What Fighting for Your Religious Freedom Looks Like

Anger, fear, and resentment are wonderful ways to motivate and radicalize a constituency.  And so there's an episode in our history, long forgotten to most of America, that's on my mind as the political umbrage machine finds reasons to stir our fears this season.

One of the major rallying cries for this upcoming election is this: Religious freedom is threatened.  How?  Well, there's an anecdote here, and a snopes-fail story there, but really?  All that matters is that people are riled up enough to feel motivated.

And sure, there are real threats to the freedom of religious practice elsewhere.  In China, for example, where churches are forced to close for just being churches.  Or in the Middle East, where being Christian means you may be tortured and beheaded.  Our self-aggrandizing sense of "oppression" is an embarrassment to the faith, a mockery of the very real crosses borne by Christ followers around the world.

"Tyranny?"  Lord help us, we have no idea what that means, although the folks who are manipulating our fears would be happy to show us, I'm sure.

That's not to say that religious freedom hasn't been challenged before in the United States.  It has. When that's happened, though, and when it was resisted, what did that look like?

What does defending your religious freedom look like in a constitutional republic, when it's genuinely at risk?

For that, my research into the dynamics and lives of the Old Order Amish for my forthcoming novel surfaced an interesting case.  There was a time, in the mid-20th century, when the Amish were jailed for their beliefs.  It was the era when public education was increasingly a national priority.  The United States was in the midst of the Cold War, and them Russkies were edumacating their young 'uns up real good.

If we didn't develop a new generation of scientists and mathematicians and engineers, the Red Menace would overtake us with their Sputniks and their Soyuzes and their ICBMs.  Next thing you know, we'd be singing the Internationale, watching terrible propaganda musicals, and being herded into interminable performances of abstract dance at the Bolshoi.

So STEM education was the rule of the day, and everyone needed to be on board.  School was mandatory.

But a group of Wisconsin Amish refused to send their kids to school past eighth grade, on religious grounds.  They were conservative Christian agrarian/craftsman pacifists, and they wanted to educate their children to be part of their community.  They had nothing against literacy, because the Amish were and are avid readers and writers.  They had nothing against math, in so far as you need some math to run a farm or a small business or a household.

But the rest of modern-era public higher education was preparing their children for an economy in which they did not want to participate, an economy that was antithetical to their faith.   So they refused.

Their children simply didn't show up to class.  Or, if forced to go to class, they'd flee into the cornfields.  Amish parents were accused of encouraging truancy, of subverting the American way with their backwards ignorance.  Charges were filed.  The Amish held their ground.

Amish elders were jailed, repeatedly, for breaking the law of the land.  They maintained their position, relentlessly and peacefully, with the stubborn gentleness of that movement.

Ultimately, they won.  In 1972, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the Old Order Amish, in a landmark decision establishing the rights of parents to see to the education of their young ones.

But there's a detail in there, one that the current self-absorbed hullabaloo about religious freedom willfully ignores.  The Amish were only interested in defending their way of life.

They were not, in any way, imposing their way of life on others.

Let me repeat that, because that's the part we seem confused about:

They were not, in any way, imposing their way of life on others.

I'd bold it and put it in all-caps, but hopefully, that point has been gotten across.

What we "English" do did not matter to them.  They had their way, their path, their Ordnung.  Others were not expected to live by it, not coerced by the power of the state into living according to their rules.

Now, I'm a fan of public education.  Is it perfect?  No, of course not.  But it's a good thing, a public good, something that makes our nation better.  Smarter.  Stronger.  Faster.  Nonetheless, I can respect both the Amish position and the way in which they went about defending their inalienable rights.

In a democratic republic, where your neighbor's freedom matters as much as your own, they showed us how defending religious liberty is done.

The Church that Fights the Tide

Christianity is in retreat in America, falling back and away, or so says whatever Pew study that American Jesus people are wringing their hands about lately.

The old liners are continuing to fade, of course.  Declining and talking about decline is just what we do.

But even the Big Box Churches of AmeriChrist, Inc. are waning, despite their evangelical fervor and seeker-hungry marketing savvy.  It's an across the board retrenchment, one that should be troubling for any who think the spread of the Way is a good thing.

But as with every trend, there are outliers, communities that have within themselves alternate dynamics that make them buck against the tide.

For years, I've studied such a community, most recently as part of the research for my last novel. 

It's a Christian denomination that has grown ferociously over the last two decades, doubling in size.  The trend-lines, for those who study that community, look really really good.

The sect is, of course, the Amish.

They're bucking the trend, radically so.  There were around 100,000 Amish folk in the late 1980s, when I first studied them as part of my undergraduate Religion program at the University of Virginia. As of three years ago, there were 251,000 Amish folk.  They're on track to have nearly half-a-million within the next two decades.  At which point, given trends, they may outnumber the Presbyterians in my old-line denomination.  Perhaps we'll wave to one another as we pass.

Why? Why are they growing, as all around them more conventional Christianity struggles?  There are many reasons, but I'll highlight three:

Reason One:  The Amish Reproduce.
To our traditional alliterative Amish image of beards and barns, bonnets and buggies, we need to add "babies."  The Amish have lots and lots of babies.  Large families remain a positive asset when you're farming the land using traditional methods.  They don't wring their hands about how to pay for college, because the Amish don't go to college.  They don't  worry about how to coordinate all of that anxiety-parenting soccer and karate and test-prep, because they don't do that, either.  

The Amish do not helicopter, or fret about the ROI on their children.  They just have kids--on average, six or seven--who help out around the farm or business.

This is a real part of their growth, one that isn't "replicable," as they say.  I mean, sure, I could propose that to my church, but somehow I think that'd go over so well.   "My plan for growing this church is that you all start having more babies right now!"  There'd be laughter, right up until they knew I was serious, at which point I'd need to hone my skills in retail.

But there is an irony here that does not escape me.  The Christians who buy into the idea that evolution is just the way God works tend not to procreate.  The Amish, who don't?  Their social structure and set of expectations is more robust, from a strictly Darwinian standpoint.  Go figure.

Babies aren't where that ends, though.  Because babies grow up.

Reason Two:  Amish Kids Become Amish Adults.
One of the most striking features of Amish community is just how little attrition occurs as their children grow to adulthood.   Unlike Catholicism, which produces plenty of ex-Catholics, the Amish have an astoundingly high retention rate.  Depending on the study, between 85 and 95% of Amish children choose to be Amish adults.

This is not because the Amish try to be "relevant" and "young" in their worship services.  They couldn't care less about appealing to kids.  Their worships are long and traditional and unrelenting.  They do not hire hippity-happenin' youth pastors.  And yet there the stat is.  They succeed, wildly, at engaging their young people in community in such a way that they choose to remain.

It is also not because their kids are unaware of the outside world.  Rumspringa, the Amish version of confirmation, actively encourages disengaging from the church for a while and experiencing the world.   And yet a significant majority choose to stay.

Why is this?  Because the entire goal of Amish childhood is to become an Amish adult.  In point of fact, that's the totality of how they orient their children's upbringing.  You're preparing your children to be a farmer or craftsman, a mother or a father.  Period.

And sure, we might cluck at that approach, finding it more than a wee bit claustrophobic and slightly oppressive.  How stifling!  How crushing of the human spirit, to not let our kids be anything they want to be!

But as we do so, we have to ask ourselves: does our culture create paths of life-giving meaning and identity for our children?  Does our economy--meaning the way we structure our life together--give them a sense of belonging, of place, of purpose?

Hah.

More pointedly: does our congregational culture do that?  Really?

And there lies the third strength of Amish identity.

Reason Three:  Clearly Countercultural Economy.
Christians of all flavors like to claim that they stand in tension with the culture.  We leftist oldliners tend to articulate that in terms of our orientation to justice.  The evangelicals assert it as a radical commitment to growth and the spread of the Gospel.  The fundamentalists focus on bible-belief and nation.

But honestly?  The Amish show the lie of our claims.  Can I claim to be countercultural, living in my suburban home, facebooking and tweeting my critiques of culture?  No, I can't.  I depend utterly on culture.  I am embedded in it.

So are you, if you're reading this.

Can the evangelicals who grasp at every cultural trend to further the marketing of their message make that claim?  No.  The medium of consumer culture seeps into their message, and when the medium is itself culturally shaped, it makes spreading a countercultural message difficult.

Can the fundamentalists who fuse their rigid literalism with nationalism, wrapping themselves in both the Bible and the flag?  No.  The blending of Christian faith and the state has always been a betrayal of the message of Jesus, and fundamentalism is just modern-era empiricism applied to the texts of Scripture.

Can the progressive Christian left, which so adopts the language of academic leftism that it can't meaningfully distinguish its own voice from whatever #tropes are #trending on #twitter?  No.  No it can't.

But the Amish?  They are counterculture.  They teach and live nonviolent agrarian counterculture in every aspect of their existence.   Theirs is not a perfect society, and I don't view them through rose-colored utopian glasses.  The Amish are very human, with all of the foibles of humankind.

But the model of life they offer is both faithful and radically distinct.

They do not rely on or mimic the oikonomia of the world.  They have created their own economy, intentionally self-sustaining and separate.  In some ways, it is arguably superior and more robust.

It is not a community that creates anxiety within its members, that sets them against one another.  Their economy is not red in tooth and claw, with a handful of victors and a scrambling mass of losers.   Their economy does not shift wildly on the whims of the powerful.  It does no violence, not just in its pacifism, but in its attitude towards those in times of need.

There is a clear choice, for those who are part of their faith and their community.  You can live like the world--like the English.  Or you can can be the Plain Folk.

And for now, the Plain Folk are trending in ways that the rest of us are not.

The Most Effective Church Youth Program In the World

There's a common refrain among oldline congregations and evangelical nondenominational types, and it runs like this:

We just can't hold on to our kids.  This is hardest among the oldliners, where college is pretty consistently the place where our progeny go off to vanish forever from the church.  But it's a challenge for the Jesus MegaCenter brand of Christianity, too.

The answer, as we tend to pitch it, is to make ourselves ever more "relevant."  We bring in screens and apps and software.  We hire young hipster youth pastors.  We awkwardly attempt to rap in worship, or do hippity hop, or whatever it is the whippersnappers are listening to these days.  We're extreeeemee, or we were, until that wasn't part of the lingo.  We make ourselves as much like pop culture as we can, scrambling to drop references that keep pace with the choking cornucopia of consumer-culture mythmaking.  And for all of the lipstick we slap on that pig, we still bleed out.

The kids look at the permeable, seemingly irrelevant boundaries of the oldline, or the synthetic corporate falseness of market-driven faith, and they wander away.

I've wondered, of the forms of Christian faith, what church does this the best?  Who holds on to their pups?  Who sustains commitment?  Where do they stick around and remain part of the community?

Lord help us, I think I may have found it. 

I was doing due-diligence research for my novel (postapocalyptic Amish literary fiction, as it happens), and there it was.  It was a little stat, buried in Donald Kraybill's excellent, thorough sociological study of the Old Order Amish in Lancaster County, PA.  The willfully irrelevant Amish, with their beards and bonnets, buggies and barnraisings? 

Their retention rate is around 94%.

Ninety four percent.  Register that.  Only six percent of Amish young folk choose to leave the church.  This, in a community that actually encourages its young folks to get out there and sample the world as part of their process of choosing to remain, a peculiar "unconfirmation" process.  There is no less culturally connected, less cutting-edge faith group in the US, and they win the retention race.

The why of this is complex, but seems to revolve around several factors.

First, the Amish live out a radically wholistic, unprogrammed faith.  Their practice bears absolutely no resemblance to the big stadium corporate approach of AmeriChrist, Inc.  They don't divvy folks up into demographics, carefully dividing out their worship and church life by age and preference.  It's just all one thing.  But they also integrate their faith completely into every last aspect of their lives.  Why are we living this way?  Because of what we believe.  Clothing.  Housing.  Work.  All of it, manifest in the dynamics of their every day existence.  It is, as they say, "authentic."  What it is not is corporate, or driven by marketing sparkle.  The Amish are not a business.  They couldn't care less about growth.  And yet they are growing, slowly, surely, in the way that compound interest grows.

Second, the Amish create a powerful community culture. There's a clear, bright, and evident character of Amish faith.  It requires and maintains a deep level of commitment, with boundaries around the dynamics of group culture that are potent.  Their folkways present an entirely different story than the story of the world outside.  The demands on members are intense, sustained, complete.  It is, in the most profound sense of the word, countercultural.  In that sense, the Amish present a clear deliniation between participation and nonparticipation.   There is none of the oldline waffling about other ways being just as good.  This is who we are, they say.  This is not who we are.

Third, the Amish teach their young to be adult members of the community.  That is all they teach them.  If you are raised Amish, that's what you know. Kids learn, early, that they're expected to be a part of it.   Not just expected.  They are a part it.  Amish life, which revolves around faith, assumes that the young participate in every facet of youth life as soon as they are able.   Work, worship, community and home life, all engage the young.  Oh, they have youth groups, sure.  They call them "gangs."  There is no adult in charge, no youth pastor who oversees them.  They're free-ranging, organic subcommunities, self-organizing informal teen fraternities and sororities.  But even in that, they are preparing for their free-will engagement in a small, relational community.

It ain't perfect.  The Amish are quite painfully human.  The expectations they set for community participation, and around the patterns of their lives?  They'd feel oppressive to many of us, like the radical disciplines of a demanding pre-modern monastic order.  And it meshes badly with modernity, the demands of modern life, and pluralistic values.

But it works.

God help us, does it ever work.

Amish Fiction is Apocalyptic Fiction

All Amish literature is apocalyptic literature.

On the face of it, that might seem like an odd thing to say.  We like reading both, if you look at the books out there.  But we don't see them as related.

When you think of apocalyptic stories, they tend to involve craggy, laconic men in tattered leather garb wandering through a blasted wasteland.  There are zombies. And asteroids.  And pandemic plagues.  Or some combination thereof.

When we think of Amish fiction, we do not visualize these things.  We see pastel paperback covers, involving bonnets and beards and buggies.  Inside those covers, we expect chaste romance, and the gentle human drama of a slower and less frenetic life.  Amish fiction, if it had a smell, would smell nothing like the sweat, blood, and hormones of other adult fiction.  It's got the fragrance of warm rhubarb pie and the rich dirt of your garden under your nails.  It's why I'd get a bit of a snicker whenever I'd tell friends and church folk what I was writing.

"What kind of book is it," they'd ask.

"Postapocalyptic Amish fiction," I'd say, because it was true.

And there'd come that smile.  Oh, you crazy pastor.

But if you have a sense of who the Amish are, and why they are, and what the word "apocalypse" means, it becomes a little clearer.

The Amish are primordial Baptists, the Protestant equivalent of one of those strange prehistoric fish they'll find now and again in deep ocean waters.  They get their name from Jakob Ammann, a semi-literate seventeenth century Swiss farmer.  From the few records we have of his life, he appears to have been a fairly hard-nosed human being, who felt that strict adherence to the teachings of the Bible was the only way to live.

Ammann was a big advocate of shunning--meaning not associating with folks who did not do exactly and to the letter what the Bible told them to do.  He favored long, uncut beards, and vigorously opposed any significant engagement with the values of the world.  His followers separated themselves not just from non-Christians, but from other early Baptists and Mennonites.  Those who followed him stuck around in Switzerland for a while, but when religious violence and oppression became too overbearing in the late 18th century, they began immigrating to the United States.

Since arriving in the United States back in the 1860s, the lives of the Old Order Amish have remained remarkably similar.  In most communities, they speak Deitsch, which isn't "Dutch," but a variant of old Swiss German.  Because they've chosen to reject the world and live in simple community, they do not engage with modern technology.

The fabric of daily life for the Amish looks much the same way it did back in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  It's pretty basic, involving family farming and older, manual crafts.  If you spend any time reading Amish fiction, this is the buggies, bonnets, and beards part.  It all feels very much like the world of the Little House books, only peculiarly transposed into our modern era.   No cars, no lights, no motorboats, not a single luxury, as they sang on Gilligans Island.  This is how they have chosen to live, simple, self-sufficient, and independent of our increasingly interconnected and industrial society.

There's variety in Amish communities, of course.  They are as varied among themselves as individual congregations are varied, though we see them all through the same lens.  Communities vary in what they view as their Ordnung, the rule that governs their day to day lives.

But all view themselves as separate from us out here in the mess and rush of the modern world, we who they refer to collectively as the English.  Oh sure, we may be Scottish or French or Guatemalan.  But to their eyes, we are all English.

Amish life is governed by some very different principles.   There is hochmut, which are the things to be avoided.  Hochmut describes the fruits of human pride, arrogance, and selfishness, the sort of thing that populates pretty much every reality television show.   There is demut, which is the opposite.  It describes those things that arise from humility and humbleness.  And there's gelassenheit, which represents a sort of nonviolent spiritual detachment.  You do not grasp, or seek your own advancement.  You maintain a gentle contentment with whatever lot you are given.

The Amish see these principles as living into the way of life taught by Jesus, in a way that does not cloud or compromise it with any of the distractions of our cluttered, greedy world.

Here is where our stories about the Amish and our stories of apocalypse come together.   The word apocalypse does not mean destruction or some final battle.  ἀποκάλυψις means, in the Greek from which we received that word, an "unveiling."  A "revealing."  A "making clear," which someone should have mentioned to John of Patmos when he was writing that crazy book of his.   Apocalyptic literature, as a literary (and biblical) genre, is about the stripping away of all of the fluff and pretense and getting down to what matters.

In a very real way, that is what draws we English to the stories of the Amish.  We sense, somehow, that most of the madness of our lives is unnecessary.  So much of our energy is poured into things that seem irrelevant, or meaningless.  We tell ourselves stories of what it would be like if we had to get back to basics, if all that [stuff] was torn away and we had to survive onslaughts of the shambling dead, or rebuild after that cataclysmic asteroid strike.  Or that massive solar storm.

But the Amish?  That is just how they are.  They never put on the veil of modernity.  They do not fill their lives as we do, with meetings and media, activities and anxieties, distraction and debt.

As so we also tell ourselves stories about the Amish, in which all of the things that crowd our days have been pulled away.

And those stories are, in their own way, gently pastel apocalypses.

Gun Totin' Amish Folk

Over the last few weeks, I've been traveling and vacationing, and the combination of time in aircraft and time at the beach has given lots of time to read.

There's been theology, the one Culture novel by the dearly departed Ian M. Banks that I'd not gotten to, and then a sequence of fiction and nonfiction books about the Amish.  The latter were as additional research for an ongoing novel project, and were both helpful and a bit confusticating.

Though I'd done research into Old Order communities as part of my senior undergraduate religious studies seminar at U.Va., that's old data.  I've also been doing online studies of both agriculture and home life, but wanted a bit of literary immersion.

The books...written either by former Amish or in consultation with active members...were helpful in that they will help me create a better mis en scene for the novel, trading the appearance of validity for a much more accurate representation of day to day Amish life.   They were "confusticating" in that they surfaced the wide variance in Old Order practices, which are as wildly different as the practices of other Christian communities.

One thing I didn't expect to encounter: the Amish are frequently gun owners.

They aren't, of course, at all interested in guns for self-defense.  Nor could they care less about the Second Amendment, which exists in its original intent for the purposes of collective defense, no matter what the SCOTUS might say.

An Amish gun...simple shotguns and hunting rifles, mostly, despite the entertainingly absurd picture above...typically serves the purpose of hunting deer or other creatures for food, or for ridding a garden of creatures that are consuming the produce that your family needs to survive.  They are tools, not instruments of violence.

This produces an interesting oddment.  An Amishman may have a shotgun, but if you break into his house, he will not use it to stop you.  The entire fear-driven dynamic of gun ownership in America means nothing to the Amish.

The Naked Community

So the other day, I found myself wondering what my little suburb of Annandale would look like if it were naked. Not stripped of clothing, mind you. That would be very unpastorly of me, and I'm also afraid my own contribution to that collective event would be rather unsettling. But rather, what it would look like if the two great powers that define and "clothe" our culture simply weren't there when we woke up one morning.

The powers in question: mammon and the sword. The sword is coercive power, and it is wielded by the state to undergird the legal frameworks of our society. Mammon is symbolic power. It drives the market, and is itself dependent on the power of the sword to establish and enforce the value of currency.

So our bedside radio chirps to life at 6:45 am one spring morning, and we hear it breathlessly announce that there is no longer any law enforcement. There are no longer any laws. No traffic cops. No courts. Nothing. Not only that, all currency is no longer valid. Our plastic is just plastic with random data encoded into a magnetic strip. Our cash is just paper with some trippy pictures on it. It all simply ceased to be meaningful or accepted.

Far fetched? Sure. A bit silly? Undoubtedly. But still interesting.

What would your community look like on the day of that announcement? The answer to that question, I think, is an interesting measure of just how healthy a society is. If the first word that pops into your head is "looting," followed by the word "pillage" and the phrase "everything on fire," then perhaps the place you are is not healthy. If you immediately think of staging a raid on your local Best Buy, then perhaps the you that you are is not healthy.

If, on the other hand, a society could just dispense with those things without batting an eye, then I think it would be in a rather different moral position. Would we still do what we do to fill our days? Would our relationships within our communities remain the same? Would our patterns of consumption be changed? For most social groups, the answer is yes. The changes would be huge. But the closer we get to modeling the Way that Jesus taught, the less impact this thought exercise would have. I can't imagine it having any meaningful impact within an Amish community, for instance.

How we react when we are truly, really, totally free is a good measure of where we stand relative to the Kingdom.