Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia

CHAPTER 1. Who Are the Amish?

:฀฀chapter 1฀฀; Who Are the Amish? The hurrier I go, the behinder I get. —Amish folk wisdom, printed on a coffee mug B y now, most Americans know something about the Amish. They knowthattheAmishareadistinctivereligioussectwhosemembers wear plain clothes, drive horse-drawn buggies, and have peculiar views about violence and forgiveness. Americans are familiar with these aspects of Amish life largely because of media coverage of the West Nickel Mines shooting in 2006, the UPN reality show Amish in the City (2004), and the Cinemax documentary Devil’s Playground (2003), as well as fictional accounts of Amish life in films like Amish Grace (2010), For Richer or Poorer (1997), and Witness (1985). Of course, the degree of accuracy in these media representations of the Amish varies widely. A clearer picture of Amish origins, history, and contemporary life, based in the scholarship of Amish studies, will make it easier to see how Amish Country tourism draws upon Amish culture in its appeals to tourists. Amish Origins The Amish locate their origins in Europe during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. At that time, the Middle Ages were drawing to a close and the Enlightenment was just about to dawn. It was the time of the Protestant Reformation, during which people of intense religious conviction , like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, posed historic challenges to the theology, unity, and authority of the Catholic Church. One of the most important challenges that the Protestant Reformers made to the Catholic 4฀ :฀selling the amish ;฀ Church involved the assertion that religious authority rests in Scripture alone. Working from this idea of “sola scriptura,” Luther argued that the Bible should be translated from Latin into the vernacular, so that anyone could read it. Now his argument seems both obvious and harmless, but in his time Luther’s argument constituted a major blow to the structure, practices, and authority of the church.1 For centuries, lay people had been unable to read the Bible because it waswritteninalanguagetheydidnotknow.Asaresult,theywereobliged to take their understanding of it from clerics, who had been trained by the church to interpret the Bible in certain ways. When Luther argued that the Bible should be made accessible to any literate person, and when he later translated it himself into German, things began to change. By enabling lay people to read and, therefore, make their own meaning of the Bible, Luther and other Reformers created the possibility for multiple interpretations of God’s word. But the Reformers did not just make the Bible more accessible. They also urged all Christians to become full participants in the project of figuring out what God was saying and what God’s word meant for Christians. Embracing this call, many earnest Christians developed new interpretations of Scripture and became committed to them. Not surprisingly, their interpretations varied not only from those of the Catholic Church but also from one another. Thus, new versions of Christianity began to emerge, and Protestantism, in all its fascinating and bewildering diversity, was born.2 TheReformationtransformedthelandscapeofChristianfaithandpractice dramatically. Still, some Christians thought that the Reformation had not gone far enough. They came to be known as the Radical Reformers. According to them, the early church was the true church of Jesus Christ because it fearlessly proclaimed the Gospel and was persecuted for doing so. In contrast to the early church, they argued, the sixteenth-century church (in both its Catholic and Reformed varieties) was not persecuted and remained closely tied to the state.3 According to the Radical Reformers , no church could truly follow Jesus Christ if it was in any way structurally connected to the state. They therefore called for separating church and state. By the time of the Reformation, the church had been officially connected to the state for well over eleven centuries. Indeed, it was in 380 CE that Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman ฀ :฀who are the amish? ;฀ 5 Empire. When Theodosius brought the church under the protection of the state, the Radicals argued, the church ceased to be the true church of Jesus Christ. This was so, they reasoned, because once the church became dependent on the state for its protection, it also came under the control of the state, thus forfeiting its power to tell the truth to and about the state Worse yet, the Radical Reformers continued, within a relatively short period of time the church became the primary means for legitimating the...