In all the thousands of column inches of newsprint, amid all the hours of television coverage devoted to Monday’s carnage in the schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, it was the little details that stood out. The fact that the police had to use vans to carry parents to hospital to be at the bedsides of their mortally wounded children because they refused to go by helicopter. The scene of worried mothers timidly peeking over the heads of cameramen filming a press conference near the school: while the pictures were being beamed instantly to Shanghai, they had to be there in person as they had no televisions to watch at home. The added sensitivity the authorities had identifying the bodies because there were no photographs to match against.
There is something about those snippets of life in the Amish community of Lancaster County that is strangely hard to deal with. On top of the sheer horror of the execution of five girls by a milk truck driver, there is bewilderment. How can it be, in this digital age, that people living within a few kilometres of the tragedy were still learning by word of mouth of what Charles Carl Roberts IV had done hours after he had unloaded his 9mm semi-ÂÂautomatic handgun?
How can it be that he chose to inflict his revenge for some slight he suffered at the age of 12 on girls from a community whose very existence is the antiÂÂthesis of the act he committed? The Amish are pacifist. The community where Roberts exacted his revenge, 80km west of Philadelphia, has no police force and no guns. In the land of the National Rifle Association, that is quite something.
Anyone who can recall Witness, the 1985 Harrison Ford thriller in which an eight-year-old Amish boy is the only witness to a murder, will have a feeling for the setting of Lancaster County. Green hills peppered with Holstein cattle, weather-beaten barns, unadorned buildings and the famous black horse-drawn buggies. Add to that the ”plain” dress, as they call it: home-made clothes, buttons not zips, braces not belts, and the beards for men and the uncut hair for women pinned up under white lace hats. About 25% of everyone in the community has the surname Stoltzfus. It all looks like what it is — a community of agrarians largely unchanged since the late 19th century.
Note the word largely. Among the many misrepresentations of the Amish is that they are a group impervious to modernity. In reality, they are the product of change.
The emergence of today’s Amishes is a story of many schisms. Their parent faith, Mennonitism (or Anabaptism), was born of a split in Switzerland in 1525, when the Mennonites broke from the Protestant reform church. Later, in Switzerland in 1693, the Amish broke from the wider Mennonite community in a dispute over the shunning of those who had been excommunicated. The Amish emigrated to Pennsylvania around the 1730s to benefit from the Quaker William Penn’s offer of protection for persecuted religions.
The Old Order of Amishes, the predominant group of about 30 000 people in Lancaster County from whom the murdered children originated, was then formed by another schism, in the late 19th century, when they broke from their fellow members in a dispute over the technological changes wrought by the industrial revolution. The Old Order was determined to take from technology only those elements that they could accommodate within their literal interpretation of the Bible, and that set them apart.
”It is easy to get it wrong about the Amish,” says Peter Seibert, president of the Heritage Centre of Lancaster County and a non-Amish. ”They are not about putting up walls to block out the modern world. What they are about is adapting their community to modernity in order to preserve its essential being as a simple agrarian society.”
So they do not have electricity, not because electricity is evil, but because of its impact within the home. They will not have television, not because it is intrinsically heinous but because they do not want their children exposed to sexual and violent images.
And modernity is there within the hills of Lancaster County. They will not have phones in the house, but they will in the shed where they run a woodworking business. They won’t have electric gadgets, but they will have battery-powered cash registers and laptops.
That’s a subtlety lost in the peeping-Tom relationship that the ”real world” has with the Amish. Every year about four million tourists descend on Lancaster County, many to gawp at the ”freakin’ aliens”, as they have been described. ”They can be quite disrespectful. Tourists walk right into Amish houses or schools assuming that they are there as an attraction. They have no sense that this is a living community that greatly prizes its privacy,” says Stephen Scott, a research fellow at Elizabethtown College. He is from the related order of the River Brethren, which has gone a little further in its compromise with the modern. ”People think I’m an Amish when they look at me, but I do drive a car,” he says.
The joke is, Scott points out, that the Amish are the ones to benefit. They may dislike being treated as zoo animals, but they also make a great deal of money out of the tourists, which they use to support the community.
That duality was illustrated a couple of years ago by the reality series Amish in the City, in which Amish teenagers were taken out of their communities and flung into downtown LA. Yet the Amish faith could accommodate even that. The teenagers were going through ”rumspringa”. That means the ”running around years”, and it identifies the period between the end of school, at the age of 14, and the entry into the church through baptism in one’s late teens or early 20s, which is followed in quick succession by marriage and the start of a traditional Amish life.
In those years of freedom the children are not officially members of the church and so cannot be shunned or excommunicated. Says Seibert: ”They get the opportunity to see life from the other side of the fence. They change their plain clothes for Nike and Reebok … they go into the big city.”
The result, Seibert believes, is a community that is thriving. More than 80% of the teenagers who move away from the community during rumspringa eventually come back to the fold. The main pressure on the Amish now is population growth, and an increasing lack of arable land on which they can subsist. The keepers of the faith are not shrinking, but the reverse; they are spreading out to states such as Kentucky and Wisconsin, in which they have never before had a foothold.
None of which will be any comfort to the parents and neighbours of the five girls who died from Monday’s shooting or the other five who remain critically ill. Any comfort will come from their faith itself. Seibert puts it well: ”In our post-postmodernist world we have to find an explanation for everything that happens to us. But that is not how the Amish will see it. For them this is God’s will, and that is all. Our world is all about the one. Theirs is all about the community before God, and about the better life they will lead after death. That is hard for us to comprehend, but that is how it is.” — Â