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The Amish

Introduction

Farming is an expression of stewardship of God's earth ©

The Amish (pronounced 'Aahmish') are an American Protestant group with effectually 200,000 members descended from European Anabaptists who came to the USA more than ii centuries agone to escape persecution.

They are best known for their 19th century style of life that was portrayed in the 1985 Harrison Ford film Witness, in which violent crime clashed with their peaceful beingness.

Their former-fashioned traditions are non what is now chosen a 'lifestyle selection'. Amish believe that their religious faith and the mode they alive are inseparable and interdependent.

The Amish originated in Europe afterwards splitting from Mennonite Swiss Brethren in 1692 over the handling of members who had been found guilty of breaches of doctrine.

The starting time Amish arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1730s to escape persecution in Europe.

Basic features of Amish life

Amish believe that the community is at the heart of their life and organized religion, and that the way to salvation is to live as a loving customs apart from the world. Individualism is avoided.

Cocky-assistance

Members of the community assistance each other, and the whole customs will work together to help a fellow member in trouble. They practise not accept country benefits or apply insurance, simply rely on customs support instead.

Split

The Amish believe that it's essential to go on themselves separate from the 'world', so they live in their ain small-scale communities and differ from other Americans in their wearing apparel, linguistic communication, piece of work, travel and didactics.

Not sectional

The Amish are not exclusive, and take many contacts with outsiders, who they call 'English language'.

Amish groups

Each Amish commune is fully independent and lives by its own set of unwritten rules, or Ordnung. The Old Social club is the strictest of these groups. There is no central authority.

Simplicity and humility

The Amish stress simplicity and humility. They avert anything associated with self-exaltation, pride of position or enjoyment of ability.

Harmony with nature

Amish believe that God is pleased when people piece of work in harmony with nature, the soil, the weather condition, and intendance for animals and plants. Amish always live in rural communities.

Amish travel in horse-fatigued buggies ©

Applied science

Some modern 'conveniences', such as cars, electricity and telephones are avoided. They just avoid engineering where it might damage the community, not because they are Luddites or think engineering science is inherently evil.

Non-confrontation

Amish are pacifists and conscientious objectors. They avoid all violence - including angry words or going to law.

Discipline

The Amish community governs itself strictly. Baptised members are morally committed to church rules. Erring members may be shunned until at that place is repentance, forgiveness and restoration to full fellowship.

Linguistic communication

Amish apply iii languages, a German dialect called Pennsylvania Dutch at home, High German for worship and English with outsiders.

Family

Amish only marry other Amish and don't divorce. They have large families averaging 7-8 children.

Education

Amish children are educated in their own schools. Schooling stops at 14 after which they learn practical skills on the job.

Holy days

Amish celebrate the same holy days as other Christians.

Growing up

Subsequently 16 Amish children can experience life exterior the community for a few years to decide whether they wish to become full baptised members of the community. 90% determine to do so.

Partially based on The Amish In Northern Indiana, past Samuel L. Yoder

The Amish way of life and values

Way of life and values

Recently the Amish are noted for selling craftwork ©

Amish live in small rural communities where strong family unit and social ties permit them their own distinctive and divide manner of life. The family is the center of Amish customs, individual identity and spiritual life.

Nonetheless in recent times they've diversified from farming and in some communities more than 80% work in small businesses making things like indoor and garden furniture, modest sheds, quilts and leather appurtenances.

The Amish produce many of their needs, rearing animals to produce meat, growing corn for food and for feeding animals, and growing vegetable both for food and for sale. Amish women make near of the apparel. Just they are non totally self-sufficient and rely on the outside customs for other requirements.

Amish values

• putting God and community ahead of the individual;
• a life of 'goodness', rather than a life of intellect;
• life as a spiritual action;
• wisdom, rather than technical knowledge;
• community welfare, rather than competition;
• separation from, rather than integration with, modern worldly society;
• non-resistance - seeking peaceful resolution to conflicts

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Amish customs

Separation

The Amish continue themselves split up, only not sectional, following the Biblical text "be not conformed to this world" (Romans 12:2).

Amish alive similar this not because they dislike or fear other human beings but considering they believe that conservancy comes from the redeeming power of living a loving life in a pure community of believers who live in separation from the world.

We must not forget that in the Middle Ages important values of the culture of the Western World were preserved by members of religious orders who isolated themselves from all worldly influences against great obstacles. There can be no assumption that today's majority is "right" and the Amish and others like them are "wrong."

A fashion of life that is odd or even erratic merely interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.

U.S. Supreme Court, Judgement in Wisconsin five Yoder, 1972

The Amish keep themselves autonomously from the communities around them in several ways:

• they clothing distinctive clothes; straw hats, dark shirts and trousers with braces for men and plain and small dresses with bonnets or caps for women.
• they are pacifists and don't serve in the military -- guns are used just for hunting
• they don't swear oaths or hold elective office, and usually don't vote
• they don't go to constabulary considering that is seen as as well confrontational
• they don't own modern technology
• they don't accept any country benefits or utilise insurance
• they accept their own teaching system
• they speak a German dialect amidst themselves
• they ally among their customs

Although the Amish separate themselves from the mainstream communities effectually them, they aren't exclusive and do business concern with their neighbours. The ideal Amish occupation is to be a farmer, but Amish men also practise mill work.

Pragmatism

The Amish interpret their behavior pragmatically. They adapt to the earth in lodge to exist able to continue to continue their redeeming life in a pure customs carve up from the world.

The doctrine of separation is regarded as an ideal, just is interpreted in a practical rather than a rigid style. This permits the Amish to build productive working relationships with the outside earth, and to plant a network of contacts that they can use for the benefit of their community.

Stephen A Marglin gives an instance of how the Amish rejection of one modern practice, insurance, is entirely in line with the preservation of the community:

...they forbid insurance precisely because they understand that the market relationship between an individual and the insurance visitor undermines the common dependence of the individuals that forms the basis of the community.

For the Amish, barn-raisings are not exercises in nostalgia, merely the cement which holds the customs together...

...An Amishman's decision to insure his befouled undermines the mutual dependence of the Amish not only by making him less dependent on the community, merely besides by subverting the behavior that sustain this dependence.

Stephen A. Marglin, Development as Toxicant: Rethinking the Western Model of Modernity, Harvard International Review, 2003

In the last 50 years the Amish have go more businesslike in their approach to engineering, while perhaps becoming more separate as a community:

In the decades since 1960 the Sometime Order Amish have in many means become more than sectarian than they were before that fourth dimension. In a paradoxical manner this religious evolution has taken place simultaneously with a greater Quondam Society openness to negotiating technological alter. Technological and religious conservatism were de-coupled, with religious life becoming more fixed even as mechanical innovation became more possible.

Steve Nolt, The Amish 'Mission Movement' and the Reformulation of Amish Identity in the Twentieth Century, Mennonite Quarterly Review 2001

Amish use horse-drawn buggies ©

Limits on technology

Amish ain horse-drawn buggies, not cars (but they can take a ride in someone else's car).

Farm machinery is generally horse-drawn, although some communities allow tractors with steel wheels equally such tractors can't exist used on the road.

They don't let telephones or electricity in their houses, because both of these technologies would literally connect them to the world through their wires. Electricity and petrol/diesel power are used in barns for work purposes. Shared telephones are available outside houses in business premises or phone booths.

Televisions, radios and stereos are non used, which helps keep the Amish unpolluted past the values advanced past the mass media. 1 Quondam Order Amish told the scholar Donald B Kraybill that "television is the sewer line that connects yous directly to the cesspool of Hollywood". As with other technologies there is a compromise - listening to someone else'due south radio or watching the Boob tube in a hotel might well be accepted.

For like reasons, computers with internet admission are banned, although Amish can use a computer at an outside workplace.

They don't use cameras considering photos break the biblical ban on making 'graven images' (Exodus 20:4)

Why engineering is limited

The Obviously People are not modernistic day Luddites who disparage new technology.

Donald B Kraybill, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 1998

The Amish avoid mod technology not because they want to alive austere and uncomfortable lives but to preserve the uniqueness of their mode of life.

New conveniences are assessed to see how they would affect the social patterns and cohesiveness of the Amish community, and anything that might damage their way of life is rejected. Less dangerous technology may be adapted to fit.

They scrutinize practices, services, and products to see whether they would generate life-style changes which would hurt community solidarity, create tension within families or between different families, or open the community to excessive dependence on outside institutions.

Anything, for case, that might suddenly create conspicuous differences between "haves" and "have nots" is a prime number candidate for rejection.

John A. Hostetler, Robert L. Kidder, Managing Ideologies: Harmony as Ideology in Amish and Japanese Societies, Police and Society Review, 1990

Hostetler and Kidder indicate out that conveniences are accustomed when information technology is necessary to practice and so - electricity is barred in the home, but accustomed in farm buildings considering if the Amish did not comply with regulations to refrigerate milk at the farm, they would non be able to continue as dairy farmers and the community would suffer economic impairment.

Language

Most Amish speak three languages: a German language dialect called Pennsylvania Dutch at abode, High German language at their worship services, and English language when talking to non-Amish (whom they telephone call 'English language').

Amish man at the market place ©

Gender roles

Amish adopt traditional gender roles in which wives are subordinate to their husbands.

Men are in charge of the spiritual life of the family and are responsible for providing sustenance. Women do domestic tasks, look later the children and have on light subcontract piece of work such equally feeding chickens and milking cows.

Clothes

Amish wearing apparel is a highly distinctive outward symbol of membership in the group, but through its plainness and simplicity rather than through whatsoever eccentricities.

The thought is that a person's clothes should reverberate humility and avert individual distinctiveness. Breaches of the Amish wearing apparel lawmaking may lead to a reproof from a customs leader.

Old Order Amish women wear modest dresses with long sleeves and a total skirt, a cape and an apron. They normally wear their hair in a bun on the back of the head, often covered with a bonnet or a white organza prayer cap. Amish women don't utilize makeup.

Men and boys wear dark trousers, braces, straight-cutting coats and wide-brimmed straw hats. Their clothes don't have stripes or checks. Amish men grow beards only afterwards they marry and don't abound moustaches because 19th century generals wore beards and moustaches and anything military is shunned.

Nighttime bluish, green, purple, brown and black are the most common clothing colours.

The Amish are very resourceful in tailoring commercially available products to their own needs, buying, for case, black and white jogging shoes at Wal-Mart forth with a tin of black paint for painting the white running strip black.

Hamilton and Hawley, in 50. B. Arthur, Faith, Wearing apparel and the Trunk, 1999

Although the apparel code is partly intended to foreclose visual statements of individuality, there is telescopic for individual gustation, every bit this chestnut demonstrates:

That the rules for Amish wearing apparel utilise merely to outwardly appreciable wearing apparel was get-go antiseptic when one of the authors, while baking pies with an Amish family, was asked to make a run to the basement for additional jars of peaches.

There, forth with diverse pieces of underwear drying on the line, were several pair of vivid, colourful men'south boxer shorts with Disney characters on them, conspicuously too commodious to fit anyone other than the only adult male person living at home at that fourth dimension.

When asked near them subsequently in individual, the married woman acknowledged that her husband wore them, that later all, nobody could encounter them and complain.

Jean A Hamilton and Jana M Hawley, in Linda B Arthur, Faith, Dress and the Body, 1999

Conflict

The Amish are pacifists who pass up military service and who try to live peacefully with each other and with outsiders.

They have a policy of 'non-resistance', which means that when governments instruct them to practice things that are confronting their religion, they refuse to do them, but accept the consequences of their refusal without argument.

They don't go to police force, regarding this as confrontational, although they have used lawyers to defend themselves if they are involved in a lawsuit started by someone else. In the famous example of Wisconsin v Yoder the Amish got round the issue of not going to constabulary by letting a committee of non-Amish defend the case pro bono.

Internal disagreements are usually resolved by the community equally a whole.

Although the Amish present a unified confront to outsiders, communities are sometimes troubled by disputes which may atomic number 82 a family to join another community or institute a new one.

Some have polarized over the shape or colour of a garment; the style of a house, railroad vehicle or harness; the use of labour-saving agricultural machinery or the pace of singing...

Beneath the surface are extended families, ofttimes fraught with envy or jealousy, that accept opposing sides...

The Amish tend to suppress their feelings since no one wishes to be the crusade of disunity or division. Typically, dissatisfied members migrate to a more compatible Former Order community or start a new settlement.

John A. Hostetler, Amish Society, 1993

An Amish schoolhouse in Arcola, Illinois ©

Teaching

The Amish accept their own private education organization of around one,200 schools which stresses the 'four Rs' of reading, writing, arithmetic and organized religion.

A typical schoolhouse has betwixt 25 and 35 pupils, with but one room and one teacher to encompass all ages. Teaching is in English. Teachers are usually younger women without specialist training. Children will often do farm work earlier and afterward school.

Amish children are educated in schools until they're 14 (eighth form). This exemption from The states law which by and large requires schooling until age sixteen is the effect of a Supreme Courtroom Case (Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), see related links), in which the Amish successfully argued that instruction beyond aged 14 exposed their children to modern values that clashed with their beliefs and might put their salvation at chance.

Formal high school education beyond the eighth course is contrary to Amish beliefs, non simply considering it places Amish children in an environment hostile to Amish beliefs with increasing emphasis on contest in class work and sports and with force per unit area to arrange to the styles, manners, and ways of the peer group, simply also considering information technology takes them away from their community, physically and emotionally, during the crucial and formative adolescent flow of life.

U.S. Supreme Courtroom, Sentence in Wisconsin v Yoder, 1972

Amish instruction has some unique strengths, described by Donald Kraybill, a senior fellow in the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown Higher in Lancaster Canton.

Amish schools showroom a social continuity rarely institute in public teaching. With many families sending several children to a school, teachers may relate to as few every bit a dozen parents.

... Amish schools are unquestionably provincial past modern standards. Notwithstanding in a humane manner they ably prepare Amish youth for meaningful lives in Amish society... They reinforce Amish values and shield youth from contaminating ideas afloat in modern culture.

Quoted in the Washington Mail

Later on they leave school Amish boys learn work skills such as farming and carpentry on the job, while Amish girls concentrate on practical domestic matters.

State benefits

The Amish will not accept whatever form of state benefit considering they believe that the community should care for its members.

They don't utilise public or private health insurance, and bring together together to pay for outside medical treatment.

Rumspringa

At the age of 16 Amish children are given a great bargain of freedom which they can use to experience the outside world. Some may even choose to 'alive English', as information technology's known. This practice is chosen rumspringa, which means 'running effectually'.

After this period, virtually children prefer to return to the full Amish lifestyle with both its restrictions and rewards, and are baptised into full membership.

Moving community

Some Amish decide to motility to another Amish community rather than remain in the 1 where they were brought upwardly. The main reasons for doing this are to larn less expensive farm land or to live in a community that is either more or less strict.

Marriage

Amish only marry other Amish, although not necessarily from their own community. They may not marry a first cousin, and are discouraged from marrying a second cousin.

Amish beliefs

Behavior

The Amish are closest to the Anabaptists: Protestant Christians who believe in adult baptism, pacifism, the separation of church and state and the importance of the community to organized religion. The denomination is closely related to the Mennonites.

Amish don't fear technology, but they do manage without it ©

They base their daily life and religious practice on a literal interpretation of the Biblical instruction "exist non conformed to this world" (Romans 12:two). Their separateness may too have been a reaction to the persecution they has suffered in Europe.

Belief as a way of life

A way of living is more important than communicating information technology in words. The ultimate message is the life.

An Amish person will have no doubt about his basic convictions, his view of the pregnant and purpose of life, but he cannot explain it except through his life.

John A. Hostetler, Amish Society, 1993

Although the Amish are sometimes painted as people who live an former-fashioned life considering they are welded to their traditions or because they fearfulness the modern world, those are both misunderstandings.

The Amish way of life grows out of the belief that salvation comes from the redeeming forcefulness of living a loving life in a pure customs of believers who live in separation from the world.

For Amish and Mennonites the struggle to die to self was life-long. God'south power was released simply when the private did not exercise his own will... membership in the customs and participation in its rites was the means to salvation.

God did non grant salvation considering of inner experience. Salvation came only by actual participation in Christ, past suffering, yielding, dying to self as he did.

They believed this was possible just in community and through the Ordnung.

Sandra Cronk, Gelassenheit: The Rites of the Redemptive Process in Quondam Gild Amish and Erstwhile Club Mennonite Communities, Mennonite Quarterly Review 1981

Amish are less concerned with achieving individual salvation through a personal belief in Jesus Christ. It'southward said that they regard any claim by an individual to be 'saved' every bit an expression of pride, and something to be avoided.

Gelassenheit

Ane important principle is Gelassenheit. This is the idea that a laic should surrender to God by living in a way that pleases God and by obeying legitimate religious authorisation.

Amish see cocky-denial and obedience to church building potency as of import virtues.

Gelassenheit is layered with many meanings--self surrender and self denial, resignation to God'southward will, yielding to others, gentleness, a at-home and contented spirit, and a quiet credence of whatever comes.

Although the word rarely is spoken, the meaning of Gelassenheit is woven into the social textile of Old Order life. Information technology reflects the virtually fundamental divergence between Onetime Order culture and modern values

Donald B. Kraybill, The riddle of Amish civilization, 1989

Farming is an expression of stewardship of God's earth ©

Farming

Amish believe that they should farm as stewards of God'southward creation, and that this is a spiritual activeness.

Field of study

Because of the emphasis on community, members are expected to believe the same things and follow the same lawmaking of behaviour (chosen the Ordnung). The purpose of the ordnung is to help the community lead a godly life.

This unanimity of belief and behaviour is maintained by stiff discipline; if a person breaks the rules they may be 'shunned', which means that no-one (including their family) will swallow with them or talk to them.

Shunning (meidung) is not washed to injure the rule-breaker merely to requite them an experience that may redeem them and bring them dorsum into the community.

If a person persists in dominion-breaking they may be excommunicated. If a person repents they are accustomed back into the customs.

Shunning is based on two Bible verses, I Corinthians 5:11 and Romans 16:17.

Nonetheless, if someone brought upwards in the Amish customs decides that they do not wish to join the community and obey its rules they are not punished in any way. They often remain in the area and join like but less strict denominations, and maintain contact with their sometime community.

Conversion

Amish do non seek to attract new believers. Although it is possible for an outsider to bring together an Amish community, it would be difficult.

Ideals

The Amish have a traditional lawmaking of ideals that rejects sexual activity outside of spousal relationship, divorce, homosexuality and public nakedness as sins forbidden by the Bible. Modesty and purity are vital virtues.

The Amish are pacifists, basing this on Jesus' instruction that one should beloved one'south enemy. They pass up all forms of violence.

The Amish admire large families and tend not to use birth control other than to control the spacing of children.

Amish worship

Worship

Work is part of worship ©

The Amish worship in their houses, which are designed to allow a large group to meet. Dissimilar households take it in turns to host worship.

A 3-hour preaching service takes place every other Sunday morning and is followed by a shared meal.

On Sunday evening there may be a meeting for young people of several communities who gather in a house to sing hymns and talk, sitting on opposite sides of a long table.

Communion services are held twice a year.

John A Hostetler describes the structure of an Amish service like this in his volume Amish Society:

1. Several hymns are sung while the ministers retire upstairs to meet for prayer and to arrange who volition preach
   • Hymns are led past a single voice who sings the beginning bar of each line alone, and is then joined by the community
   • Singing is very wearisome and a hymn can have twenty minutes
   • The second hymn is always the Loblied
2. Introductory sermon
3. Prayer: kneeling and usually silent
4. Bible reading for which the associates stands
5. Chief sermon, which ends with a Bible reading
6. Testimonies given by other ministers equally requested by the preacher
7. Endmost remarks from the preacher
8. All plow and kneel for a prayer from Dice Ernsthafte Christenpflicht
9. Benediction
10. Notices
11. Closing hymn
12. Dismissal - the community leaves in age order, youngest outset

The Amish view of worship was summed up in the defence cursory in the case of Wisconsin v Yoder:

Worship, in Amish life, whether for the onetime or the young, is non confined to a "prayer period" or a weekly hr of church attendance. Worship permeates Amish life, and in a multifariousness of forms.

The Amish gild is a "ceremonial community", its religious formalism life beingness governed by the days of the week, by seasons, and by the calendar.

At the time of adolescence, the Amish young adult is growing speedily in the life of worship of the "ceremonial community" in which harvesting, sewing and all daily work, learning and action are consciously offered in praise and love of God.

Wisconsin v Yoder court case

Amish organisation

Organisation

In that location are effectually 200,000 Amish, who alive in more than than 20 United states of america states and Ontario, with the largest communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. They are a growing group -- it's thought that their population doubles every 20 years.

Horse buggies limit the altitude Amish tin travel ©

The Amish are divided into dozens of divide fellowships, broken down into districts or congregations. Each commune is fully independent and lives by its own set of unwritten rules, or Ordnung. The Old Lodge is the strictest of these groups.

Because Amish transport is limited to horse buggies these districts are geographically small and may include around 30 or twoscore households.

The Amish do not accept a professional group of ministers. Instead, lay ministers are chosen past lot from inside the community. Ministers are not paid and add their religious duties to their farm or other work.

There are three ranks of minister: bishop, preacher or government minister, and deacon. Amish districts commonly accept a bishop, a deacon and two preachers.

Districts take decisions in meetings of the baptised members.

'Arrangement' is said to exist 'suspect' in the Amish world (Kraybill, 1989), so there are no significant cardinal institutions. Instead in that location are ad hoc groups of Amish or people who sympathise with them who tin can act on behalf of Amish communities when needed.

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Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/subdivisions/amish_1.shtml

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