Book review: The Amish in Their Own Words

One rare example of Amish self-representation is The Amish in Their Own Words. This book compiles writings from 25 years of the Amish "Family Life" magazine, essays and letters written to debate values and share community history internally. Editor Brad Igou suggests that this book will combat mistaken notions about the Amish being either country bumpkins or "saintly people living in utopia." If you come to this collection, however, believing that Amish culture glorifies masochism and expends a great deal of energy policing its own simple lifestyle, these texts will probably not change your mind. A majority consist of warnings about the slippery slope.

The slippery slope is pretty much everything: brightly colored linoleum, necking or petting before marriage, public schools, flesh-colored stockings, personal photographs, paperback romances and Westerns, tobacco, unnecessary reflectors and decorations on buggies, fancy baby clothes, factory jobs, and so on. The slippery slope leads down the road toward more liberal churches, cars, electricity, and eternal damnation. It can all start with untied hair coverings. "Cap strings flying loose on the down road to hell," as one Amish woman so eloquently puts it.

Did I say I wanted Amish poetry? Out to the barn with hubby to chore./ I help to get started, but not much more./ One by one the cows come in./ Scrape down the Misht [manure] where they've been./ Tie them and wash their udders clean./ Cows are contented, but one seems mean./ I head for the house and when I arrive,/ I glance at the clock; it's after five!

At least it's an "authentic" Amish poem. Any search for an Amish or Mennonite literature will be haunted by the problematic concept of authenticity. Is the writer a real, bona fide Old Order Amishman? Does she belong to a more liberal congregation that will allow her to put rubber tires on her tractor? Did he leave the church as a teenager? Is she a researcher who spent time living with the Amish, a neighboring farmer, an anthropologist who's done research in the field, a filmmaker with a cursory interest in factual detail? Or is he, like me, the ex-Mennonite son of an ex-Amish father?

The Amish and Mennonites are all about boundaries. Both groups are Anabaptists, but since the Amish originally separated from the Mennonites in 1693, their traditions have been characterized by a continual splitting of churches, marking off the degree ...