Authors: Donald B. Kraybill,Steven M. Nolt,David L. Weaver-Zercher
The Amish Way (22 page)
Evil is a conundrum that every spiritual tradition faces. Is evil real or illusory? Is it produced by humans, supernatural forces, or a blend of both? Can evil be overcome, and if so, how? Drawing on the biblical text, the Amish have a clear sense that the world is not as God intended it to be, and they trace the roots of evil to the sin of rebellion. They see evil personified in the devil, or Satan, who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven before the creation of the world. Later, the devil tempted the first humans, Adam and Eve, to doubt God’s authority and become their own masters. As a result of their disobedience, Adam and Eve had to leave the perfect Garden of Eden, and life on earth has been plagued by sin ever since.
The Amish see evil as affecting everyone’s life, and they do not believe they are immune from sin or the suffering sin causes. Nor do they think that they can achieve moral perfection. Amish writing, soaked in the language of humility, accents human shortcomings and the need for divine pardon. “Is there an escape route [from evil]?” asks one Amish writer. “Yes, through Jesus Christ, repentance, and grace through faith.”
2
As we observed in Chapter Six, the
Gmay
and its rituals of confession and restoration offer an antidote to personal sin and a salve for its harmful effects.
2
As we observed in Chapter Six, the
Gmay
and its rituals of confession and restoration offer an antidote to personal sin and a salve for its harmful effects.
When faced with wrongdoing at the hands of others, the Amish believe they should not resist evil with evil. Their understanding of nonresistance comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye
resist not evil
: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. . . . Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:38-39, 44, emphasis added). This text, in which Jesus calls his followers to return good for evil, grounds Amish pacifism, their refusal to litigate, and their rejection of self-defense.
resist not evil
: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. . . . Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:38-39, 44, emphasis added). This text, in which Jesus calls his followers to return good for evil, grounds Amish pacifism, their refusal to litigate, and their rejection of self-defense.
“When we consider the example of Christ, we see that He expressed no revenge against his enemies,” insisted David Beiler, a nineteenth-century Amish bishop whose writings continue to carry great weight. Beiler was not bothered in the least by Bible stories that portray people engaged in warfare, seemingly with God’s blessing, since Christ’s example trumps everything. To Beiler, the scriptures made clear that Jesus “preferred to avoid confrontation, and He did not drag those who injured Him before a worldly court.”
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In similarly sharp language, the Dordrecht Confession declares, “Christ forbade and ruled out all revenge and retaliation.”
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In similarly sharp language, the Dordrecht Confession declares, “Christ forbade and ruled out all revenge and retaliation.”
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This theme of nonresistance appears frequently in children’s stories and school texts, often taking aim at what the Amish see as the natural aggression of men and boys. In one popular series of Amish-authored books, a boy named Benjie is teased by a boy named Enos. Benjie’s older brother tells him that “it takes a real man to stand up to mockery. Anyone can tease and mock, but not everyone can take it without fighting back. I know it’s hard to return good for evil, but God will help you.” Benjie resolved to “just smile and think, ‘you can tease me all you want, Enos, but I will still love you.’”
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The Amish response to evil entails a combination of silence, patience, and forgiveness. This response is grounded in their understanding of God’s providence.
Providence, the idea that God “unceasingly cares for the world, that all things are in God’s hands, and that God is leading the world to its appointed goal,” is a central affirmation of Christianity.
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How to mesh such a conviction with the reality of evil has long been a source of debate among Christians. Some resolve the dilemma by believing that God grants humans free will and does not stop them from acting on evil desires. Others hold that God sometimes allows evil things to happen for purposes that are not immediately obvious but are part of some greater long-term good in God’s big-picture plan. Still others argue that humans will never fully understand why bad things happen under God’s watch.
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How to mesh such a conviction with the reality of evil has long been a source of debate among Christians. Some resolve the dilemma by believing that God grants humans free will and does not stop them from acting on evil desires. Others hold that God sometimes allows evil things to happen for purposes that are not immediately obvious but are part of some greater long-term good in God’s big-picture plan. Still others argue that humans will never fully understand why bad things happen under God’s watch.
The Amish answer to the problem of evil is neither airtight nor entirely consistent from one person to the next. In our conversations with Amish people, they offered all three of the aforementioned answers. Nonetheless, their unwavering confidence in God’s providence inclines them toward the last two, leaving many questions unresolved. In the wake of the Nickel Mines tragedy, one Amish man told us, “I like to say a religion without mystery is like a wagon without wheels.”
This does not mean that Amish people passively accept without question whatever happens. They freely admit to struggling with questions, doubts, and injustice. In a story recounting an array of hardships in his life, an Ohio Amish man named John A. N. Troyer reported that forty years later he still couldn’t forget the evening when “a young boy in a car hit our buggy,” killing Troyer’s wife and son. “The days ahead looked dark to me,” Troyer recalled. Then, less than a year later, he had an accident at work and had to have his arm amputated at the shoulder. “I often wondered, ‘Why me?’”
Still, Troyer expresses typical Amish confidence that, despite his inability to understand why these things had happened, God understood. “Since we pray the Lord’s Prayer every day, and say ‘Thy will be done,’ we want to accept the way it is.”
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“Thy will be done” is one of the most common refrains in Amish life. Amish people submit themselves to God’s will, believing that the divine will is sometimes clear and sometimes impossible to discern. For example, a minister preaching a funeral sermon for one of the victims of the Amish school shooting said that it is not God’s will that people shoot one another, and in the same sermon suggested that the schoolgirls’ deaths were somehow part of God’s plan in a sense that humans might never fully understand.
In some cases, people find positive ways of understanding their pain without claiming to know any ultimate purpose behind it. Ada Borkholder, an Indiana Amish woman who contracted polio as a very young child writes, “I have often said if I had to have polio, then I am glad it was when I was young so I don’t remember being active.” She does not romanticize her suffering or claim that her condition served some greater good. She simply concludes, “Lord, Thy will be done.”
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Imagine a trial in which the defendants have decided to represent themselves. Imagine, then, that when it comes time for them to speak, they sit quietly, saying nothing at all. Nothing. They simply wait for the verdict.
The Amish commitment to silence as an expression of their belief in God’s providence sometimes takes such a form. Through the years, Amish parents charged with not sending their children to high school and young men facing draft boards often asked to speak in their own defense—and then offered no defense at all, only silence. In the late 1970s, when school authorities in Nebraska challenged the legitimacy of Amish schooling, the Amish in one area quietly moved away, citing the words of Jesus that those who are persecuted in one place should move on rather than fight (Matthew 10:23).
Silence exemplifies
Gelassenheit
—a person’s willingness to accept things without demanding an answer to why they happened the way they did. But silence is also an expression of nonresistance in a world that urges individuals to make themselves heard, a world in which political interest groups clamor to be the loudest voice in national debates. In contrast, the Amish note that Jesus mostly responded with silence when the Roman governor Pilate questioned him prior to his crucifixion (Matthew 27:11-14).
Gelassenheit
—a person’s willingness to accept things without demanding an answer to why they happened the way they did. But silence is also an expression of nonresistance in a world that urges individuals to make themselves heard, a world in which political interest groups clamor to be the loudest voice in national debates. In contrast, the Amish note that Jesus mostly responded with silence when the Roman governor Pilate questioned him prior to his crucifixion (Matthew 27:11-14).
Silence in Amish life “is an active force, not a sign of introspection,” observes anthropologist John A. Hostetler in his book
Amish Society
. “There is the silence of pacifism, of turning the other cheek, which reaches back to the martyrs and to Christ himself. . . . When confused by a bureaucrat, outwitted by a regulation, or cursed by an outsider, the Amish person answers with silence.” Ultimately, silence is “a way of living and forgiving, a way of embracing the community with charity and the offender with affection.”
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Amish Society
. “There is the silence of pacifism, of turning the other cheek, which reaches back to the martyrs and to Christ himself. . . . When confused by a bureaucrat, outwitted by a regulation, or cursed by an outsider, the Amish person answers with silence.” Ultimately, silence is “a way of living and forgiving, a way of embracing the community with charity and the offender with affection.”
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This same disposition lies at the root of Amish refusal to participate in labor unions, which they see as coercive and demanding. “It is true that labor unions came into being because employers abused their authority,” explains an Amish guidebook, and “labor unions, by giving a voice . . . to employees, served to correct this injustice.” But a combative voice is not one the Amish want speaking for them. Instead, the church urges silence in the face of injustice: “We need to be willing to suffer.”
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That is not to say that Amish people have no sense of justice. In the aforementioned children’s story about Benjie, the author conveys the character’s honest feelings when he finds himself the butt of Enos’s jokes: “Now Benjie was very angry. . . . More than anything else, he wanted to knock Enos down and sit on him. He wanted to shake Enos until his teeth rattled.”
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The Amish way, however, is to turn such concerns for fairness and justice away from noisy protests and loud calls for revenge and toward the divine command to forgive.
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The Amish way, however, is to turn such concerns for fairness and justice away from noisy protests and loud calls for revenge and toward the divine command to forgive.
A week before the Amish school shooting in Nickel Mines, a twelve-year-old Amish boy in the same area was killed in a hit-and-run accident.
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He had been riding his scooter on the way to help his neighbors milk their cows when a pickup truck struck him, hit a fence post, and sped away. A newspaper reporter visited the boy’s family the next day, and his mother conveyed a message to the driver of the truck: “She should come here. We would like to see her. We hold nothing against her.” When the driver read the mother’s words in the newspaper article, she went to visit the family and received their words of forgiveness. Over the next several weeks, she visited the family three more times.
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He had been riding his scooter on the way to help his neighbors milk their cows when a pickup truck struck him, hit a fence post, and sped away. A newspaper reporter visited the boy’s family the next day, and his mother conveyed a message to the driver of the truck: “She should come here. We would like to see her. We hold nothing against her.” When the driver read the mother’s words in the newspaper article, she went to visit the family and received their words of forgiveness. Over the next several weeks, she visited the family three more times.
Such a forgiving response is bewildering to most outsiders. Yet when the larger world expressed surprise at the grace extended after the school shooting, the Amish were surprised in return, wondering why people were making such a fuss over the act of forgiveness. Although Amish people understand that forgiveness is often difficult, they do not view it as unnatural or strange. As a practice of
uffgevva
, it fits comfortably within the wider pattern of Amish life. It does, however, place the Amish in bold contrast to many outsiders who see giving up
any
rights, including a justified right to anger or revenge, as abnormal.
uffgevva
, it fits comfortably within the wider pattern of Amish life. It does, however, place the Amish in bold contrast to many outsiders who see giving up
any
rights, including a justified right to anger or revenge, as abnormal.
As with so many other aspects of their lives, the Amish understand forgiveness to be a form of giving up—giving up bitterness and the right to revenge and replacing them with loving feelings and even acts of compassion toward the offender. Interviews with Amish people who have suffered grievous wrongs reveal that they are hardly sentimental about forgiveness. They understand that the process is often difficult and note that Jesus said that even minor infractions must be forgiven “seventy times seven,” implying that forgiveness takes time and is often marked by failures along the way.
Yet they have no doubt that forgiving is the right thing to do. In fact, they are so certain of its necessity that they can state their commitment to forgive even before they fully feel that way, offering compassionate words and actions with confidence that loving emotions will follow. “Forgiveness stretches out over time,” said one mother. “But you have to start out with the will to forgive. But the bitterness may reenter your mind from time to time, and then you have to think about forgiveness again.”
With characteristic humility, Amish people can recount stories of failed forgiveness and grudges that have plagued an individual or family for years. But such accounts are stark reminders of how destructive bitterness can be, and reinforce the necessity of forgiveness for the forgiver’s own well-being. Speaking from experience, one man explained that “the acid of hate destroys the container that holds it.” An Amish minister, writing in the magazine
Family Life
, says, “The stress and wear and tear of bottling up a grudge can be hard on both mind and body,” and “we are hurting nobody more than we are hurting ourselves if we don’t keep our forgiving up to date.” He concludes, “God has good reason for telling us not to let the sun go down upon our wrath. . . . we are to wipe our slates clean of all unforgiving grudges toward others every day.”
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Family Life
, says, “The stress and wear and tear of bottling up a grudge can be hard on both mind and body,” and “we are hurting nobody more than we are hurting ourselves if we don’t keep our forgiving up to date.” He concludes, “God has good reason for telling us not to let the sun go down upon our wrath. . . . we are to wipe our slates clean of all unforgiving grudges toward others every day.”
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At the crux of it, Amish people are convinced that forgiving is the way to respond to evil because Jesus commanded it. Time and again, they point to the Lord’s Prayer and its words about forgiveness, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12), as the reason to forgive. They point out that forgiveness is the only part of the prayer that Jesus underscores, telling his disciples, “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15).
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