The Amish are Not Ours (continued)

Enacting that rationality—forgiving one’s enemies—does not come easy, even for the Amish. I may be wrong, but I suspect that some Amish people in and around Nickel Mines will experience feelings of rage and contempt for some time to come. Still, language and intention do matter, as does the cultural air one breathes. Steeped in a milieu in which Christ’s suffering love counts as normative, the Amish possess the resources to make their rhetoric of forgiveness a reality.

Of course, even the Amish recognize that embedding their Jesus ethic in the larger society is no simple task. As classic sectarians, the Amish don’t pretend that their “kingdom ethic” translates easily to a society in which the wheat and the tares are mixed. Had Charles Roberts lived, they likely would have supported a lengthy incarceration. But they also would have demonstrated concern for Roberts’ well-being, and may have been the first in line to provide him with spiritual counsel. Rather than hoping that their daughters’ executioner would “rot in hell,” they would have done their level best to insure that wouldn’t happen.

And that should cause the rest of us to reassess our view of the Old Order Amish. It’s all too easy to reduce the Amish to quaint leftovers from a virtuous American past. Plain dress, horses and buggies, barn raisings, and colorful quilts: these are the images that capture the fancy of the world’s Amish watchers. One-room schoolhouses round out that picture, eliciting a deep nostalgia for America’s imagined past. The horror of last Monday’s events would have grieved us had they occurred down the road at a public school. That the killings occurred in a one-room Amish schoolhouse exacerbated that anguish, for the Amish and their little school are, in many of our minds, somehow “ours,” a reservoir of our supposedly more innocent past.

I am glad that Americans are grieving Monday’s horrific events. From everything I know, the Lancaster Amish community welcomes the prayers of the world as a healing salve. Still, I would hope that those of us outside the Amish community would work hard to resist the notion that the Amish are “ours.” They are not. The reason they are “not ours” is not their strange fashion sense, their Pennsylvania German dialect, or their resistance to certain technologies that other Americans happily embrace. Rather, they are “not ours” because they manifest a rationality, anything but quaint, that refuses to dismiss Jesus’ command to forgive as an unrealistic ideal. For the Amish, “In God We Trust” is more than a motto that decorates their currency. It’s a fundamental orientation to life that enables them to live peaceably and forgive those who don’t.

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