Growing Up Amish: The Rumspringa Years

Chapter Two: Religion: Transmitting the Faith

[ Chapter Two { Religion Transmitting the Faith I remember the day when I was baptized. I felt clean as a whistle. —Amish grandfather A Faith-Filled Community Although most standard texts on adolescent development devote little attention to religious practices and faith issues, any study of Amish youth that neglects this subject would be seriously deficient. Much has been written to describe Amish worship rituals and beliefs, but little attention has been directed to moral or spiritual development, the transmission of faith to the young, and the religious practices of the youth.1 Most young people, no matter how neglectful or wayward, would agree with the words of an elderly bishop: “Our faith is at the heart of Amish life, the foundation on which we seek to build our relationships, vocations, family, and communal life. If anyone fails to understand that, they will never really understand who we are and what we are about.” A non-Amish observer accustomed to the compartmentalizing of secular and religious life might assume that in the highly structured Amish society, every facet of community life rigorously instructs and enforces the tenets of 26 [ Growing Up Amish { the Amish faith. Outsiders might expect Amish practices to resemble the extremism of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound or Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Actually, for a religious culture that strives to leave nothing to chance or to the outside world, Amish communities provide relatively little formal religious instruction in the home or even in Amish schools. As David Weaver-Zercher has observed, faith within the Amish community is more caught than taught. It is part of their “habits of the heart.” Amish parents admonish their children and youth to obey God and their parents, revere the scriptures, recognize God as the creator and sustainer of life, and submit themselves to Christ and the teachings of the Bible. Amish mothers are often the chief readers of Bible stories, and other stories with moral lessons, to their young children.2 In most communities, however, formal religious instruction occurs only after the youth, usually in their late teens, have expressed their intention to join the church. Prior to that, according to Donald B. Kraybill and Carl F. Bowman, “religion is not formally taught in the school or in other Amish settings.”3 Formal instruction in the faith occurs only during the eighteen-week preparatory class for church membership. Youth and Worship Although church leaders do not adapt the traditional forms and practices of the Amish faith to the interest level or preferences of the young, an estimated 85 percent choose to join the church and remain Amish for life.4 Nor does the church employ age-appropriate curricula, junior church, or interactive instruction. Infants, children, and youth sit through adult-centered services, along with their grandparents, parents, siblings, and neighbors. They sing the same songs and hear the same sermons as the adults. Moreover , everyone expects the young to sit quietly through a long, thoroughly predictable, adult-oriented worship service. A bishop observed, “The reason there are so many good archery hunters among the Amish is because they are used to sitting still for three hours in church.” As a further challenge, all hymns, prayers, and scriptures are written in sixteenth-century High German, the language Martin Luther used to trans- [ Religion: Transmitting the Faith { 27 late the Bible. Since the Amish never use this idiom in daily discourse, the youth face a challenge similar to that of mainstream youth listening to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. “When I was younger,” a man recalled, “I had to concentrate so hard to understand High German that I would eventually give up and start to think about the upcoming Phillies’ game in the afternoon.” A twenty-five-year-old man admitted, “Our family sometimes reads the Bible at home in English, but in church I understand very little of the scripture readings and hymns.” When asked how members learn the older form of German, he replied that most absorb it throughout their adult years.5 Ministers preach in the Pennsylvania German vernacular, their first language , but the two customary sermons may last nearly an hour and a half, which is beyond the attention span of many adults, let alone children and youth. In the plainest settlements, some ministers still exhort attendees in an old-fashioned singsong or chantlike style, rarely establishing eye contact with the faithful. A few...