Amish Spirituality

Quaker theologian Sandra Cronk describes Old Order spirituality with the German word Gelassenheit, commonly translated “yieldedness” or “submission.” The Amish, Cronk says, “see God working in the world with the power of powerlessness.” As they seek to emulate this paradoxical pattern, “Old Order people believe they are living the divine order revealed by Christ.” The Amish believe that submission should characterize one’s relationship with God, as suggested by the phrase “thy will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:10). But a spirituality of yielding “is not just a personal experience,” according to Cronk. It expands into an ethic of yielding to one another, renouncing self-defense, and giving up the desire for justification or efforts at revenge.

Gelassenheit does not necessarily breed fatalism, however. In their everyday lives Amish people make choices, calculate risk, and plan for the future. And although they often speak of “God’s plans” behind events that are tragic or painful, they do not believe that God predestines history or that they are merely puppets in a divinely determined script. The Amish believe that humans possess choices of ultimate significance, choices such as whether or not to make a commitment to Christ. For the Amish, this decision—made as an adult and sealed by baptism—signifies a person’s entrance into church membership. Submission to the will of God can also translate into stubborn refusal to follow the government’s rules, as when Amish men rejected military induction or when Amish parents refused to send their teenagers to public high schools.

Gelassenheit has many dimensions. One aspect reflects an individual’s willingness to surrender self-will to God’s will. Ideally, a person filled with Gelassenheit does not argue with God. The martyrs burned at the stake for their faith epitomize the deepest form of spiritual yieldedness, of literally giving up their lives to God. Yet in the daily lives of twenty-first-century Amish, Gelassenheit means yielding to church authority and being willing to accept the Ordnung, or rules of the church, and the collective wisdom it embodies. Moreover, a lifestyle of humility and modesty also gives witness to the gentle spirit of Gelassenheit. For the Amish, the Pennsylvania German verb uffgevva (to give up) captures one aspect of Gelassenheit: the willingness to give up one’s self to the authority of the community and its God-ordained leaders. Indeed, uffgevva is the word the Amish typically use when speaking about submission. Its multiple meanings include giving up self-will, submitting to an authority (a parent or the church), and yielding to God’s will.

Gelassenheit also shapes Amish perspectives on women’s roles in their community. Based on their understanding of certain New Testament passages and in a fashion similar to other traditional societies, the Amish hold that men are the spiritual head of the home and that wives should submit to their husbands’ authority. Women with young children rarely hold full-time jobs outside the home, although they are increasingly involved with running family businesses in addition to managing households. And although women vote on various church matters, they do not hold ministerial office or wield official authority. Men’s and women’s spheres of work and influence are clear, and the idea of submission is frequently invoked to describe women’s relationship to men. At the same time, Gelassenheit is valued across gender boundaries and understood to be a desirable trait among both men and women.

What is most striking to persons accustomed to the assertive individualism of Western culture is Gelassenheit’s ability to trump personal desire and produce submissive and self-giving behavior. Amish people practice Gelassenheit every day as they dress in prescribed clothing, decline to pose for photographs, and make themselves vulnerable by driving buggies amid fast-moving traffic. Gelassenheit shapes personalities that are not aggressive, that hesitate before responding to questions, and that express joy with a gentle smile or quiet chuckle rather than a loud, boisterous laugh. Gelassenheit is closely related to nonresistance, the Amish commitment to taking literally Jesus’ teaching to “resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). The spirit of Gelassenheit rejects self-defense and revenge.

The spirituality of Gelassenheit is “caught” as much as it is taught. Children are brought up in a world soaked in rituals and habits that express submission and endorse self-surrender. That world is also filled with people from the past—a past that touches the present—who witness to the importance of submission, nonresistance, and forgiveness.

Stories and Songs

The Amish are a story-telling people, and perhaps the best-known story in Amish circles is that of Jacob Hochstetler, an eighteenth-century Amish man who lived with his family on the Pennsylvania frontier. In 1757, as the French and Indian War reached their corner of the world, the Hochstetlers awoke one night to find Native Americans attacking their cabin. Two of Hochstetler’s sons, Christian and Joseph, reached for their hunting guns, but Jacob would have none of it; he forbade them to use violence. Instead, the family took refuge in the cellar. The mother, one son, and one daughter were killed. Two of the surviving sons later fathered large families, from which a sizeable percentage of today’s Amish population can trace its ancestry—no doubt one of the reasons the story is so often repeated.

The tale is also told because it conveys a central cultural concern for nonretaliation and submission. A father who does not try to protect his children might appear negligent to outsiders, but the Amish see Jacob Hochstetler as modeling faithfulness to Jesus’ call to nonresistance. Jacob did so, the story suggests, as a loving parent who curbed his sons’ impulse to defend their lives through violent means. In this story, reprinted in genealogies, included in Amish school textbooks, and repeated around dinner tables, Jacob Hochstetler is no fool. In contrast to many popular models of manhood, Jacob offers a model of Amish masculinity that illustrates the character of Gelassenheit.

Nowhere do examples from the past merge with the spirituality of the present more than in Amish worship. Amish church services are awash in the language and rituals of self-surrender. Sunday morning gatherings, three hours in length, begin with hymn singing from the Ausbund, the sixteenth-century hymnal that includes songs written by imprisoned Anabaptists. Amish hymn singing, like other aspects of Amish life, is remarkably unhurried by modern standards. Singing a four-verse hymn may take fifteen to twenty minutes. The tunes, passed on orally because the hymnal includes no musical notation, linger in the air as members extend syllables and hold notes. In the spirit of Gelassenheit, not even time is forced.

Ausbund hymns speak of dependence on God and the fleeting nature of human life on earth. The Lord’s Prayer is one of the hymns. Others are martyr ballads, recounting stories of biblical figures, early Christians, or Anabaptists who died as Christ did—without a fight—and left justice in God’s hands, praying for the salvation of their executioners. One hymn, written by Christopher Baumann, describes his torture at the hands of authorities:

They stretch me [on the rack] and torment me,
They tear at my limbs.
My God! To you I lament,
You will see into this.

Baumann goes on to confess total dependence on God, but his prayer is not for divine retribution on his torturers:

My God, I plead from my heart,
Forgive them their sin,
Those who inflict upon me this pain.

Another hymn, by the martyr Georg Wagner, presents Jesus’ crucifixion and refusal to defend himself as an example for others:

Take notice how
That we also in such manner
Patiently suffer here
To help Him bear the reproach.

Reflecting Forgiveness in a Martyrs Mirror

Amish worship involves kneeling for prayer, listening to the reading of two chapters from the New Testament, and hearing two sermons, one about twenty minutes long and the other about an hour long. Without fail, the bishops or ministers who preach begin by emphasizing their own shortcomings and unworthiness to speak. This embodiment of humility resurfaces again at the end of the sermon. The preacher concludes by apologizing for his weaknesses and calls on other ministers to correct any errors he may have made. The other ministers might do so, but not without first citing their own limitations.

Delivered extemporaneously by men without seminary training, sermons rely heavily on the retelling of stories from the Bible and from Anabaptist history, mixed with observations and lessons drawn from everyday life. It is not uncommon for sermons to refer to stories recorded in Martyrs Mirror, a thousand-page book filled with accounts of early Christian martyrs and sixteenth-century Anabaptist men and women who died for their faith. Their example of dying well is offered as a model of patience even for twenty-first-century Amish listeners who are not sitting in dungeons.

Compiled in Dutch in 1660 by a Mennonite minister, Martyrs Mirror was later translated into German and English. An Amish publisher sells several hundred copies each year in both German and English. Despite its dense and often difficult prose, Martyrs Mirror is widely known in Amish circles and can be found in many homes. Its message reinforces the distinction between the church and the world, and confirms the Amish concern about putting too much trust in worldly authorities.

Martyr traditions are hardly unique to the Amish. Many religious groups and some political movements have honored heroes who died for noble causes. But the memory of martyrs has often been used to fuel revenge. Whether in sixteenth-century Protestant stories of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which incited French religious conflict and justified retaliation against Catholics, or in the rhetoric of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade at the turn of the twenty-first century, a powerful impulse ensures that undeserved deaths are repaid in kind.

Rather than fueling retaliation, however, the Amish martyr heritage nourishes an ethic of nonretaliation and love of enemy. From the beginning, the Anabaptists believed that “their martyrs were true Christian martyrs, [precisely] because Anabaptists had not shed the blood of other Christians, as had Catholic and Protestant officials,” historian Brad Gregory observes. They were true martyrs, in part because “they had persecuted no one.”

Through the years the Amish have remembered the martyrs’ experiences as examples of self-surrender to be emulated, not as scores to be settled. Indeed, in recently published reflections on Anabaptist martyr hymns, one Amish minister warns fellow Old Orders against any temptation to blame today’s Catholics for the persecution that Amish forebears suffered, often at the hands of magistrates loyal to Rome. Not only, he writes, is there “no point made in accusing any church of today for what happened four and five hundred years ago,” but the very act of using a martyr memory to find fault with others negates the message of humility and forgiveness that the stories are supposed to teach. “Shouting down the beliefs of other people is surely not what we are here on earth for,” he insists. “None of us can be sure that we have all the truth.” Instead, “what needs to be deplored and regretted is the abuse of power that almost always goes with [any] group of people having the upper hand.”

The self-surrender at the heart of Gelassenheit cultivates Amish forgiveness. In a study guide published by an Old Order Amish press to accompany Martyrs Mirror, the author draws the connection directly, asserting that “when the persecutors prepared to put them to death, the Anabaptists wanted to die as Jesus did, praying for their persecutors and forgiving them.” Both in the sixteenth century as well as today, their example “would have been a powerful encouragement to lay down one’s life in a spirit of forgiveness.”

Forgiveness is a regular feature of Martyrs Mirror stories. Hendrick Alewijns, executed in 1569, connected God’s forgiveness of his own sins with his willingness to forgive his persecutors: “May God forgive you all [the] wrong you did against me, as I forgive you, and as I would have it done to me, in regard to my sins.” When an acquaintance betrayed an Anabaptist peddler to the authorities, the arrested man assured him that he would “gladly and from my heart forgive you for this, and it is my earnest desire that the Lord may have mercy upon you.” Sisters-in-law Maria and Ursula van Beckum echoed Jesus’ words on the cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and another martyr, Jan Watier, even asked his executioners to forgive him, in case Watier had inadvertently wronged them.

Others awaiting execution wrote to their families with directives to forgive those who were about to take them from their loved ones. From his prison cell Jan Wouters sent word to his wife to pray for and forgive the person who had captured him. Refusing to forgive would place her in divine danger, he feared, because it would “prevent the Lord . . . from forgiving your debt; hence I beseech you to forgive it from the heart. And pray for them that afflict you . . . for we daily need forgiveness, because we are frail.”

Nonresistance, humility, and forgiveness blend together in the Old Order spirit of Gelassenheit. “Forgiving the persecutors at the moment of death was the final act of following Christ during one’s lifetime,” according to the Amish study guide. “Christ did not use the sword during his life, nor did He resist with the sword at the time of His death. Rather, He forgave His enemies.” In the Amish mind, to love one’s enemies, as Jesus taught, surely means forgiving them as well.

The Dramatic Witness of Dirk Willems

As we asked Amish people about examples of forgiveness, many of them mentioned a story “about the guy who ran across the ice.” Although not everyone could recall the story’s details, all knew the general outline—and the Amish moral—of this dramatic Martyrs Mirror account of self-sacrificing love for one’s enemy.

The guy who ran across the ice was Dirk Willems, a Dutch Anabaptist from the village of Asperen who was arrested in 1569 for being baptized as an adult and allowing forbidden religious gatherings to be held in his home. Jailed in a palace-turned-prison, Willems escaped by knotting rags into a rope and lowering himself out a window of the castle. But his getaway would not be easy. A guard noticed the prisoner’s flight and began pursuing him, apparently with the mayor in tow. As they ran, Willems came to a frozen pond, and although he made it safely across, the ice was beginning to break up with the spring thaw. The hapless guard fell through the ice, however, and began to sink. Fearing he would drown, the guard cried out for Willems to turn back and rescue him.

Here Amish storytellers often pause for effect: listeners are to consider Dirk Willems’s options and reflect on their own ethical instincts. Did the guard’s fall through the ice provide a path of escape, a providential means of saving Willems, for which the Anabaptist escapee should praise God? Should Willems keep running and leave the mayor to save his employee from the icy waters? Was it even practical for Willems to try to help his pursuer, since the pond’s surface might easily collapse under his weight and leave them both to drown?

The narrative tension only increases as the story continues. Willems stopped, turned around, and went back to save his pursuer’s life. Willems literally extended his hand to his enemy and carefully pulled him to safety. Unlike stories commending soldiers who sacrifice their lives for their comrades or parents who forfeit health and wealth for their children, this story lauds a man for risking his life for his mortal enemy.

The story’s conclusion drives the point home: no sooner had Willems saved the guard than the mayor caught him and insisted on having him burned at the stake. The execution was bungled—a strong wind briefly blew the flames away from Willems’s upper body—but that only made his death more torturous. Martyrs Mirror reports that the wind carried Willems’s voice to the next village, where residents heard him cry out more than seventy times. “Seventy times!” the Martyrs Mirror study guide underscores. “Peter asked Jesus if he should forgive one who sinned against him seven times, and Jesus said not seven times, ‘but seventy times seven.’ Dirk forgave his enemies many times.”

This striking story of forgiveness and love for one’s enemy has become the classic Amish martyr story, memorialized not only in Martyrs Mirror but also in the Amish periodical Family Life. An embellished version titled “Dirk Willems and the Thief Catcher,” in the curricula of Amish schoolchildren, implicitly asks students to identify with the man who turned back to do good to the one who was trying to harm him.

Forgiveness in Amish Schoolbooks

The Bible and Martyrs Mirror are the primary forgiveness texts in Amish life, but children learn stories of forgiveness from their schoolbooks as well. The vast majority of Amish children attend Amish schools, where teachers reinforce the church’s values through curricula that parents have helped to shape. Many schools use Pathway Readers, a set of textbooks published by an Old Order Amish press that bear titles such as Living Together and Seeking True Values. Our Heritage, the last volume in the series, is used in the eighth grade, the final year of Amish education.

The cover of Our Heritage features a drawing of chains and shackles, an image of imprisonment and an allusion to martyrdom. Dozens of stories, arranged in sections such as “The Way of Love” and “People Who Served,” explicitly teach nonresistant love and encourage the practice of forgiveness. For example, “Peter Miller’s Revenge” tells the tale of a nonresistant Christian named Peter Miller who lived during the time of the American Revolution. “Miller and his friends could not conscientiously take part in war, nor could they take sides,” the story explains. “They strongly believed war was wrong but they never refused to help a man in need, whether he was a British soldier or an American.” The narrative then introduces readers to Michael Whittman, a man who considered Miller “a stupid fool” for his nonresistant position and repeatedly harassed him.

One day, as Miller was tending to a “half-starved” deserter from George Washington’s army, he learned from the runaway that Whittman was about to be hanged as a turncoat. Immediately Miller set out to intercede for his harasser, walking three days through deep snow to appeal directly to General Washington. The general patiently listened to Miller but then explained that Whittman had received a fair trial and a just sentence. Had that not been the case, Washington replied calmly, “I would be happy to pardon your friend.” “My friend?” exclaimed Miller. “He is my bitterest enemy!”

Washington was shocked, unable to comprehend Miller’s desire to request leniency for his enemy. Nonetheless, Washington issued a pardon and Miller delivered it to the place of execution in the nick of time. The story ends with another Amish lesson: the priority of action over talk. “‘Oh, Peter,’ Whittman sobbed, ‘How could you ever forgive me after the way I treated you?’ Dumbly Peter shook his head. He could not speak. And words were not needed.”

Not all the girls enrolled at the West Nickel Mines School would complete their lessons in the eighth-grade Pathway Reader. Yet they had already absorbed Amish values from their families, churches, and school—sources of teaching, example, and encouragement that reinforced one another.

On Sunday, October 1, children in Amish households around Nickel Mines would have heard Jesus’ parable of the servant who begged his master for forgiveness but then turned and refused to forgive a fellow servant (Matthew 18:21-35). This story, which is part of the Amish lectionary for the weeks prior to their autumn communion service, suggests that Christians withhold forgiveness at their peril. Families attending church that day would have heard sermons on forgiveness, along with allusions to the sacrificial love of martyr ancestors. Because church districts gather for worship only every other Sunday, families who did not have church that day would have read and discussed the Matthew 18 text at home. When the parents of a ten-year-old girl who would be wounded in the shooting asked her the meaning of the parable, she responded, “We must forgive others.”

The next day, when thirteen-year-old Marian asked Charles Roberts to shoot her first, apparently hoping to absorb his anger and save her classmates, her first response in the face of unprecedented risk was to sacrifice herself to save others. As an eighth-grader, she had already acquired the habits of Gelassenheit, habits that were so deeply ingrained that she could face her death with a courage that characterized the martyrs whose stories she had so often heard. Those values, deeply embedded in Amish consciousness, sprang into practice during the course of Roberts’s rampage—and in the forgiveness that flowed in its wake.