In order to mold His people, God often has to melt them.
Amish Proverb
On January 5, 1527, armed guards marched Felix Manz out of Wellenburg prison to a boat on the Limmat River in Switzerland. His brother and mother shouted from the crowd, “Stand firm, Felix!” The guards rowed him out onto Lake Zurich. His crime was his belief and public speaking about baptism: he stood firmly against the universal Catholic and Protestant practice of infant baptism. A minister offered him a last chance to change his mind. He refused. The guards tied his hands behind his knees and placed a pole between them. He said, “Into they hands, O God, I commend my spirit.” Then the guards splashed him overboard. They held him under in the icy blue water, until the bubbles stopped.
He was the first of thousands of Anabaptists, hunted down, imprisoned, exiled, drowned or burned at the stake. One of them was my ancestor, Johannes Lehman.
Most of the Anabaptists who left for the New World came to Pennsylvania because of William Penn. In the Charter of Privileges of 1701, Penn did something no other colony had done: he instituted no state religion and granted all inhabitants of Pennsylvania freedom to worship how they chose. He had tasted persecution as a Quaker in Europe – not a dish he wanted to serve to others. The Anabaptists came in droves.
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Like most Protestant denominations, the Anabaptists split several times. The Mennonites are the largest branch, but the Amish stand out for their refusal to use technology the way the rest of us do. Most who have heard of the Amish know that they have no cars, travel by horse and buggy, their men are bearded and their women dress modestly.
Many think the Amish reject all modern technology as evil. They don’t. They simply submit each new thing that comes along to a simple test: Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?
This series offers case studies in resistance against the Machine, a force that waxes and wanes throughout history, and one that today steamrolls humans into obeisance with a reach and force and a round-the-clockness that far exceeds anything that the Pharaohs, Ceasar Augustus, Genghis Khan or Stalin could even dream of. The Amish have resisted the Machine for a long time now – in some very curious ways.
Let’s look at three: the bullet, the car and the screen.
First, the bullet.
One of my favorite jokes: what goes clop-clop, clop-clop, BANG, clop-clop, clop-clop? An Amish drive-by shooting. It’s funny because it has never happened. Amish are pacifists – they don’t shoot to kill in any circumstance. They refuse to pick up the sword or gun in any war. This got them scorn in 20th Century America. In 17th Century Switzerland, it got them killed.
Second, the car.
Dave Chappelle has a hilarious bit where he talks about getting stuck behind an Amish buggy in his Porsche in Ohio. When he pulls up beside the buggy, he says, “Ezekiel, I’m tryin’ to put you onto the game, Zeke. It’s a big world out here, n****. I just went 25 miles in 30 minutes. That’s a day’s journey for you!”
Ezekiel may have the last laugh. Why? Because one day, Chappelle may be in a very high-end nursing home, surrounded by the best nurses money can buy. His one or two grandkids, even though they have the fastest Teslas, will be in New York and LA and a bit too busy to drive or fly to see old granddad slowly fading away in Ohio. Ezekiel will be in a rocking chair, withered but smiling, not drawing from Social Security because he never paid in and doesn’t need it, surrounded by sons, daughters, grandchildren, and uncountable grandnieces and grandnephews as they carry on with their cooking, games and singing. None of them more than a buggy ride away.
I’m not a car guy. I’ve lived in cities most of my adult life where I could bike or walk most places. But many among my friends and family ARE car guys. It’s a passion I respect. But I submit to you that the Amish may be right about this one. I’ll go further. I think Eisenhower, who was a good President, made a disastrous decision with the Interstate System. It did more to break down family ties than anything except no-fault divorce.
Cars are still a “no-no” for most Amish, as far as I can tell. They can call an Uber to go to Ace Hardware – but they cannot own or operate a car or truck.
So how does an Amish farmer plow, get to church of a Sunday? Horsepower, of course.
I am a hopeless romantic. I have no clue how hard it must be to keep a team of horses healthy enough to plow your fields and run you around the county. But give me the option of a farmer in a John Deere X-9, watching YouTube on his Ipad, dozing in his air-conditioned cab as the GPS steers him through the corn – not touching the wheel for hours – or Ezekiel on a bottom-riding plow behind a team of glistening Percheron draft horses he knows by name, turning the black Lancaster earth. Which would I call better? There is no contest.
Finally, the screens. Here is where it gets tricky with the Amish.
In the middle of the last century, the telephone was becoming so omnipresent in America that the Amish started asking their elders and pastors, can we try these things out? The Amish don’t have a pope. They don’t have bishops like the Orthodox or Anglicans. Although they believe strongly in gelassenheit, submission to authority, it is among the most decentralized, localized religious groups in the world: each “assembly” comes up with their own rules, Ordnung, for how to behave in the world.
Well, some congregations tried these new-fangled instruments. They installed them in farmhouses. This was back when phones were on “party lines.” That is, if you picked up the phone you could hear what anyone else along the line was saying.
You can imagine what happened next. People were listening in on neighbors’ conversations. Gossip spread like wildfire.
The elders gathered. Should we outlaw phones? Some men needed to talk to their “English” (non-Amish) customers, selling their eggs or carpentry. They needed to order the generators that ran the new milking machines and refrigerators to satisfy the FDA’s regulations for selling to the English.
They hit on an ingenious compromise. They put the phones in an outhouse at the end of the lane or out in the field, away from the house.
Recall their simple test: Does it bring us together, or draw us apart? Phones in the house, they decided, draw us apart.
TV’s? Of course not. Computers? Well, again, it’s tricky. They don’t like connecting to the electric grid or the Internet. But they’ve got to survive in the modern world and that means communicating with the English. An Amish tinkerer, Allen Hoover, invented the Classic Word Processor. that does basic word-processing, spreadsheets and accounting.
"Not just a locked computer; no modem, no phone port or internet connection, no outside programs, no sound, no photographs, no games or gimmicks" reads the black-and-white advertisement. "Nothing fancy. Just a work horse for your business."
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These are a few glimpses into how the Amish resist the Machine.
Are they winning? Great question. I don’t know. I have seen Amish youngsters texting on their smartphones on their horse-drawn buggy as I passed. But I have also seen them racing each other, cheeks cherry-red in the cold, laughing as they clopped down the road. I’m sure it’s a very messy mix.
But I can show you one measurable way they are winning ground. If the Machine hates babies, and it does, the Amish are beating the Machine. In the last thirty years, while the enlightened, tech-savvy city dwellers partied childless through their 20s and 30s, the number of Amish in the US have tripled. If you live in Pennsylvania, Ohio or Indiana, they are a small but growing and visible minority. Good estimates put their population in the U.S. at near 400,000 and, with more than six kids per family, it is now doubling every 20 years.
Maybe the rest of us need to banish the big screens from the bedroom.
Can they hold out? The onslaught of the Machine is ferocious. C’mon man, you need to be on Facebook or Google if you want people to know you’re a good carpenter or your eggs are cage-free! You’d be stupid to assume you’re going to provide for all those babies without it. And why not check in during dinner – you might miss a new customer – or a bad review. It’s just being diligent, right?
When Jobs, Zuckerberg, Brin and their peers line up for their interview at the Pearly Gates, it will be interesting. They’ve got a lot to answer for.[1]
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But let’s recap: what can we glean from the Amish and their resistance to the Machine?
· One intelligent way to do ju-jitsu against the white water current, as each new tech wave breaks over you, is to ask their simple question for you and the ones you love: will this draw us together or will it draw us apart?
· Certain technologies you may deem to be so devastating to community that the right answer is zero tolerance. For the Amish, that is the car. For you and me, it might be ___________. Fill in the blank, if we dare.
· Certain technologies may be essential to providing for your family but very dangerous to the community. You might draw up rules for where and when to use it. For many Amish, this means phones are OK in business, but not at home and not after working hours. Andy Crouch, who wrote The Tech-wise Family, allows phones in bedrooms but not in the “great room” in his home, the place where the family cooks and eats.
I guarantee you the greatest struggle the Amish are having now is not with cars or electricity. It is with the screens they carry in their pockets.
· Be willing to tell the Machine that even if it scorns you, even if it kills you, there are certain things you will not do. For the Amish, this is using lethal weapons to enforce the law or wage war. That is not my belief. But I remember hearing someone say, I’m not a celibate priest or a pacifist Quaker, but I’m glad they are among us.
Amish barn-raising
And what about me? Should I go back to my Mennonite roots, crawl back out on the Amish branch and get rid of my car and smartphone? Should you? Let’s dive into that question next week.
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Today’s wit:
The Internet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
Gene Spafford
[1] Forgive me, Lord. We all do.