Half the church might say, “Well, I don’t have a problem with this,” and the other half may say, “Oh, no we’re staying with our traditional beliefs and we’re not going to ever go outside them.”
We have this image of the Amish as being frozen in time, stuck somewhere around 1850. Completely abstaining from technology and anything else that belongs to the modern world.
But that’s not quite right because new economic pressures are leading to new debates within Amish churches about just how much to let the outside world in.
Here’s something that may surprise you. By some estimates, the Amish are the fastest growing faith community in America. The Amish number over 300,000, and that number is predicted to hit 1 million by 2050.
At the same time, Amish families are picking up and moving across state lines. Every now and then, you’re going to get what some people would call “seekers.”
A lot of people come in with a romantic notion of how much fun it’s gonna be to dress in more old-fashioned clothes. “Let’s dress like they do on the prairie.” “We’re just gonna live like they did, you know, 100 years ago.”
Well, that wears off awful quick.
The Amish live what’s called a plain life. But the boundaries of plain can be blurry.
So, like, within 10 to 15 miles, you could have electricity, and an automatic washing machine. You could go 10 to 50 miles away, and you’re gonna have solar kerosene lamps and batteries, and then you could go over the hill and there’s not even gonna be so much as a refrigerator.
As Amish communities grow, and American farmland becomes expensive and scarce, more Amish people have to find work off the farm, in the big, technological world.
Does the church always kind of set a standard for what’s allowed? Yes, the bishops mainly do that. They have a meeting, like, once a year, and then they decide, “Well, hey, are we gonna let this in?” They really don’t like any technology.
But, there is much more in here than they realize. Some Amish have electricity at home, but it’s powered by solar because their community is not OK with public power grids.
Similarly, some won’t own cars, but they might hire non-Amish drivers to get them around. There’s this one professor who calls this maneuvering around the rules “Amish hacking.”
Some Amish churches let people use technology for business.
But, once you have a taste of it, it’s hard to put away after work hours. Do you think it’s hard to know where a community should draw the line, or do you think it’s kind of clear?
Increasingly, some Amish people are seeking out more relaxed standards. In short, they’re going on winter vacation… to Florida. Pinecraft is a kind of destination hot-spot for Amish and Mennonite tourists.
In Pinecraft, you can get away with things you couldn’t do elsewhere. Like riding bikes. What happens in Pinecraft, stays in Pinecraft, that’s fact.
There’s actually some communities where I could even go so far as to use the word “forbidden” from coming down here. They would view this as more a playground, and it’s not something that they want to participate in, because their lifestyle is so different.
The thing is, the Amish have been here before. Back in the 1860s, Amish leaders held a series of conferences to decide how much Amish culture should bend to modernity. Hardliners thought the technology would weigh people down, prevent them from ascending to heaven.
In response, the church split. Different communities took different paths. In our lives, it can feel like technological change is inexorable. There’s always more, and more, and more is always better.
But here’s this community that says, “Well, no, we’re going to take this, and not that,” and I wonder if we don’t all crave that kind of control sometimes.
I guess from the outside it can be a bit confusing, and it can feel a little arbitrary like, why embrace an iPad, but not mass-produced clothing, or why embrace a washing machine, but not a tractor?
They might have to do a little research and, you know, just do a little little searching. Is that something that I want to introduce in my life? Where is it going to take me?
I guess when you get to a place where, you know, you have Amish communities like where you can ride cars, and you can ride bikes, and have iPads, and electricity, and then I wonder, you know, is the boundary between Amish and not Amish kind of blurring?