Only the Amish are Amish, (practically) Everyone Else is Modern

The Amish have thick communities in which members are not autonomous but are deeply embedded within a web of familial, religious, and economic relationships. The downside is that Amish is an identity that you can’t take to the suburbs and say have a desk job downtown at the bank and then practice your faith in Bible studies, family worship, and Sunday meetings. The upside is that you have lots of built-in support from a remarkably resilient community. For instance:

When a tornado destroys houses in an Amish community, neighbors come together, feed and shelter the victims, then help them rebuild what they have lost. Their charity not only testifies to the strength of their community; it constitutes it. For the Amish remain deeply committed to one another, and such commitments are the fabric of their communal life. The weave of this fabric is also evident when the victim is responsible for his own misfortune. For example, if one of them gets drunk, starts a fire, and accidentally burns down his own house, they will again come together to help, forgiving him in order to keep him within the community, but he will have to face them in person, knowing that he has burdened them with his sin. His restoration is not anonymous. It is both communal and moral.

This is relevant for considering the sort of Amish thinking that non-Amish bring to the debates and contests of modern social existence. Anne Applebaum compares Republicans to the French citizens who during occupation went along with the Vichy (Nazi) government:

It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.

Applebaum makes many more points of historical and political interest about parallels between the United States government under Trump and what transpired in Europe under Nazi rule (and war). Her point is not to compare Trump to Hitler but to raise a psychological point about what happens to Americans — especially Republicans and conservatives — who go along with a government official as corrupt as the current POTUS. That process numbs and changes a person’s convictions. Maybe so if they were living in an Amish community and a Trump-like figure emerged as the head of the clan.

From the other side of the spectrum comes John Piper’s advice to Christians about going along (becoming numb) to gay marriage. After establishing that the Bible forbids marriage between homosexuals, Piper then considers how to live with family members and church members who may disagree with the Bible, those who have been swept along by the culture and courts to think that gay marriage is acceptable. In the case of church members, Piper writes:

You’re a pastor and a church member affirms so-called “gay marriage.” Now what? Well, that’ll depend on your documents, won’t it? I mean, you could get yourself sued, which is OK if you’re doing the right thing. But you need to have in place documents that say what membership involves in these regards. There was nothing in our documents forty years ago that helped us navigate these things. But now there are, so that’s another one.

And so in general, the answer is that love will look different in different situations. Excommunication from the church is not unloving. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that church discipline is an unloving thing. So, adjust the form of love to the particularity of the relationship, and stand your ground.

Piper seems, from a very different starting point about conformity and resistance to cultural trends, to be in the same place as Applebaum. Both seem to think that modern persons at some level should think and act unilaterally about moral convictions in the way that the Amish follow communal norms. Maybe this can’t happen across the board, but when it comes to a specific controversy, election, or politician, the common argument by many is to call for some kind of moral or intellectual consistency. That logic does not help co-existing with people who do not share your version of consistency.

It seems odd that at this advanced stage of modernity for both zealous evangelicals and progressive academics to expect people living in liberal, democratic, pluralistic societies to be uniform in their personal, political, and social lives. As if, all of us do not have a certain set of standards for family life, others for the office, still others for church, and then the messy negotiations that come with living in a nation where a lot of people of different religions and convictions live. To go along with gay marriage in politics may not be a betrayal of the Bible because no Christian takes the Bible with him on all political considerations — otherwise, Christians would oppose the Super Bowl (as a departure from the Fourth Commandment). To live with President Trump may not be a form of acquiescence before a hostile and foreign power because respecting POTUS does not require agreeing with everything for which he stands. Meanwhile, silence about the president’s policies and tweets may be a necessary adjustment to keeping a full-time job, tending the garden, replacing the garbage disposal, and following COVID-19 statistics.

This is the internet, after all, a space completely foreign to the Amish.