Amish Education and Religious Freedom

A few miles after I left the Ohio Turnpike near Cleveland an extraordinary sight loomed ahead on a little country road. It was a horse-drawn vehicle painted bright orange. Suddenly two bright red lights began flashing on it. I pulled my car to an abrupt halt, and it is well I did; Ohio has a $50 fine for passing a school bus while it is discharging passengers. The wagon bore in large letters the words “School Bus—Stop on Signal,” and little Amish children scrambled from its rear and ran laughing to their nearby farm homes. They looked exactly like a bookplate from McGuffey’s Reader of 125 years ago, the boys wearing straw hats and trousers held up by broad suspenders, and the girls in lace caps, their long dresses stirring the dust as they ran.

This horse-drawn school bus represents a typical compromise that the bishops of the Old Order Amish Mennonite church have reached with state laws on compulsory education. When the old one-room country schoolhouses were abolished in favor of centralized schools, the Amish set up their own elementary schools. There are now some two hundred schools, with an enrollment of 13,000. The small cement block buildings are neat and fireproof. One or two teachers instruct all eight grades. And there are never more than eight. This far and no further will the Amish bishops go. They fear that the education offered in large, modern, centralized high schools is too grave a threat to their traditionally simple, agrarian way of life.

In Ohio, when state law required that all children living more than a half mile from a school be transported by bus, the Amish got a school bus—their own kind. When education to age sixteen became compulsory, they worked out a compromise whereby for the ninth and tenth grades they substitute home-instructed courses in agriculture, animal husbandry, carpentry, and other trades for the boys and such skills as sewing and butter churning for the girls. The Amish children take the same standard aptitude tests in basic reading, mathematics, and other learning skills as public-school students and, to their parents’ pleasure, rank very well. No nonsense like neglect of homework is tolerated by the Amish.

As long as the Amish can work out a compromise like this with state educational laws, they are content. But when, as in Wisconsin, officials have insisted that Amish children attend public high schools as do all other children, or that the Amish must build an equivalent private high school—something they may think is far beyond their financial means—Amish parents have preferred to be jailed.

Thus arose the case the United States Supreme Court considered this year. It poses a very difficult constitutional issue for Americans. On the one hand, the Old Order Amish bishops insist that religious freedom means the right to hold to their archaic way of life, handed down from their forefathers, and the right to train their children in the precepts of that tradition. On the other hand, a state may insist that all children born within its domain have the same right to education and the career opportunities education affords. And to have genuine religious liberty, the state may say, children born in Amish households must be given a free choice of religion, including the option of breaking with the ways of their parents. By foreclosing higher education, the Amish parents are said in effect to deprive their children of the freedom of choice enjoyed by all other young people. The Supreme Court seemed to leave the door open for further suits on this basis even though it struck down the convictions in the current case.

To understand this conflict and its potential consequences, we must know why the Old Order Amish believe the Christian religion compels them to follow so unusual a way of life and why, to preserve it, they would be willing to leave the United States and go to such countries as Paraguay or British Honduras where, though all sorts of hardships may await them, there is no compulsory school attendance law.

The Amish are spiritual descendents of the most radical Reformers of the early days of the Reformation. Shortly after Martin Luther boldly posted his Theses on October 31, 1517, religious revolt broke into open flame through Germany. Switzerland, and the Low Countries. Luther, alarmed at the excesses to which he saw the movement heading, sought in vain to restrain it, but conditions were soon out of his control.

On January 15, 1525, one Conrad Grebel, a particularly outspoken young rebel against the evils of established institutions of both church and state, was baptized in a ceremony at Zurich. He soon baptized scores of followers. Among his teachings was that infant baptism lacked support in Scripture and that valid baptism could take place only after the age of sixteen, when an individual understood the commitment he was undertaking. From this, Grebel’s followers came to be known as the Swiss “Anabaptists.” The Amish and all other Mennonites consider themselves spiritual heirs of Grebel’s little band.

Grebel and the Anabaptists went much farther than Luther, Calvin, or Zwingli in their zeal for reform. They would have nothing to do with fancy church edifices, organs or other musical instruments, altars, vestments, or any other trappings of institutionalized religion. They insisted that to be true to the commands of the Bible Christians must eschew all things not in accord with the letters of instruction Paul sent to the early Church. They were also pacifists and refused all military service. They had as little as possible to do with the state.

The Anabaptists were soon being harried and persecuted almost as vigorously by the followers of John Calvin as they were by the armies allied with the pope. Grebel died of illness at only twenty-six, but angry authorities could not quench the flaming revolt he had started.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands at about this time the writings of the Protestant Reformers were increasingly troubling the conscience of a brilliant Catholic priest, the Very Rev. Monsignor Menno Simons. From his pulpit in the church at Witmarsum, he found it more and more difficult to defend the actions of the Vatican. One day he witnessed the horrible massacre of 300 Protestant “heretics,” including women and children, who were fleeing from their homes in Belgium. He could find no justification in Scripture for such violence and said so from his pulpit. Sharp warnings from church authorities only aroused his conscience all the more. In 1535 Father Menno and many members of his congregation broke entirely with Rome.

Menno Simons became even more impassioned than the Swiss Anabaptists in denouncing the violence perpetrated by kings and their armies, and soon he and his followers had to flee from their homes at Witmarsum. In the years of persecution and exile that followed, Brother Menno led an inspired and growing congregation from one place of refuge to another. From Switzerland and the Palatinate came Anabaptist refugees by the score to join them. First dubbed “Wederdoopers” (water-dunkers) by their scoffing critics they came to be known as Mennonites and bore the name with pride.

During the period in which they wandered from place to place suffering intense persecution, Brother Menno instituted strict rules for his followers. One was the practice of meidung, shunning the fallen brother. If there was one who showed signs of compromising with the world or who was losing heart for the struggle, he was to be dropped from membership, lest his weakness affect the faith of all. Strictly applied, the rule meant that he should be shunned as the most dangerous of all sinners, and that no member of the church should speak to him, eat with him, or have any dealings with him whatsoever unless he could be persuaded to repent publicly and beg forgiveness.

After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 finally brought peace to Europe, the Mennonites settled down in the places of refuge they had found in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Alsace and prospered with their industrious farming, which restored the fertility of the war-devastated land. With peace came relaxation of the stringent old rules. In 1697, another flaming reformer arose, a Mennonite minister from Canton Bern named Jacob Amman.

Amman contended that the Mennonites were departing from the fierce, pure faith that had guided their forefathers of 150 years before and called upon them to separate themselves again from the world and particularly to return to the practice of meidung, shunning, which had nearly died out. Other Mennonite ministers disagreed with Jacob Amman, and a trenchant exchange of letters followed. Ultimately, Amman’s followers departed from the fold, set up their own church districts (they met in homes and never erected church buildings), and came to be called the Amish Mennonites.

The Mennonites and the Amish brought their differences to the New World with them. When the Mennonites suffered renewed persecution in the early 1700s, William Penn, hearing of their suffering, offered them a place of refuge in his colony of Pennsylvania. Many Mennonites eagerly accepted this haven. The Amish learned of it, too, and some came as early as 1737; nearly all the remaining Amish left Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, during which they had again been severely persecuted because of their refusal to serve in any nation’s army.

Today you will find two books in most Amish homes, in addition to the Holy Bible in Luther’s German translation, which heads a very narrow list of approved reading (books are printed for the Amish by the Mennonite Herald Press in Scottsdale, Pennsylvania). One is The Letters of the Amish Division, which they still read eagerly and cite as justification for their separation from other Mennonites. The other is Van Braht’s Martyrs’ Mirror, originally published in the Netherlands in 1637 which relates in gory detail the terrible persecutions visited upon the early Mennonite and Anabaptist martyrs.

Old Order Amish elders see themselves as the inheritors of this revolutionary Christian faith. They see themselves as God’s own elect, the one small group that through all the tortures and trials of faith has, by remaining separate from the evil world, held true to the pure New Testament faith. They believe they have built and preserved a true Christian society in a world of sin, and they intend to keep it.

They interpret very strictly the Confession of Faith adopted February 24, 1527, by the Swiss Anabaptists, meeting near Schauffhausen on the Rhine, which declares:

A separation shall be made from the evil and from the wickedness which the Devil planted in the world: in this manner, simply, that we shall not have fellowship with them and not run with them in the multitude of their abominations.…

To us then, the command of the Lord is clear when He calls upon us to separate ourselves from evil and thus He shall be our God and we shall be His sons and daughters.

A more recent statement of the doctrine of separation is that adopted by the Mennonite General Conference in 1921: “Of Separation: We believe that we are called with a holy calling to a life of separation from the world and its follies, sinful practices and methods.…”

The majority of Mennonites do not let separation from evil prevent them from carrying on an energetic and effective ministry of evangelism, such as the “Mennonite Hour” on radio. The Amish, however, declare that they will have nothing to do with the rest of the world and carry on no evangelism whatsoever. To the Old Order Amish God seems to care only about them; they pay no apparent heed to the Great Commission.

It is a very good thing for Christianity that the early Church, which the Amish profess to copy so zealously, did not regard the Christian faith its personal property. While the early Christians separated themselves from the pagan idolatry of Rome, and practiced among themselves a set of moral values much different from that around them, they nonetheless were eager to share their faith and worked hard at winning converts. To the early Christians the world was not to be left to its evil ways but was to be changed.

Obviously, if a group of Christians try to live a strict interpretation of one part of the New Testament but ignore other important scriptural teachings, a rather distorted faith results. This has been the misfortune of the Amish today. And this is how the Amish have come to a head-on collision with the majority of Americans on the subject of education.

The Old Order bishops tend to be unreasonable on this subject. Their position is rigid and inflexible, as though eight years of schooling were a precept of the Bible itself. Much of this may be explained by the fact that the Amish bishops are possessed by deep fear. A man who is consumed by fear is not one who can think clearly.

We need to have compassionate understanding of this fear. When the Amish first came to America they differed only in theology from the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Dunkards, and the other Plain Sects. In dress and in mode of life, they were distinguishable only by the fact that they did not build churches, did not have communication with others, and conducted their religious services in High German, while speaking in their homes that Old German dialect corrupted by colloquialisms and English vocabulary known as Pennsylvania Dutch (which a modern German can understand only with difficulty).

When mechanization first came to American agriculture in the form of McCormick’s reaper, the Amish adopted it as eagerly as did their neighbors. The steam threshing machine became as much a part of harvest time among the Amish as with other farmers. They adopted crop rotation, fertilizers, and modern soil-conservation practices.

But about 1900, the Amish began to fear that once again they were becoming too worldly. Modes of dress began to change in rural America, but the Amish held rigidly to the styles of the nineteenth century. They had never been willing to wear buttons (presumably because Prussian military officers wore fancy buttons and these came to be associated with militarism and extravagance in dress). Now not only their hook-and-eye styles but their broad hats, coarse fabrics, and floor-length dresses became increasingly a denominational costume that set them very much apart from their neighbors. The Amish bishops rather liked this situation because it made it more difficult for their young people “to jump the fence over” and to “turn Yankee” (as they say when young people leave the Old Order faith).

The die was cast. From this point on, having refused to allow any change in style of clothing, the Amish bishops seemed determined to outdo one another in rejecting every change the modern world offered. The Amish bishops do not have conferences or any kind of central organization. Each is supreme in his own church district of fifty to one hundred families. There are no church buildings among the Amish; they meet in homes or barns. They are eager to avoid criticism and desire to be known for the strict piety with which they hold to the faith of the forefathers.

Although they had eagerly accepted the steam engine, they drew the line at the gasoline engine. Tractor plowing was rejected as was all other farm machinery operated by the internal combustion engine. The automobile was condemned because it would make travel to the outside world much too easy. Electricity was also frowned upon because it would make life easy, and if life was easy, the people would never hold to the stem old faith.

Inevitably, a bitter division occurred in the ranks of the Amish. In 1926, a bishop named Noah Beachy declared he could find nothing in the Bible that commanded Christians to plow with horsepower while other farmers cultivated far more acreage and raised much more food by using tractor power. The Beachy Amish, several thousand in number, left the fold and soon adopted automobiles, though they painted the chrome bumpers black to avoid being fancy. They still drive only black cars, retain distinctive dress, have their own schools, and are as reluctant as the Old Order Amish to see their children attend public high schools. Unlike the Old Order, they support an evangelistic program and try to have some outreach to their neighbors. Their dissidence has made the Old Order bishops all the more trenchant in defending the strict traditional way of life.

‘IN THE YEAR THAT KING UZZIAH DIED’

Isaiah 6:1

Shut up as a leper,

Dead under a cloud,

Your royalty eclipsed:

And not till then My vision dated.

Dated

That with certainty

I could look upon mortality

And know

When breath of kings and princes fail,

There would remain

That other vision burning,

Burning with a heat

Proportioned to its light.

No repetitious revelations

Come with such a vision.

It is enough to see

In each Uzziah dead,

In each disease, each shame,

Each royal claim eclipsed,

My Lord uplifted.

Surrounded with a host

Whose faces, feet and features

Are covered for that vision’s errand,

To serve with nothing less

Than angel’s wings;

And sing no other song

Save, Holy, Holy. Holy!

RUTHE T. SPINNANGER

Despite all their problems, including defection of many of their young people, the Old Order Amish continue to grow in numbers. This is due in part to their large families (although Amish couples do use contraceptive devices). Total number of Amish is estimated at 30,000.

The Old Order Amish believe that the modern world is going to blow itself up with the bombs and other terrible weapons its military leaders have assembled. They also believe that modern American society is going to sink into a slough of disease and crime that will utterly bury it. As they see the advertisements for X-rated films when they visit town, they shudder at the degeneration already evident. Our rising crime rate, our divorce rate, the unhappiness among young and old that leads them to use alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and other drugs—things like this convince them we are Sodom personified, and they feel certain of what our end shall be.

We cannot blame the Amish for not wanting their young people to become part of the urban culture of contemporary America. Actually, the Amish feel generally sorry for us. They know that there are many earnest Christians among us, but they feel we are unlikely to win salvation because we are subjected to just too many temptations. We have set ourselves to too unequal a task, they believe. We cannot really be Christians in such an environment. Our only hope is to pull out and try to save ourselves by rejecting the crumbling, doomed world.

The Old Order Amish present us with an unusual problem of Christian charity. Their simplicity we are coming to appreciate more. Their extraordinary family stability, the loving care they give to their aged, the help they extend to those in distress, touch any observer deeply when he is privileged to live among them. The criticism they make of our society is in all too many respects valid.

Their continuance in their unique way of life is a tribute to our tolerance and respect for the beliefs of others. We hesitate to disturb them by intruding the force of government—by, for example, imprisoning them for their conscientious refusal to send their young people to a centralized high school. We have discovered that to use force against them is, in the end, as futile for us as it was for the frustrated crowned heads of Europe. The beatings given Amish boys who refused to be sworn into military service in World War I did not induce a single one of them to serve. Efforts to force participation in the social security program by seizing horses for nonpayment of taxes resulted only in eventual amendment of the Social Security Act to provide for exemption on conscientious grounds. We may eventually drive the Amish out of America to foreign lands where no compulsory schooling exists, but we may never see in the student body of any modern high school a single child who is in good standing in the Amish community.

Glenn D. Everett is the Washington correspondent for a number of religious periodicals, including the “Sugar Creek Budget,” the unofficial national newspaper of the Old Order Amish. He is a United Methodist layman.

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