around outsiders, but it’s a whole different story when we are with our own. We’re expressing opinions, pointing fingers, trading insults and turning quickly judgmental.

I was angry. No one likes a rat, and no Amish like being reported to the bishop. There was no doubt that Brushy Alvin now knew how I felt about his sticking his nose in my business. I didn’t let things get any more emotional. I just stormed away, grumbling beneath my breath.

Amish can be stubborn. So even though he didn’t say the words, even though he believed he was right, I walked away thinking I had persuaded Brushy Alvin.