It all began this past summer when an acquaintance invited us to go along with her to an Old Order Amish farm to buy eggs, asparagus and other home-grown vegetables. Before we knew it our family was not being treated like customers but like members of this Amish family. Our new friends invited us to spend the Fourth of July with them, baking shoo fly pie, churning homemade ice cream and watching the fireworks of a nearby town visible from the farm. My children were taken on a horse-drawn buggy ride and we marveled at how easily this family went about their daily chores without the benefit of all the technological gizmos we could not live without.
As unlikely as it seems, our two families coming from such vastly different cultural backgrounds developed an almost immediate sense of caring and respect for one another. They are no longer just the Amish people whose buggies we zip by at sixty miles per hour; they are our friends, whose home we are welcome in whenever we want to stop by (which is a good thing since we cannot phone ahead to let them know we’re coming!).
As a scholar of religion with something of an anthropological bent, my initial reaction was to treat this family as a research project: to enter their world, to analyze the culture of this unusual religious sect, to produce an ethnography of life in the Old Order Amish community. Instead, I wound up analyzing myself and my own cultural context, entertaining the question: Why do we live the way we do? rather than asking: Why do they live the way they do?
One aspect of my Amish friends’ demeanor that I find so engaging is the deep spiritual grounding they display absent any outward displays of religiosity. No crosses dangle from their necks nor adorn their walls, grace before meals is said in silence, and pious language never seems to cross their lips. Yet their lives are deeply grounded in spiritual connection. Compare this with modern American Christians who cannot seem to stop themselves from announcing their Christian identity by wearing T-shirts emblazoned with pious sayings, WWJD bracelets on their wrists, biblical verses tattooed on their bodies, and all manner of advertisement of religious identity.
For all the overt religiosity characterizing contemporary America, Americans are mired in near epidemic levels of anxiety and depression with an annual suicide rate of more than 30,000. I fear we have traded authentic spirituality for superficial religiosity much to the detriment of our emotional well-being.
The youngest member of this family is 19-year-old Sarah. When I am around her I cannot help but compare her to the 19-year-olds who sit before me in classrooms at Luther College. Don’t get me wrong. I have great affection for my students and am deeply committed to their personal and academic growth, and their educational accomplishments far exceed Sarah’s. Yet Sarah exudes an authenticity and maturity seldom matched by my students, enthralled as they are to the artificial worlds of Facebook, Twitter and all manner of digital “community.” Sarah seems comfortable in her own skin while so many young adults today struggle with deep issues of identity. One key difference is that Sarah’s life revolves around the real rather than the artificial: personal contact with flesh-and-blood human beings, regular contact with the natural world, and the rhythms of nature undisturbed by artificial contrivance.
While becoming immersed in Amish life this summer, I read the latest book by Jared Diamond, "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?" Diamond makes a compelling case for there being valuable lessons that traditional societies living outside the umbrella of our modern techno-world could teach us, lessons that could help us live healthier, happier lives while raising self-confident and autonomous children. Those living in closer contact with the real world could be a source of great help to those of us who spend most of our time in the artificial worlds of our own making. I clearly have learned many of the same lessons from my Amish friends that Diamond has from the traditional societies he knows so intimately.
Now I am not ready to renounce the modern world and run off to live on an Amish farm, mind you. I have a cell phone (but not a smart one), I have a Facebook account (but not Twitter), and I surf the Internet on a daily basis. But more and more I am realizing that those who choose to live without these things have much to teach us about the real physical and emotional costs incurred by making a life of convenience and comfort our highest priority. I just hope we learn the lesson before it’s too late. Our very well-being as a society may be at stake.
Comments
A wonderfully thoughtful reflection. The Amish way of life is very close to what I experienced as a child on a farm in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus I have a special reason for reflecting on the values of that way. Everything I have done since leaving my childhood farm home and going off to college has been an ongoing departure from that way of life. In fact it has disappeared even in the farming culture of which I was once a part. Nonetheless, the residue of that childhood experience is probably a part of me in ways of which even I am not aware.
Why do old-order Anabaptists eschew modern technology?
They don’t want prideful creature comforts to interfere with their relationship with God.
It is that primal relationship with God that affects everything they do, and which also so commonly marked the lives of non-Anabaptist neighbors and family of Will Bunge – especially as they experienced the trials of the Great Depression and of World War II.
Over decades of personal relationships with residents of Aase Haugen Home in their nineties and over 100, I’ve seen the products of late 19th-century and early 20th-century rural America that had lifestyles very like the Anabaptists.
These “old-timers” provide strong evidence that old-order Anabaptists are exactly correct about the deleterious effects of today’s smart phones, social media, and opulence on one’s primal relationship with God.
Yes, Ralph. I very much believe they have something very important to teach us about the deleterious effects of modern techno-life. I recently saw a study suggesting that Old Order Amish communities in the U.S. have only 10-20 percent the rate of depression of the larger society. Modern life may not be good for us, at least in some ways.
I'm an "English" who has business dealings with the Amish. I wire them tens of thousands of dollars at a time with no contracts, only a handshake and a promise. I've found them to be honest businesspeople who live by their word and have a love of God. My company represents their modular prebuilt cabins online since their faith prevents them from using computers [url removed]. They build these cabins in their custom off-grid production facility on their farm in Kentucky. They recharge their handtool batteries with solar panels and power their milling machines and air compressors with diesel generators. Their 15,000 sf facility is heated in the winter with radiant in-floor heating using outdoor woodburning stove, burning their wood scraps. They are efficient builders, but they don't like phones or fax machines very much. US mail and in person visits are their preferred means of communication, even in businesses that have a few million dollars a year in sales.
Thanks, for your input, Linton. I agree that you can trust the Amish in a way that you cannot always trust others.
It's always good to see Amish faith presented truthfully. Today's "Amish reality" shows are disturbing. Fortunately, the media is just as fickle as the viewing public. The tide will turn at some point (hopefully sooner rather than later), and "Amish reality" shows will have played out their welcome in the spotlight, and the media will chase some other "next big thing" (which likely be just as disturbing to people of faith). We are "English" Christians who do business with the Amish on nearly a daily basis and we respect their faith, their lifestyle, and their work ethic. We hope that by our marketing of their products to the world, the Amish can provide for their families and continue to live their chosen lifestyle on their rural farms. [url removed]