Amish Culture

This book addresses the relationship between religion and knowledge from a sociological perspective, taking both religion and knowledge as phenomena located within ever changing social contexts. It builds on historical foundations, but offers a distinctive focus on the changing status of religious phenomena at the turn of the twenty-first century. Including critical engagement with live debates about intelligent design and the ‘new atheism’, this collection of essays brings recent research on religious movements into conversation with debates about socialisation, reflexivity and the changing capacity of social institutions to shape human identities. Contributors examine religion as an institutional context for the production of knowledge, as a form of knowledge to be transmitted or conveyed and as a social field in which controversies about knowledge emerge.

Revivals of the 1950s and 60s spawned a movement of spiritual and practical change within the Amish community of Lancaster County, PA. Out of those changes came an unusual Amish gang called the Goodies. They were thus named because of refusing to engage with their old friends in the Amish tradition of Rumspringa. This article describes the beginnings of the Goodie gang and the consequential divisions that sprang out of this movement, including four new Amish-Mennonite congregations in Lancaster County. In conclusion, the paper reflects on some mission activity spawned by those within the Goodie gang in the years following.

INTRODUCTION: The Amish are a rapidly growing, North American Christian denomination that descends from the 16th-century Anabaptist movement in Germanic Europe. Because of their conspicuous socioreligious practices, the Amish have been of interest to social scientists, medical and genetic researchers, and linguists. This entry includes a brief overview of Amish history and demographics in the United States. It continues with a description of Amish beliefs and practices and the interest the community holds for social science researchers.

History: The Amish formed in the late 1600s as an Anabaptist branch in the Swiss–German–French border region. These were a new wave of converts who challenged the established Swiss Brethren (Mennonite) churches’ laxity toward the Dordrecht religious articles agreed on with the Dutch Mennonites in 1632. Points of difference included the ...

While there has been a good deal of publicity given to the Amish communities in the United State as a tourist attraction, little attention if any, focuses on the social problems they face as a community. Just like other subcultures, the Amish experience social problems being youth deviance as the most common among them. By answering my research question, I planned to support how some Amish practices like Rumspringa and shunning have a significant negative effect on the Amish youth. Criminological theory could help explain the nature of conformity and deviance among the Amish youth. The evidence suggest the Rumspringa period provides the perfect setting for the Amish youth to engage in unprotected sex, drink alcohol, and in most of the cases, consume illegal substances. The Rumspringa period and the contemplation of shunning during this period produces high levels of anxiety and depression, and feeling of isolation; which could lead to suicide. Qualitative, historical and geographical evidence previously gathered is used trough out this paper to develop a socio-cultural critique supporting the argument some Amish Rule of Order practices such as the Rumspringa and shunning have a significant negative effect on the Amish youth.

This article examines Beverly Lewis’s highly popular trilogy The Heritage of Lancaster County, a series often cited as inspiring the Amish romance novel trend. Although Lewis did not invent the Amish romance, the high visibility that her work enjoys in the media, and the conventional wisdom that she was the first to develop the genre, means that subsequent novels are necessarily responding to and adapting Lewis’s texts. Looking at Lewis’s trilogy as a foundational text, this article analyzes the ways in which it draws on Gothic conventions to perform evangelical cultural work (to use Jane Tompkins’s phrase). Considering the trilogy as a Gothic text within the context of Christian publishing highlights the ways in which it functions as an extension of evangelical outreach: the narratives both celebrate Amish community values and adherence to tradition while using Gothic tropes of confinement and escape to emphasize the idea that the Amish are narrow-minded and overly rigid. Ultimately, this article argues that Lewis’s novels use the Gothic to argue that the antidote to Amish rigidity is evangelicalism.

Revivals of the 1950s and 60s spawned a movement of spiritual and practical change within the Amish community of Lancaster County, PA. Out of those changes came an unusual Amish gang called the Goodies. They were thus named because of refusing to engage with their old friends in the Amish tradition of Rumspringa. This article describes the beginnings of the Goodie gang and the consequential divisions that sprang out of this movement, including four new Amish-Mennonite congregations in Lancaster County. In conclusion, the paper reflects on some mission activity spawned by those within the Goodie gang in the years following.

As the Amish population is growing, researcher and practitioner interest in the Amish health culture is also growing. This is largely due to demand from practitioners for population-specific cultural guidance. Once a small area of study, health-themed publications in Amish studies (n = 246) now account for approximately one-fourth of all peer-reviewed publications, and a sizeable percentage address the health culture, i.e. Amish beliefs, practices, attitudes, decision-making processes, financing, and values. In this article, we provide a first-ever exhaustive narrative review of the Amish health culture literature (addressing Amish health conditions elsewhere). Specifically, we address Amish use of modern medicine, complementary & alternative medicine, cultural norms for birthing and intercourse, support and care for the sick and aged, health knowledge, payment for services, barriers to service access, service provider effectiveness, health programming, and ethical conflicts. Our goal is to organize the literature, synthesize findings, identify orienting perspectives, and clarify research questions and directions. Following our synthesis, we reflect on the current state of Amish health culture research, drawing particular attention to strengths and limitations of the oft-used cultural competency paradigm, and recommending more rigorous social scientific theorization of the Amish health culture.

As an ethnic religion, the Amish are of interest to population health researchers due to a distinctive health profile arising from ethnic attributes, including a closed genetic pool and shared culture that shapes lifestyle practices. Amish-focused health research both furthers our knowledge of health conditions by comparing Amish with non-Amish and assists health practitioners in serving this rapidly growing population. Amish health research, now representing approximately a quarter of all Amish-focused publications, is in need of review, to the end of strengthening this knowledge body’s coherence, clarifying research directions, and identifying knowledge gaps, lapses, and stagnations. Herein, we synthesize and discuss Amish physical health conditions research, both the population’s distinctive health profile and mechanisms shaping this profile. Specifically, we summarize research addressing BMI, physical activity, and body image; diet and supplements; cancer; cardiovascular conditions; communicable diseases; immunity; sleep; genetic disorders; tobacco and alcohol use; periodontal conditions; traumatic injuries; natural treatments for burns; fertility; and sexually transmitted diseases. In reflection, we raise questions about the nature of intervening mechanisms shaping the Amish health profile, the strange omission of several common independent variables commonly used when studying other ethnic groups’ health, several recurring methodological complications, and public health policy considerations.

Why do the North American Amish maintain high fertility when surrounding populations have nearly all completed the demographic transition? Using the same theoretical predictors and methods as a 1996 Population Studies paper, we explore fertility changes, specifically changes in mean parity, between 1988 and 2015 among one sizeable Amish population in Ohio. Findings suggest that wealth flow shifts (as measured by a decline in farming families) and institutional changes (reflected in Amish denominational gradations) help to explain a decline in mean parity from 5.3 to 4.85, while ideological pronatalism (represented by higher fertility among church leaders) helps to explain why fertility has not been more responsive to structural incentives to limit family size. While this restudy confirms the trend of a slow decline in Amish fertility, it also invites a more methodologically expansive inquiry into Amish fertility patterns.

Multiculturalism gives preference to group rights over individual rights. This may challenge democratic values. This paper focuses on the Amish denial of education from their adolescents. Criticizing Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the paper analyses the power of the Amish community over its members. The main questions are: Is it reasonable to deny the Amish adolescents' standard American education? What are the limits of state interference in norms of illiberal communities who invoke separatism as a mechanism of cultural and religious preservation?

Using two examples of cross-cultural interaction, this paper examines how periods of cultural exchange have influenced quiltmaking practices. American quilts with clear links to Eastern cultures echo the larger patterns of economic and cultural trade between Asia and the West during the past several centuries. Beginning with the use of Asian-produced or Asian-influenced fabrics in the eighteenth century, American quiltmakers have frequently looked to the "exotic" East for design inspiration. The distinctive Old Order Amish quilt style exhibits clear tied to "English" (non-Amish) quiltmaking techniques, patterns, and formats. Amish quilts support the assertion that Amish culture is continually influenced by and reacting to larger American or "English" society. During the current quiltmaking revival, cultural exchange has again had an impact; Japanese quiltmakers have adopted American quilt styles, adapting them to create a distinct Japanese artform, while "English" quiltmakers and quilt collectors have embraced the Amish quilt aesthetic.

Feminist ethnographic methods stress the role of empathy for research subjects and researchers’ willingness for their work to be useful to their subjects. When the research subjects are “unloved groups,” though—people whose actions or beliefs are hateful or harmful—some ethnographers argue that such empathy and empowerment is misplaced or leads to uncritical scholarship. In this reflection on the author’s ethnographic study of Westboro Baptist Church, a small Kansas-based congregation infamous for preaching its anti-gay theology at funerals, including the funerals of fallen servicemen and -women, she questions the usefulness of denying an emotional connection with “hatemongers.” Instead, she argues for compassion for both the victims and, more challengingly, the
perpetrators of hate in order to protect researchers from the threat of desensitization.

Co-edited with Anselm Schubert and Astrid von Schlachta. Includes essays by (in the order they appear in the volumes) Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Astrid von Schlachta, Ellen Yetzy Glebe, Alejandro Zorzin, Gary K. Waite, Adam W. Darlage, C. Arnold Snyder, Urs Leu, Päivi Räisänen, Mathilde Monge, Martin Rothkegel, Thomas Kaufmann, Katharina Reinholdt, Marion Kobelt-Groch, Ralf Klötzer, Victor Thiessen, Piet Visser, James Stayer, Anselm Schubert, John D. Roth, and Michael Driedger.

(downloadable file includes table of contents, introduction, and 4 short concluding essays)