Anabaptist Habits

Our actions are rarely random. We all embrace patterns of behavior and habits of mind that shape what we do in a given situation. When we consider the behavior of groups, we call such patterns culture. One way to understand culture is to compare it to a musical repertoire. A repertoire is a set of musical pieces that a performer knows especially well from frequent practice. It reflects an artist’s background and training, and serves a performer in a situation in which there is no time to learn something new. When a musician is asked on short notice to “play something,” or a choral group finds that its manager has suddenly scheduled a concert for next week, these artists fall back on their repertoire—the material they can perform almost instinctively. It’s not that musicians can’t learn new music; they often do. Even then, however, a repertoire forms the core around which new material is added.

Culture is the term we use for a group’s repertoire of beliefs and behaviors. It involves assumptions and conduct that are so deeply rooted and so often practiced that most people are not even aware of them. Culture reflects people’s history and teaching, and is especially visible in times of stress that demand immediate response, when there is no time or emotional energy to think through all the possible actions. Like musical repertoires, cultures change over time, but they change in ways that extend present patterns.

Although the Amish are far from static, their culture draws on values and practices set in motion hundreds of years ago, amid events in Europe’s tumultuous sixteenth century. Out of that era of religious turbulence, which saw Reformation figures such as Martin Luther and John Calvin charge the powerful medieval church with corruption, a small but feisty group of reformers called for more than just reform of the church. These radicals insisted on a new concept of the church as a voluntary gathering of those committed to obeying Jesus’ teachings. They symbolized their commitment with adult baptism. But because all of them had been baptized into the church as infants, these new baptisms constituted, in the eyes of church and state officials, second baptisms. So the radicals received the disparaging nickname Anabaptists, which means “rebaptizers,” and found themselves condemned as heretics.

Both Catholics and mainstream reformers wanted a state-supported church, which the Anabaptists challenged. For their part, the Anabaptists insisted that they were simply trying to live as Jesus had commanded, relying on an uncomplicated and often literal reading of the Bible. They renounced self-defense, the swearing of oaths, and military participation. As they held one another accountable to lead Christian lives, they sometimes resorted to expelling members from their fellowship (excommunication) as a sort of shock therapy to jolt the unrepentant into mending their ways. But the Anabaptists would not use violence, nor would they ask government officials to coerce or otherwise maintain religious belief. In fact, they believed that the faithful church should not rely on state support or sanction at all. For them, any links to the state were a sure sign that the church had compromised its primary commitment to God.

Such ideas immediately earned Anabaptists the ire of both Catholic and Protestant church leaders, who saw their authority undercut, and civic officials, who relied on religious fear to keep citizens in line. Condemned on all sides, Anabaptists soon found themselves imprisoned and even executed for their beliefs. Although the Anabaptist movement was never large, it accounted for 40 to 50 percent of all Western European Christians who were martyred for their faith during the sixteenth century. Of course, martyrs are a minority in any movement, and most Anabaptists never faced the prospect of capital punishment. Nevertheless, brutal death has been a part of the Anabaptists’ story from the time they began creating their cultural repertoire.

By the 1540s the notoriety of one Dutch Anabaptist leader, Menno Simons, was such that the name Mennonite came to label many Anabaptist descendants. Then, in 1693, a disagreement among Anabaptists produced the Amish. A fervent Anabaptist convert, Jakob Ammann, feared that Anabaptists in Switzerland and eastern France had become too eager for social acceptance. The emergence of religious toleration, which some Anabaptists greeted as a breath of fresh air, struck Ammann as a dangerous temptation to seek worldly approval. Under Ammann’s leadership, Amish churches formed, with a determination to distinguish themselves from the surrounding society, which they considered to be corrupt.

Within a generation, both Mennonites and Amish began immigrating to North America, where many settled in the same communities and recognized one another as fellow Anabaptists, even while cultivating distinct traditions. With some exceptions, Mennonites engaged the wider society more readily than did their Amish counterparts. By the twenty-first century, many Mennonites were seeking to harmonize Anabaptism with higher education, professional pursuits, and urban and suburban living, while Amish people embodied their Anabaptist convictions in rural areas and in traditional customs that they called an “Old Order” way of life.

Anabaptist habits that undergird Old Order Amish culture include their responses to violence, crime, and undeserved suffering. These are not the only situations in which Amish people practice forgiveness, but they are circumstances of stress, pain, and grief in which the Amish repertoire of values creates particular patterns of practice. These values incorporate a willingness to place tragedy in God’s hands without demanding divine explanation for injustice. They also include a desire to imitate Jesus, who loved those who harmed him and who refused to defend himself. Wider society’s police and judicial powers merit respect, and even appreciation, the Amish say, but as institutions of “the world” they are fundamentally alien to the Amish, who do not use them to seek revenge.

We examine these and other Anabaptist habits in more depth in Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine, where we explore the roots, spirituality, and practice of Amish forgiveness. For now, we turn to a sampling of stories that illustrate Amish habits in the face of crime—stories that are part of the larger repertoire of faith that stood behind the Amish response to the violence of Nickel Mines. These stories, filled with both pain and grace, tell us that the Amish reaction to the shooting, remarkable as it was, was neither exceptional nor rare.

Forgiveness as First Response

Forgiveness seemed to come quickly for an Amish mother in northern Lancaster County when her five-year-old son was hit by a car in 1992. The boy was riding his scooter, crossing the road that separated their house and barn, and his injuries were so severe he didn’t survive to see the next day. Still, as the investigating officer placed the driver of the car in the police cruiser to take him for an alcohol test, the mother of the injured child approached the squad car to speak with the officer. With her young daughter tugging at her dress, the mother said, “Please take care of the boy.” Assuming she meant her critically injured son, the officer replied, “The ambulance people and doctor will do the best they can. The rest is up to God.” The mother pointed to the suspect in the back of the police car. “I mean the driver. We forgive him.”

In this case, an expression of forgiveness came swiftly, at the accident scene, before the driver’s breath alcohol test and before the victim’s death. Still, three years later, the mother again asserted her forgiveness of the driver in the pages of a short book she wrote titled Good Night, My Son. Forgiveness did not take away the pain that still tore at the parents’ hearts, nor was their acceptance of their son’s death without struggle. Yet upon reflection several years later, the mother did not retract the forgiveness she had offered at the scene of the accident.

Another story that highlights the speed with which an Amish family extended forgiveness in the aftermath of tragedy came to us from the recipient of that gift of grace. In late October 1991, Aaron and Sarah Stoltzfus had enjoyed a happy day together. Married in an all-day wedding at her home the previous Tuesday, the couple had set out on their honeymoon. Unlike English couples, who might fly to a Caribbean island, the Stoltzfuses, following traditional Amish honeymoon custom, arranged to visit extended family for several weeks. During that time they received gifts, enjoyed a break from their work routines, and became better acquainted with their new in-laws. Now, five days after their wedding, they were returning home on Sunday afternoon after their first honeymoon visit.

That same day, seventeen-year-old Joel Kime came home from church, grabbed some lunch, and headed to a soccer game with his brother and two friends. Driving his family’s old AMC Concord station wagon, and eager to show off its power, he had already hit seventy miles an hour when he topped the crest of a hill on a narrow country road, only to find a buggy one hundred yards ahead. Unconcerned, he decided to “blow past those guys, because I thought it was so incredibly cool!” His daring turned into terror as the horse began to turn left into the passing lane. At his high speed, Kime had failed to see the buggy’s turn signal. Newlywed Sarah died in the hospital that evening.

According to Kime, Amish forgiveness transformed this tragedy in many ways. On Monday evening, the day after the accident, Kime’s parents took him to the Stoltzfus home. He had never been to an Amish home before and was frightened. To his surprise, Aaron’s grandmother hugged him and expressed her forgiveness. So did Aaron’s father. It happened again when Sarah’s parents, Melvin and Barbara, put their arms around him and said, “We forgive you; we know it was God’s time for her to die.” In Kime’s words, it was “unbelievable. It was totally, absolutely amazing. . . . They proceeded to invite my family to come over for dinner. . . . I cannot express the relief that floated over me.”

In a back room of the farmhouse Kime met Aaron, the shattered husband, staring at his deceased bride in the wooden coffin. “Like his parents, he came to me with open arms,” Kime recalled. “I said, ‘How can I ever repay you?’ He simply forgave me. We hugged as the freedom of forgiveness swept over and through me.”

Some time later, Kime and his family had dinner with Sarah’s parents in their home, along with Aaron and some of his family. “Never once did they attempt to make us feel bad. . . . I still have a pile of at least fifty cards that I received from various Amish people across the county. They were constantly encouraging and pointing me to God.”

At his trial, expressions of Amish grace surfaced again. “Numerous Amish people wrote letters to the judge begging for my pardon, asking that I be acquitted on all counts.” Legally it was impossible for the judge to acquit Kime, but because he was a minor, he was able to bypass prison.

The relationship between the Kime and Stoltzfus families continues. They get together about once a year in each other’s homes. In Kime’s words, “I came to realize that [my] relationship with Aaron and the rest of the Stoltzfus family had grown into a legitimate, normal relationship. They had forgiven me and never went back on that decision. Five years after the accident I invited them to my wedding, and they came for the ceremony and reception, bearing gifts.” Later, when Kime and his wife spent time overseas as missionaries, the Stoltzfus family supported them financially. “Forgiveness, they taught me, is not a one-time event,” Kime concluded.

Forgiveness in the Media Spotlight

Other tragedies, and the Amish responses that followed them, have been much more public. The murder of Paul Coblentz, a twenty-five-year-old Amish farmer, on August 19, 1957, drew intense national media attention to the Amish settlement in Mount Hope, Ohio. Around 10:30 P.M. two young non-Amish men looking for cash randomly targeted the rural home of Paul and Dora Coblentz. Robbing the young couple of $9 and beginning to assault Dora—who was seeking to shield their seventeen-month-old daughter—one of the intruders, Cleo Peters, shot Paul twice at close range. The robbers then fled, first in a stolen truck and later in a stolen car. A cross-country manhunt eventually cornered the two in Illinois, where they shot a county constable before surrendering to police. The subsequent murder trial flooded rural Ohio with reporters and photographers. The case even appeared as a feature in a true-crime magazine.

In 1957 Amish-themed tourism was still in its infancy, and few Americans even knew of the Amish, let alone anything about their culture and beliefs, so journalists arriving in rural Holmes County struggled to interpret the story for their readers. They were particularly puzzled by the fact that the Amish “revealed no hatred against the fugitives” and that “no wish for vengeance was expressed by any member of the dead man’s family.”

Reporters focused much of their attention on Coblentz’s father, Mose, who spoke freely with them before and during the trial. Mose seemed to express the grief typical of any parent in that situation “as he wondered aloud how he could go on after everyone left and he would be alone to think of his loss.” But he astonished observers by going to visit his son’s killer, Cleo Peters, in prison. Afterward, Mose reported that the meeting was emotionally very difficult for him, but in the end he had managed to tell Peters, “I hope God can forgive you.”

The state was less generous, and the killer’s speedy trial ended with a death sentence. At that point, Amish people from Ohio and elsewhere began to write letters to Ohio’s governor asking for clemency for Peters. An Ontario Amish man admonished readers of the Amish correspondence newspaper The Budget, “Will we as Amish be blameless in the matter if we do not present a written request to the authorities, asking that his life be spared?” As letters piled up on the governor’s desk, he commuted Peters’s sentence seven hours before the scheduled electrocution.

The Amish did believe that the crime should carry consequences. They had not interfered with the state’s rendering of justice—the widow, Dora Coblentz, had even testified at the trial—but they were reluctant to have an execution carried out in their name. Mose Coblentz and other Amish close to the family reported that they pitied Peters, whose time in the Air Force, it was said, had led him to drinking and delinquency. When Peters’s parents came to Ohio for the trial, several Amish families invited the couple for dinner, approaching them as fellow victims of their son’s actions.

In another case, two decades later, that garnered heavy media attention, including a feature article in Rolling Stone, the assailants were well-known to their Amish victims. Four non-Amish teenagers from Berne, Indiana, spent a warm, late summer night in 1979 harassing area Amish—a frequent activity for them. Riding in the back of a pickup truck, they threw stones and pieces of tile at the windows of Amish homes and into passing buggies. This night their projectiles hit a buggy occupied by Levi and Rebecca Schwartz and their seven children. One chunk of tile bounced off Rebecca’s arm, causing her to hold seven-month-old Adeline, who was wrapped in her lap, closer.

The attack was particularly unnerving because it happened after dark, so the Schwartzes hurried home. Arriving at their modest farm without further incident, Rebecca gave baby Adeline to an older daughter while she helped the younger children out of the buggy and into the house. Taking off their coats by lamplight, the family discovered that Adeline was dead. The piece of tile thrown into the buggy had struck the infant in the back of the head and, as examiners later concluded, killed her instantly and silently.

Within an hour, police had arrested the four assailants, aged eighteen and nineteen. “The boys were caught soon after,” wrote Adeline’s maternal grandmother in the next week’s issue of The Budget. “Some were our neighbors.” None of the teens had been in trouble with the law before, and it was hard to know how to make sense of their actions on that night. The grandmother, in an account filled with emotion over the death of Adeline, could only call the young men’s actions “foolish.”

Reported across the nation, the incident generated hundreds of letters expressing sympathy for the Schwartzes and calling for harsh punishments for the accused. The Schwartz family responded differently, deliberately forgoing vengeance even in the way they talked with others about the assailants. Levi Schwartz told a journalist, “If I saw the boys who did this, I would talk good to them. I would never talk angry to them or want them to talk angry to me. Sometimes I do get to feeling angry, but I don’t want to have that feeling against anyone. It is a bad way to live.” The next summer at their trials, the young men received heavy fines but only suspended jail sentences and probation, in part because the Amish asked the judge for mercy. “We believe,” began a letter endorsed by the Schwartzes and presented by their bishop, “that the four boys have suffered, and suffered heavily, since the crime, and they have more than paid for what they did. Sending the defendants to prison would serve no good purpose, and we plead for leniency for them.”

Consequences, but Not Revenge

Amish people understand that evil deeds carry consequences—which are often meted out by the state—but they are keen not to allow that worldly process to entice them to seek revenge. Public statements of forgiveness, then, also serve to distinguish the response of Amish victims from a vindictive judicial process, especially when the Amish participate in that process as witnesses and cooperate with the police. That was the case, it seems, when twenty-four-year-old Michael J. Vieth of Monroe County, Wisconsin, went on a rampage against area Amish. Although doctors later described Vieth as “seriously disturbed,” he blamed his actions on a long-held grudge stemming from a time when a buggy had forced his car off the road. Since then, he had looked for a way “to get even with them.”

In November 1995, after drinking some noontime beers at a local bar, Vieth decided to drive by an Amish school and unload his anger. Pointing his rifle through the open window of his car, he shot at a buggy that had just left the school. As the bullets hit the horse, it reared up and shielded the Amish youth in the buggy from injury. Vieth fled the scene but returned later, after school had been dismissed. Brandishing a gun, Vieth abducted a fifteen-year-old young woman who had completed her Amish eighth-grade education and was now serving as an aide in the school. He drove her to a secluded location and raped her.

The young woman cooperated with the police by providing a description of the assailant. After searching for three days, police received a tip about Vieth and soon found evidence of the crime at his home, where he lived with his mother.

It was the first armed abduction in the history of Monroe County—and it was unusual for other reasons as well. The families of sexual assault victims are “usually seething mad with the perpetrator,” said the district attorney, “but that wasn’t the case here.” Instead, the district attorney found expressions of forgiveness. An Amish bishop told him, “We forgive the young man. . . . I hope he can change his life around.” “What good would it do to know why he did it?” asked another Amish man. “Can you usually figure out why God sent this or that? Not really.” “It’s not our place to judge. God is the great one,” said yet another.

After convincing the judge to give Vieth a sixty-year sentence, the district attorney admitted he was impressed with the Amish readiness to forgive, but he also considered it wishful thinking—or at least unconnected to his role as an instrument of public justice. “It’s just not the case,” he said, “that God will take care of everybody when you have a tragic situation, when there is evil, and [you] just hope to cleanse it with prayer.” As the rape victim’s father pondered the tragedy, he said, “It’s tested our faith, but hasn’t shaken it.” Still, he admitted to difficulty in dealing with his emotions as he thought about what happened to his daughter: “That’s something we have to work on.”

About the same time, not far away, another Amish reaction startled lawyers and judges. In the spring of 1996, Mahlon Lambright, an Amish carpenter from near Mondovi, Wisconsin, turned down $212,418 offered by an insurance company representing an English man whose truck had struck the Lambright buggy and killed his wife, Mary. Moreover, the media later reported, Lambright had asked a judge to dismiss a petition for a wrongful death settlement because his family was receiving all the financial help it needed from the Amish church. Another Amish man, who spoke to the press about the case, stressed an additional reason that Lambright refused a financial settlement: “It shows that he’s not seeking revenge, or he would have accepted the money. Our Bible says revenge is not for us.” In both cases, Amish victims had participated in the judicial process but distanced themselves from the outcomes, substituting forgiveness as their own response.

Forgiveness, Fear, and Sympathy

The stories we uncovered did not suggest that forgiveness in the aftermath of violent crime was simple or easy. Some accounts, in fact, forth-rightly mixed the theme of forgiveness with accounts of ongoing fear and the struggle to let go of anger. The 1982 murder of Naomi Huyard, the first Amish person murdered in Lancaster County history, was one such story. On the evening of November 27, fifty-year-old Naomi Huyard was killed in an especially gruesome and sexually violent way by two young men bent on imitating the murders committed by Charles Manson. One of the killers was a neighbor of the victim.

Typical of many Amish households in Lancaster County, the Huyards had rented space in an electric chest freezer at the home of a non-Amish neighbor. Naomi had gone there to retrieve some frozen food when she was attacked by the teenage son of the homeowners and an accomplice. The murder sparked a chilling fear in the female members of the Huyard family who lived in the neighborhood. For months some found it difficult to sleep; others would not walk outside or go away alone. Reflecting back on the tumultuous events, a relative remembered that, in the initial whirlwind of activity and emotional numbness that followed the killing, “we did not have time to really concentrate on trying to forgive [the killers], as some might have thought. . . . Everything still looked confusing to us.” Moreover, recalled this relative, “many people were afraid that since this happened to someone Amish, we would be so willing to forgive that we wouldn’t be concerned about [the killers] being locked up.” Such fears “were mistaken,” she wrote, “as we were very concerned about this and certainly wanted [them] locked up and taken care of by the law.”

The nature of the murder, and the protracted court trial that slowly leaked details of Huyard’s final minutes of life, deepened the agony for family members. A niece, writing two years after the events, freely admitted her struggle to forgive the killers. The Amish family also wrestled with how to relate to their neighbors. Immediately after the murder they met and cried together, and the Amish “told them it is not their fault and we do not blame them.” But later, as the parents began to insist on their son’s innocence, despite mounting evidence and an eventual court conviction to the contrary, the Huyards became angry and frustrated, and broke off most interaction with the couple.

Naomi’s niece admitted that, of the two murderers, it was harder to forgive the one who was a neighbor, because “he knew Naomi.” “But,” she said, “a Christian must forgive, yes, even the worst murderers. My thoughts were of how Jesus prayed for those who crucified Him: ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’” Even so, her written account, published a decade after the murder, contains real ambivalence. On the one hand, she concludes her story with a call to “all Christians to pray for them [convicted murderers].” On the other hand, the sexual violation of her aunt disturbed her so deeply that letting go of her anger toward the killers was obviously no easy matter. She believed that both killers were “sick,” but she had no time for their attempts to manipulate sympathy and fabricate alibis.

In other cases, the fact that the offender was a stranger may have helped make forgiveness easier and allowed victims to see wrongdoers sympathetically, as troubled but nevertheless fellow human beings. At least that was one theme in the response to a hit-and-run accident in Seymour, Missouri, in January 2000. A logging truck, trying to pass an Amish buggy on a backcountry road, crashed into the buggy, killing Leah Graber, the mother of thirteen children. Several days after Graber’s death, her family offered forgiveness to the trucker in a face-to-face conversation. They talked about friendship and about safety improvements on the local roads. “We don’t believe in pressing charges or going to courts,” said an Amish spokesperson. “Instead, let’s sit down and be friends and try to prevent this from happening again. That’s the only way to solve things.” Moreover, he noted, “It’s not our way [to press charges], we believe it’s just an accident that happened. . . . It may have been a part of God’s plan for Leah.”

Similar sentiments marked responses to a series of violent robberies in the summer of 1996 near Nappanee, Indiana. There, assailants riding in cars accosted at least twelve Amish bicyclists, knocking them off their bikes and then robbing them. At first the victims did not report the incidents. Joe Miller, who was hit and robbed of $280, said, “I forgive them, and I’d like to forget it. We all make mistakes; if we forgive we will be forgiven.”

Realizing that the drive-by robberies were not ending, one of the victims informed the police, who immediately arrested five individuals. All of them pleaded guilty. Earl Slabaugh, one of the Amish bike riders who reported an incident, went to visit the twenty-one-year-old driver of one of the cars. He told her that he had forgiven her and held nothing against her. According to news reports, she broke down and cried, crushed by her own shame and moved by this act of grace. A committee of Amish leaders and victims asked the prosecutor to convey their forgiveness at the sentencing, and numerous Amish people from the community told reporters that they were forgiving the assailants. Knowing in advance that the victims were to announce their forgiveness, the prosecutor preparing a plea bargain included a requirement that the defendants write letters of apology.

Playing the Repertoire in Georgetown

Eight days before the shooting at the West Nickel Mines School, another tragedy had visited the Amish community near Georgetown. On Sunday morning, September 24, twelve-year-old Emanuel King left his home around 5:30, as he did most mornings, to help a neighboring Amish family milk their cows. He rode his scooter out his family’s mile-long farm lane and turned right onto Georgetown Road. As he rounded a slight turn, an oncoming pickup truck crossed the center line, struck Emanuel on the far side of the road, hit a fence post, and sped away. Hearing the crash, a non-Amish neighbor came out to investigate and discovered Emanuel’s lifeless body, thrown from the site of impact.

The next day, a newspaper correspondent covering the hit-and-run accident went to Emanuel’s home and found some family members too distraught to speak. Others agreed to talk, but their words were not what the journalist had expected. “There were tears, yes, and sadness,” the reporter noted, “but also something else here”—a gracious spirit toward the woman whom police considered and later confirmed to be the hit-and-run suspect. Emanuel’s mother, grief-stricken, nevertheless wanted to convey a message to the woman. “She should come here. We would like to see her,” she told the reporter. “We hold nothing against her. We would like to tell her she should not feel bad about this. We just think Emanuel’s time was up now. That is how it was supposed to be.” One of the boy’s aunts, her eyes filled with tears, added, “Tell [the suspect] our thoughts are a lot with her, and our prayers.”

When the driver read the newspaper headline, “A Boy’s Death, a Family’s Forgiveness,” she did a surprising thing: she went to the King home to receive the words of forgiveness. An Amish neighbor reported, “When the driver read that we forgive her and that we wish she would come down here for forgiveness, she came right away on Monday evening.” The driver returned again for the viewing and for visitation with the family. Over the next several weeks “she came back three more times,” explained Emanuel’s father, “and later she even brought a new scooter for the children on what would have been Emanuel’s thirteenth birthday.”

In this time of intense grief the King family relied on a repertoire of grace, forgiveness, and trust in divine providence to make sense of events that otherwise seemed senseless and that, in many other settings, would have triggered calls for retribution. As we will see, none of these habits is simple or uncomplicated. But all were religious habits so deeply rooted in Amish life that they seemed as instinctive to Emanuel’s relatives as they were incomprehensible to outsiders. Seven days later, when five more Amish children in this corner of Lancaster County died in a horrific way, the repertoire was played again, this time for the entire world to see.