Lauding Amish Forgiveness

The most prominent response to emerge from the story was amazement. Time and again commentators expressed astonishment that the Amish were able to forgive, and to forgive so quickly. Occasionally the bewilderment turned to skepticism, as when reporters asked if the Amish were simply seeking good publicity. Generally, however, observers believed that the Amish had genuinely forgiven Roberts and his family—acts they found utterly amazing. One columnist, writing in Helena, Montana, summed up the sentiment of many observers: “I am profoundly moved by what is happening in Nickel Mines.”

In addition to being surprised, the vast majority of pundits also lauded Amish forgiveness, calling it worthy of admiration. “What wonderful people they are,” wrote a woman living nearby in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “If all people would follow their examples of faith and forgiveness, what a much better world this would be.” A writer in Philadelphia concurred; not only should Americans “feel indebted” to the Amish for what they did, but they should also endeavor to “learn from their example.” In the Sacramento Bee, a columnist cautioned that she didn’t want to “idealize” the Amish community, which “has its problems, too.” Still, she wanted her readers to consider “for just a moment how remarkable their calm display of human kindness is.” “We should all be that odd, strange, and offbeat,” wrote yet another observer.

Such views of Amish forgiveness led many commentators to ask what it was about the Amish that enabled them to forgive. For many, the answer was relatively simple: the Amish embodied an uncorrupted Christian faith. “The Amish have shown the rest of the world what true Christianity is really like,” wrote a columnist for a Fort Wayne, Indiana, newspaper. Other observers cited a simple authenticity among the Amish. Still others tied the Amish response to an altruism to which all people could aspire. “This is not about being Amish,” wrote one commentator. “This is about living our lives with a calm courage that understands that survival lies in reaching out, not striking back.”

Finally, many observers found that the Amish response at Nickel Mines gave them an opportunity to reflect on their own lives and American society. These reflections often revealed a sense of unease about modern culture, which most found wanting compared to Amish life. Numerous observers lamented rising secularism in the country, including one commentator who, in a debatable comparison, equated “the faith of the Amish” with “the Christian faith of our forefathers.” After the shooting a Binghamton, New York, newspaper ran an op-ed piece titled “A Society So Modern It’s Sickening,” which noted four words that have lost currency in contemporary American life: innocence, decency, reverence, and manners. The commentary mentioned the Amish only at the end, when the writer identified forgive as a fifth word she hoped would now make a comeback. “Modern society’s sophisticates sneer at the Amish for their ‘backward’ ways,” she concluded, but their extension of forgiveness at Nickel Mines demonstrates “that they may be far more advanced than the rest of us.”

Contrary to this writer’s assertion, few people sneered at the Amish in the aftermath of the shooting. In fact, these four themes—amazement at the act of forgiveness, admiration of the Amish who did it, a largely favorable view of Amish life, and a lament about mainstream American life—characterized the vast majority of op-ed pieces and commentaries following the tragedy.

Together these themes built on a much longer tradition of public tribute to Amish life. The Amish have long captivated outsiders with their tight-knit communities and resistance to modern technologies, prompting some to wonder if the Amish have something good the English are missing. In the aftermath of the Nickel Mines shooting, this tune of amazement played in a slightly different key. Not only did the Amish have something good that others lacked, but in many people’s eyes the Amish were good—or at least better than the vast majority of their American neighbors. Three months later, when the editors at Beliefnet.com named the “Most Inspiring People of 2006,” their selection confirmed the overwhelming choice of their readers: the Amish of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.

Questioning Amish Forgiveness

Despite the widespread admiration of Amish forgiveness, a small but insistent chorus emerged on the other side. An early and stinging critique of Amish forgiveness appeared in the Boston Globe the Sunday after the shooting. In a frequently reprinted op-ed piece titled “Undeserved Forgiveness,” Jeff Jacoby admitted that it was “deeply affecting” to watch the Amish strive to follow Jesus’ admonition to return good for evil. Still, he insisted, “hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved.” Jacoby asked his readers, “How many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered?” The problem was not with forgiveness per se, he said; in fact, “to voluntarily forgive those who have hurt you is beautiful and praiseworthy.” No, the problem in this case, wrote Jacoby, was that the persons who granted forgiveness forgave a person who hurt others. “I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward.” Appealing to the Bible, the same authority that the Amish often cite, Jacoby reminded his readers that Ecclesiastes teaches that “there is a time to love and a time to hate.” He concluded by quoting from Psalm 97: “Let those who love the Lord hate evil.”

Jacoby was not alone in his criticism of Amish forgiveness. “Why Do the Amish Ignore Reality?” was the headline for Cristina Odone’s opinion piece in Britain’s Observer. Odone called the Amish community’s response to their daughters’ killer “disturbing.” “They have responded to the massacre of their innocents by repeating that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” she complained. In many respects, Odone’s concern was less about forgiveness than it was about what she called the “fatalism” inherent in Amish life. In her view, the Amish acceptance of whatever comes their way, combined with their commitment to pacifism, means that they “inhabit a hopeless universe where senseless massacres are accepted. Not even the charming old-fashioned horse and buggy can make up for that.”

These critiques, though relatively few in number, provided a sharp counterpoint to the acclaim heaped on the Amish in the days after the shooting. Moreover, they picked up on themes that some critics of Amish life had cited long before writers at the Boston Globe and the Observer had ever heard of Nickel Mines. In a poem published in 1996, Denise Duhamel recounted the death of an Amish boy at the hands of a drunk driver and his family’s response to that tragedy. “My Amish neighbors / forgive,” wrote Duhamel, who then offered her perspective. “I prefer seeing it all,” she wrote. “I prefer a good fight / a wailing of grief,” quite unlike the gift-shop Amish dolls that “want it silent.” Duhamel’s implication was that Amish people deal with their grief like soulless dolls—by simply stifling emotional pain. In the days following the Nickel Mines shooting, a USA Today blogger made a similar complaint: “This extreme event needs time for emotions to settle, not suppress and suppress. After all, this was not someone who broke a window and was sorry!”

The lack of appropriate emotion, a fatalistic approach to evil, a willingness to forgive the unrepentant, the extension of forgiveness on behalf of others, and its swiftness—all of these critiques of the Amish response echo concerns that some scholars raise about forgiveness more generally. Much has been made in recent years about the virtue of forgiveness, both as a means to heal the victim and, in some cases, as a path to mend the relationship between victim and offender. We explore some of these issues later in this book. At this point we simply note that, in response to those who advocate the virtues of forgiveness, dissenting voices offer caution about extending forgiveness, at least in certain circumstances.

For instance, legal scholar Jeffrie G. Murphy has written that, while he is not an “enemy of forgiveness,” he is troubled by those who are too enthusiastic in their “boosterism” of it. In Murphy’s view, forgiveness is often a legitimate response to being wronged, although it is only valid “if directed toward the properly deserving (e.g., the repentant) and if it can be bestowed in such a way that victim self-respect and respect for the moral order can be maintained.” Sharon Lamb, who collaborated with Murphy on a book titled Before Forgiving, applies Murphy’s concerns to domestic abuse against women. In most situations of abuse, Lamb contends, “the idea of offering forgiveness toward unrepentant perpetrators . . . is dangerous and plays into deep stereotypes of women’s ‘essential’ nature.”

By counseling caution, Lamb and Murphy continue a long-standing debate about forgiveness that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust. In his book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, first published in 1969, Simon Wiesenthal describes a request for forgiveness he received from a dying SS officer when Wiesenthal was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. The officer, haunted by his involvement in atrocities against Jews, approached Wiesenthal in a final attempt to be forgiven for his crimes. “I have longed to talk about [my evil deeds] to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him,” the officer said. “Without your answer I cannot die in peace.” Wiesenthal recounts this event in gripping detail and reports that, in the end, he responded to the man’s request with silence. Was silence the right response? Wiesenthal wonders. He then turns to his readers and asks them, What would you have done? What should you have done?

In Wiesenthal’s concentration camp story, the wrongdoer was repentant, or at least seemed to be, thus overriding one of Murphy’s cautions about forgiveness.³ Nevertheless, the incident raises two other questions that the critics of Amish forgiveness asked in the wake of the Nickel Mines shooting. First, is it appropriate to forgive someone for evil acts he or she committed against other people? Second, are some acts so heinous that they should not be forgiven?

In the second half of The Sunflower, a panel of respondents offers a wide range of answers to those questions. “If asked to forgive, by anyone for anything, I would forgive because God would forgive,” writes Roman Catholic priest and educator Theodore Hesburgh. So would I, says the Dalai Lama, although “I would not forget about the atrocities committed.” Radio talk show host Dennis Prager, who describes himself as a “religious Jew,” responds differently: “People can never forgive murder, since the one person who can forgive is gone, forever.” Holocaust survivor Sidney Shachnow offers an even harsher judgment: “I personally think [the SS officer] should go to hell and rot there.”

The spectrum of responses reveals two pertinent things about Amish grace in the wake of the Nickel Mines tragedy. First, forgiveness is a valued, but disputed, virtue. Some people find forgiveness noble in the abstract but much more complicated when real-life factors—Who is being forgiven? Of what? By whom? In what circumstances?—are added to the mix. Second, forgiveness is defined differently by different people. Indeed, part of the challenge of talking about forgiveness stems from different definitions of what forgiveness entails. Is it successfully letting go of anger, or is it simply trying to let go of anger? Does it demand positive acts on the part of the victim as well as positive feelings? Does it mean that the wrongdoer is now pardoned and is therefore no longer accountable for his or her crime? We return to some of these questions in Part Three of this book when we look more closely at the nature of forgiveness as it was expressed at Nickel Mines.

Another question emerged in the aftermath of the shooting, a critique that is unique to the Amish story. Some onlookers, pointing to the practice of shunning within Amish communities, asked whether the Amish were inconsistent, even hypocritical, in their application of forgiveness. How can the Amish be cited as shining examples of forgiveness, some people wondered, when they seem unwilling to forgive their own people? One online newspaper, reporting the experience of an ex-Amish woman a few weeks after the shooting, put it this way: “Her story paints a very different picture of the Amish than the scenes in Nickel Mines.” In a certain sense, the newspaper’s observation was correct: Amish responses to their wayward members differ from their responses to English offenders. But is that hypocritical? We return to that question in Chapters Nine and Eleven, when we look at forgiveness and shunning within Amish communities.

Using Amish Forgiveness

Despite a few warning lights, responses to the grace extended at Nickel Mines were overwhelmingly positive, so much so that pundits lined up behind the Amish to score points for their own causes. Soon both the shooting and the Amish response became raw material for making arguments about issues of national, even international, significance.

As they have after other school shootings in the United States, arguments about gun control and America’s culture of violence emerged quickly. “Why does a tormented, suicidal adult, such as the one who shot ten Amish school girls . . . have ready access to a semiautomatic pistol, a shotgun, 600 rounds of ammunition and a high-voltage stun gun?” asked an editorial from Scripps News. Of course, anti-gun-control advocates saw the school shooting quite differently. “This shooting . . . and every school shooting in the past ten years all had one thing in common,” remarked Alan M. Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. “They all happened in so-called ‘gun-free school zones,’ where students and adult staff are essentially helpless,” that is, unable to use guns to defend themselves.

Arguments for and against gun control drew more on the shooting than on the forgiveness that flowed in its wake. But the idea of forgiveness packed great ideological wallop as well, particularly for people who saw acts of retribution they could not support. The biggest target in this regard was the Bush administration and its war on terror. The Amish response to Charles Roberts was a “blueprint” for how President Bush should have responded after September 11, wrote Doug Soderstrom on the Axis of Logic Web site. If only President Bush had been the “follower of the Lord Jesus Christ” he claimed to be, “the world may have been spared the unfathomable travesty of a ‘nation of believers’ driven insane by an uncontrollable urge to kill in the name of an all-loving God.”

Diana Butler Bass, writing on the Faithful America blog, expressed similar sentiments: “What if the Amish were in charge of the war on terror? What if, on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, we had gone to Osama bin Laden’s house (metaphorically, of course, since we didn’t know where he lived!) and offered him forgiveness? What if we had invited the families of the hijackers to the funerals of the victims of 9/11?” Acknowledging that it was too late for that, Butler Bass concluded with what she called a modest proposal: Americans should ask the Amish to assume leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. “After all,” she said, “actively practicing forgiveness” is far better than living in perpetual fear.

Other commentators were not quite willing to hand over national security to the Amish, but they still thought the Nickel Mines Amish deserved better grades than Washington politicians in their handling of a crisis. “You respect people who are true to their words,” wrote George Diaz of the Orlando Sentinel. While the Amish “are committed to their beliefs,” the Republican congressional leadership “is committed to saving its posterior.” From there Diaz proceeded to flay House Speaker Dennis Hastert and others for their handling of scandals in the Republican-led House of Representatives. Writing just weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, Diaz quoted an Amish man who, in an interview with CNN, said, “In forgiveness there is healing.” Diaz respected the man’s simple assertion but added that it “would be nice if somebody [in Washington] accepted accountability” for all the inside-the-beltway shenanigans. “Then, and only then, can forgiveness and healing truly begin.”

The Religious Right likewise became a target of these Amish-inspired reflections—and so did the Religious Left. “The so-called Christian Right should look closely at the Amish lifestyle for lessons in what is wrong with their approach to faith and politics,” wrote Stephen Crockett of Democratic Talk Radio. Unlike James Dobson and his ilk, the Amish “do not seek to impose their values on others by law or force,” and “hate has no power or legitimacy among them.” David Virtue, writing for “The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism,” found a different lesson in the aftermath of Nickel Mines. Recalling the bravery of the Amish schoolgirls and the courage of those who offered forgiveness, he observed that their response grew out of “raw naked faith,” not out of the “pathetic liberal gospel” advanced by the U.S. Episcopal Church’s hierarchy. He then invoked the name of liberal clergyman John Shelby Spong, asking his readers if they would “stand up and die” for the theological beliefs held by Spong in the way the Amish girls had stood up for their faith.

It may be stretching things to say that the Amish schoolgirls died defending their faith, although they and their surviving community members clearly demonstrated their faith in their responses to Roberts and his family. Thus it’s not surprising that the most consistent and wide-reaching discussion after the shooting focused not on politics per se but on the nature of the Christian life. To be sure, many political issues—gun control, school violence, the war on terror, capital punishment, penal reform, and violence against women, among others—were debated along the way, but the most prominent questions were these: What does it mean to live a truly Christian life? Have the Amish set a standard for other Christians to aspire to?

At least for some observers, the answer to the second question was yes. Sister Joan Chittister, writing for the National Catholic Reporter, suggested that “it was the Christianity we all profess but which [the Amish] practiced that left us stunned.” The Nickel Mines Amish, Chittister concluded, astounded the twenty-first-century world the way the earliest Christians astounded the Roman world: simply by being “Christian.”

Theologically speaking, this may be the case. For centuries Christian theologians have cited the centrality of forgiveness to the Christian faith, not only as something Jesus modeled but also as something he commanded his followers to do. Nonetheless, it’s important to recognize that the Amish are, and always have been, quite unlike most people who call themselves Christians. From a sociological standpoint, they are not simply Christians; they are Amish Christians. As Amish Christians, they share a basic set of beliefs with other Christians, but they come to their faith with a unique history, culture, and theology. To really understand the grace offered at Nickel Mines, we must explore the history, the spirituality, and the culture of the people who extended it.