Now that we have Muslim communities with which to compare, let’s thank our Amish for being such good neighbors. It turns out you can preserve your values and way of life without trying to behead everybody else.
Some time ago, my wife and I took a drive in the Amish country near us. About twilight we passed a teen-aged couple holding hands on a buggy ride. They were obviously in love, and it occurred to us that whatever the Amish are missing in the way of modern conveniences wasn’t worth mentioning in such a beautiful moment.
As a matter of fact, as other groups of heritage Americans face a birth dearth, the North American Amish population is doubling roughly every 20 years, driven by average family sizes of five or more children.
An Amish recently explained his community’s success to the Guardian newspaper: “I can see the big changes they have come to society, which my children will never see. There is more independence on the individual level, but people have become more selfish – everything is for themselves. We value the idea of working for the betterment of everyone. Our goal is to show people that it works if we are honest in our dealings, respect people and go the extra mile.”
In the simplest terms, the Amish ask the question: Just because you have a car that drives 200 m.p.h., do you need to jump in and put the pedal to the floor? More exactly, they back up a bit and ask the question of whether you really need a car. That general approach might apply to questions our own community is asking about birth control, artificial intelligence and data centers.
In the 1970s, I wrote an article profiling an Amish man who was being shunned, the practice of restricting contact with baptized members who have broken the rules of the community (the Ordnung). As a modern journalist I of course depicted my subject as the victim of a cruel, bigoted system that senselessly tortured the shunned, their spouses and their children.
But age has taught me that theirs is clearly a better system than compromising away core beliefs to the detriment of both the offenders and the offended. For the Amish, shunning is accompanied by a loving and renewed effort to bring the sinner — can we still use that word? — back into the fold. It is not done out of hatred or punishment but is meant to encourage the individual to return to the community. And not incidentally, retention rates are 85 percent or higher. Compare that with your church’s “contemporary” service.
Another misunderstood Amish teaching is their supposed prohibition of photography. In fact, they have no objection to having their pictures taken. They do discourage members from vainly posing for pictures — not a bad policy if you have seen any of my family photos in recent years.
There are other aspects of Amish life that we can admire. My assistant Grok has gathered them in a paragraph:
Amish practices — selective rejection of modern technology, tight-knit mutual-aid communities, deliberate limits on formal schooling, agrarian or craft-based work and prioritization of humility, family and non-resistance — offer coherent, lived responses to several acute modern failures. This is not a claim of superiority in every domain or a call for mass conversion; it is a defense of their internal logic and of their measurable advantages against specific contemporary problems.
You don’t have to be an expert on either the Amish or the Muslims to make a comparison based on their actions and words. The Muslims are living a mistake of the 7th-century where they conflate religion and conquest, the outcome being predictable and disastrous. The Amish, God bless their hearts, have chosen not to make that mistake. — tcl
