What We Can Learn From the Amish
The nation's third schoolhouse atrocity in less than a week, the one in Nickel Mines, Pa., took place in a community as different from everyday America as horse-drawn buggies are from SUVs. How could it happen there, in rural farmland among the peace-loving Amish for whom the injunction "be ye not conformed to this world" is much more than a fine notion?
As the news swarm served up the vivid incongruities and the explanation industry delivered the inevitable theories, the most striking answer came from the afflicted community itself. Grief-stricken, of course, those Amish who reluctantly but politely responded to outsiders' queries spoke repeatedly, even insistently, of the need to forgive.
The reason for the horror, most said, was beyond their ken, part of a design that God alone could understand. If the end had come so inexplicably early for the innocents slain, all were now in the hands of a loving creator. Some of the Amish admitted to their incomprehension of the wider American society beyond their own, where, as one farmer remarked to a reporter, children actually play video games in which the object is to kill simulated humans.
But to a person, they would not pass judgment on a world they know is fallen but is never beyond redemption. To judge would be prideful.
There is so much that other Americans can learn from the Amish, whether those Americans be believers or skeptics, liberals or conservatives, fundamentalists or modernists. One lesson for this age of terrorism-inspiring fundamentalisms is that religion itself is not the problem, even a faith deeply and fervently embraced. Although often inaccurately described as fundamentalists, the Amish, descendants of the 16th-century Anabaptists, do indeed take their Scriptures with a literalist zeal.
But that fervor is tempered by an overarching knowledge that mere error-prone sinners are in no way empowered with the authority to say how the Scriptures must be read and understood by others. Theirs is a community of like-minded believers. Yet even their children are allowed in their late teens to sample the outside world, to choose for themselves whether to embrace or reject the ways of the community.
The larger lesson imparted by Amish in their mourning is one of humility, a radical humility that is almost absent in a world that believes that all can be understood, explained, or solved. Just as the Amish think that it is necessary to subdue prideful individualism to live in harmony with others in their communities — a vivid contradiction to the dominant American ethos — so they hold that humans can do little to change the divinely ordained workings of the world.
We "English," as the Amish call all outsiders, need not embrace the extremity of such faith-guided acceptance to see the wisdom of sometimes acknowledging our very human limitations. In the instance of the recent horrors, we might even acknowledge that an overweening compulsion to control and fix the world might be part of the larger problem.
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