When Amos King gave running a try, it wasn’t as if his legs weren’t already getting blown out every day. He was a twenty-six-year-old roofer, which meant climbing ladders under a hot sun with a stack of asphalt shingles on his shoulder, and because he’s Amish, just getting to work was a workout. Most mornings, Ame was out the door before the sun was up, pushing himself down the road to his shop on a heavy steel scooter that required so much force, he’d soon be panting and switching from right foot to left and back again to relieve his burning quads. He’d end his days the same way: while his non-Amish crewmates were cranking the AC in their pickups and digging in the cooler for a cold one, Ame was scooting on home, powered by his own sweat-propulsion engine.
Ame is strikingly handsome, with the kind of confident, genuinely friendly appeal that grabs your eye as soon as he enters a room. But back then, one secret fear nagged at his self-esteem. Even though he was at the age when he should be settling down, finding a wife didn’t worry him: he was afraid of what would happen next. “My initial reason for running was to not get fat,” he says. “In Amish culture, as you get older and married, and with all the good cooking, you’re doomed. You’re doomed, brother. I didn’t accept it. You create your own destiny.”
Ame decided it couldn’t hurt to try a little extra exercise, so when one of his buddies from work mentioned he was signing up for a 5K, Ame asked if he could come along. Race day was freezing cold, and Amos wasn’t sure how heavily to dress or how hard to push. “Some guys who’d run before told me, ‘Don’t go out too fast,’ ” he recalls. “Guess what Amos did?” The leaders shot off at a sub-five-minute-mile pace—and right on their heels came the Amish roofer in long black pants and suspenders, attempting for the first time in his life to run three consecutive miles in a row.
“It felt easy,” Amos says. “At first. Then my nose was running and my nostrils froze together. I couldn’t breathe. I had to walk. It was hilarious.”
Nevertheless, he finished in twenty-two minutes, a performance respectable enough to please most recreational runners, but not quite good enough for Ame. He was chatting about running with his insurance agent, who put him in touch with Jim Smucker, a veteran marathoner and third-generation owner of the Bird-in-Hand Family Restaurant & Smorgasbord, an Amish country institution in Lancaster County. Ame was hoping for some tips, but Jim did him one better: he invited Ame to join him and a friend for a speed workout.
A few evenings later, Ame met up with the two Mennonite marathoners at the Conestoga High School track. They were going to do 800-meter intervals: two laps at top speed, followed by a jogging recovery, repeated over and over until you wish for a merciful death. Jim warned Ame that it was a killer workout, so he shouldn’t worry about keeping up. After nine intervals, though, Ame was still right on the heels of the veteran runners. In fact, he didn’t even seem to be struggling.
“Don’t be polite,” Jim said. “Why don’t you open ’er up on this last one and see what you have left?” Permission granted, Ame blasted off. He sprinted so hard, he opened up a lead of more than 200 meters and finished ahead by a full thirty seconds. “Their jaws just dropped,” Ame told me. “That’s when they thought, ‘Oh, I think the Amish guy does have some speed.’ ”
True, Jim was impressed, but he knew he’d never see Ame again. Nothing against Ame, but Smuckers have been in Lancaster for more than a century, and in all Jim’s years, he’d never even heard of an Amish runner before. And for good reason: it all boiled down to a spat that broke out between Jim’s and Ame’s ancestors three hundred years ago.
Originally, Amish and Mennonites were a single faith led by Menno Simons, a maverick Christian in the Netherlands who believed that infant baptism was bogus. How do you build a committed, worshipful community, Menno asked, when you’re dragooning babies into the ranks who don’t even know what’s happening to them? Menno’s challenge didn’t sit well with the dominant Catholics and Protestants, who felt that perhaps they could bring these strays back into the fold through the warm embrace of torture, murder, and terror. The persecuted Mennonites fled into neighboring countries, like Switzerland, where they did their best to adapt and fit in.
Fitting in, however, began to rankle Jakob Ammann as much as font-dunking newborns bothered Menno Simons. Ammann was a Swiss tailor who never learned to read or write, but he’d absorbed enough of the Bible and Mennonite teaching to believe that if Jesus stood for anything, it was for not fitting in. Ammann and his followers—the Amish—broke away from the Mennonites, creating a Plain People community which, three centuries later, is fundamentally unchanged. Today, Mennonites in our area drive whatever they want and, while still dressing modestly in long pants and dresses, are fine with jeans for men and pretty patterns for women. But Old Order Amish remain largely frozen in time, wearing the same style straw hats and mortician-like outfits as their great-great-great-grandparents’ and relying on the strength of their own bodies and their kinship with animals to raise the food they need to survive.
It’s a tough life, and it starts early; whenever I grumble in winter waiting for my old Ford to warm up, I quiet down as soon as I look up and see the parade of Amish kids hiking through heavy snow in the cornfield behind our house on their long walk to school. One frosty morning, I picked up a neighbor at five thirty to go to the Amish hardware store, and his three preschool-age sons were already working in the barn with him.
“Are they always up this early?” I asked Daniel.
“If they want breakfast, they are,” he said.
I didn’t really get this insistence on rugged old-fashionedness when we first moved to the Southern End. It was charming, for sure; we loved sitting on the porch in the evening and hearing the soft drumbeat of horse-drawn buggies instead of car horns and the roar of city buses. But seriously—phones have to be in a shed in the cornfield, not in the house? Chain saws and in-line skates are fine, but bikes and Toro lawn mowers are banned? Teens can play dodgeball, volleyball, and ice hockey, but not baseball? No electricity, no tractors—no zippers? Was there some kind of Old Order Da Vinci Code at work, or was it just to make life harder than it had to be for no real reason, like deciding you’ll write only with your left hand or back your car into a parking spot using just the mirrors? Every time I thought I was getting a handle on Old Order-liness, I’d run into another rule that seemed less about revealed truth and more about…well, I didn’t really know. Was it thought control? Sexual denial? Straight-up crazy fundamentalism?
I was already perplexed, and that was even before I met Sam Stoltzfus and learned about his Nazi espionage library. I ran into Sam for the first time when I got lost on my way to a local cabinetmaker’s house and flagged down a passing buggy to ask for directions. Sam pulled over, and when he told me he also was a woodworker, I hired him instead. I followed him to his barn so he could stable his horse, then brought him back to my house to take measurements for the desk and bookshelves I needed.
During the drive, Sam was curious to hear how an “English”*1 guy like me had wandered into the River Hills from downtown Philly. Needless to say, I had a million questions for him, too. Like, how come one of my neighbors was shunned for using a tractor, yet the community turned out in force to support a pair of Amish teens who’d been arrested for what had to be the grand enchilada of all Old Order sins: they’d been arrested for dealing crack to other Amish teens, after narcotics officers began wondering why two young guys with soup-bowl haircuts were driving in and out of Southwest Philly to visit the Pagans motorcycle gang. How was that fair?
Sam not only understood; he added a few juicy tales of his own. Like the one about the cops who showed up at the scene of an accident and found an Amish boy passed out in a buggy with blood on the road but no horse: the boy was so blitzed, he never woke up when a hit-and-run truck driver slammed into the horse and carried it another quarter mile down the road before it fell off the hood. Sam and I were getting along so well, he invited me to come back to his shop and hang out while he explained Amish thinking to me. In return, he had a favor to ask: could I find a few books he wanted?
“I can try,” I replied, figuring I might locate whatever prayer books he wanted on Alibris or the Gutenberg archive. “What are you looking for?”
“Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Sam said. “And How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
“Really?” I hadn’t seen that coming. “Uh—in English, right?”
“Yes, English. And Nazi spy books. Can you find some of those?”
Self-help and storm troopers—wow. Sam explained that a few weeks earlier, he’d picked up a box of old paperbacks at the “mud sale,” our fire company’s outdoor auction held each year in a soggy field after the spring thaw. Sam wanted only the gardening and herbal remedy titles, but included in the box were also Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File and some personal-improvement books. Out of curiosity, Sam dipped in and found himself enthralled. The self-help stuff I could see, since I’m sure he recognized a lot of himself in the continuous-growth/seek-first-to-understand ethos, but I wouldn’t have expected him to come away with a heightened interest in Israeli revenge killings and West Berlin strippers.
“Won’t you get in trouble?” I was happy to lend him my own Forsyth books, but I didn’t want to be a coconspirator in my new friend’s excommunication.
That was when Sam opened my eyes to what I’d been missing. Amish life isn’t about what you can’t have, he explained; it’s about what you can. What are the three things every person wants? Health, happiness, and security. Right? Well, the Amish are happier, healthier, and safer than the rest of us. By a long shot. This isn’t just opinion; it’s hard math.
Let’s start with health and security. The Amish don’t go hungry, homeless, or broke, because they’ve quietly created their own little semi-socialist Scandinavian paradise right in the heart of red-state America. They adopt one another’s children, care for their old folks at home, build and pay for their own schools, and take in the needy. The Amish dodged the whole subprime mortgage fiasco by avoiding banks and shady brokers, relying instead on “Amish Aid,” a community pot that provides loans and homeowner’s insurance. Likewise, the Amish essentially created their own universal health care a long time ago, paying out of pocket for medical costs and helping their neighbors cover hospital bills by raising funds through auctions, donations, and sales of chicken pot pie.
But of course they come into health care with one big advantage: better health. The Amish are six times more active than the average American, and half as likely to suffer from cancer or diabetes. They don’t smoke, drink, fight, or mess with drugs. They don’t get fat (the Amish obesity rate is a nearly nonexistent 4 percent versus almost 40 percent for the rest of us) or fool with guns (which kill or injure some 100,000 Americans every year). They’re big on real foods—kombucha, raw milk, grass-fed meats, organic produce, gut-enhancing fermented veggies, home-baked bread—and seldom eat out. They age gracefully, with far superior late-life mobility and overall health. The Amish rarely harm themselves, or anyone else. Their suicide rate is 70 percent lower than ours, and there has been exactly one Amish murder in all of American history, and that by a delusional psychotic. Which poses a sub-question: why is Amish mental health so sound that in three hundred years, they’ve created only one threat to public safety?
Happiness can be tricky to measure, but if we look at the same metrics as used by the retail industry—customer loyalty and return business—Amish numbers are booming. You might assume that an eighteenth-century society surrounded by shopping outlets would be dying out by now, but the community has steadily doubled every twenty years, a growth rate five times higher than that of the U.S. population as a whole. The Amish have a better retention rate than Netflix: roughly 90 percent of young Amish adults choose to stick with the faith and join the church for life. And thanks to Menno Simons, they know exactly what they’re doing; baptism occurs after Amish teenagers have spent a year or more on rumspringa, or “running loose.” They’re free to buy cars, dress English, fly to Disneyland, pound Jäger at Mardi Gras, and even be forgiven if they’re boneheaded enough to buy drugs from Pagans. Once they’ve experienced the modern world, the overwhelming majority decide, Meh, not so great after all, and return to “living plain.”
“We’re not perfect people,” Sam cautioned me. And tragically, every so often someone either in the community or affiliated with it will prove it. A few miles from our home, a couple who’d left the Amish church fourteen years earlier was convicted of giving nine of their daughters to a sex abuser who’d convinced them he was the “Prophet of God.” Back in 2011, a splinter group of Amish extremists in Ohio began terrorizing other church members by ambushing the men and forcibly shaving off their beards. Rather than bringing in law enforcement, the Amish prefer to discipline*2 their own through public penance and shunning, and that has left some women dangerously unprotected. An Amish molester in Missouri was stopped only because the church reluctantly called the police after his third offense, and an Amish bishop not far from Lancaster was arrested after failing to report two cases of child molestation because he said it “wasn’t really that bad.”
When talking and time-outs fail, that’s where Amish culture goes wrong. What’s amazing is how often it goes right. One afternoon, Sam and I went to visit his cousins’ buggy repair shop near Bird-in-Hand. “My uncle made a mistake with this business,” Sam told me. “He earned too much money.” Sam’s uncle was a whiz at salvaging unfixable buggies, even ones that had been crunched by cars in collisions. Since new buggies can cost up to $10,000, he began getting work towed in from as far away as Indiana and Kentucky. Word of his skill even spread to Disney and the Smithsonian, which hired him to restore vintage Wild West carriages. Then, at the peak of his success, Sam’s uncle hit the brakes. He gave away more than $1 million in savings, divided the business among his nephews, and moved his family to a small produce farm. Why?
“Raising his children rich wasn’t fair to them,” Sam explained.
And right there, in the moment that Sam’s uncle closed up shop, you can find the secret to Amish success. Sam’s uncle knew that happiness, health, and security come from devoting yourself to two things—your family and your friends—and anything that doesn’t bring you closer to both is pulling you in the wrong direction. Distance and envy are two poisons that can destroy any community, and that’s why the Amish have a problem with cars, fashion, and even electricity: they let you travel too far, show off too much, and stare at screens instead of faces.
Sam’s uncle loved his craft, but he loved his community even more, and when he felt himself being drawn away by constant praise, easy work, and fat paychecks, he had to make a change. His decision was a declaration of faith in the five words that define Amish life:
Slow down. Savor your world.
Most of us whipsaw back and forth all day, racing to save time so we can sit around and waste it. The Amish are skeptical of speed, so before accepting any new technology, they question whether it makes life better, or just go by a little faster. They don’t automatically reject new things; instead, each Amish district debates for itself whether this new thing will help them learn patience, self-control, and empathy. If not, maybe the smart play is to avoid it.
But even while Sam’s lips were still moving, I was arguing with him in my mind. I was on board with his logic about TVs and cell phones and maybe even air travel, but c’mon: enough already with the buggies. I kept my mouth shut because I felt that challenging him on this point was cutting a little too close to his core beliefs, but think about it: if the goal was to spend more time on your land and with your family, savoring your friends and God’s green earth, then what was the sense of creaking along in a black box for two hours because you needed to pick up a pound of flour? Especially when there was nothing stopping you from hiring a car whenever you felt like it. Sticking with the buggies was silly and stubborn, a pointless knee bend to a lost past—or so I thought, until a donkey that was afraid of puddles arrived in our backyard and suddenly the whole Rubik’s Cube machine of Amish interlocking logic clicked for me.
It’s no coincidence, I realized, that the only Americans who don’t need cops, fists, or therapists to settle their differences are also the only ones who haven’t abandoned their business partnerships with animals. Patience and kindness don’t show up on demand; they’re disciplines that require constant practice, and there is no better boot camp for learning those skills than hitching your survival to your ability to discern—and respect—the needs of another creature. My Old Order neighbors understood that horses are less about transportation and more about education; for every hour they devoted to training their animals, their animals were quietly returning the favor. If you wanted to yank out the one piece in the Jenga tower that could make Amish culture and character come tumbling down, it’s easy: take away their horses, and watch centuries of fellowship and nonviolence begin to fray.
There’s a lot I will never adopt from my Amish neighbors (long black pants in summer and a cap on education at eighth-grade spring to mind), but Sam opened my eyes to the difference between rules that hold you back and rules that help you grow. That was why he could read thrillers if he felt like it and had no qualms telling me that he’d seen (and kind of enjoyed) the movie Witness. Amos, our closest neighbor over the hill, dropped in one evening while friends were over for dinner. “This is wine?” he asked, never having seen it before. “Can I try?” Before I could reach for the bottle, he’d filled a water glass to the brim. He drank it off like it was lemonade, then set off to walk tipsily home in the dark. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be having that again,” Amos told me the next day. “Not enough evenings in life to spoil another one.” The Amish aren’t closed to the world, he’s saying; they’re just a little more goal-oriented about how much of it to let in.