Two sisters in their traditional, everyday, Lancaster County Amish attire. (Photo: Tessa Smucker)
The road that runs through the main village of Berlin, Ohio, only about 90 minutes south of Cleveland, is called “Amish Country Byway” for its unusual number of non-automotive travelers and it’s true that driving down it, you’ll have to slow down for the horse-drawn buggies that clog up the right lane. But those seeking the “real” Amish experience in downtown Berlin might be disappointed. It’s more Disney than devout: a playground for tourists full of ersatz Amish “schnuck” (Pennsylvania Dutch for “cute”) stores selling woven baskets and postcards of bucolic farm scenes.
You only see the true Holmes County, which is home to the largest population of Amish-Mennonites in the world, when you turn off Route 62 and venture into the rolling green hills interrupted periodically by tiny towns with names like Charm and Big Prairie. You’ll likely lose service on your cell phone just as the manure smell starts to permeate the air. On my visit this past summer, I saw Amish people–groups of children sporting round straw hats, the young women in their distinctive long dresses–spilling out of family barns, where church services are held, in the distance.
The Amish don’t have any spiritual attachment to a geographical location, the way Jews have to Jerusalem or Mormons to Salt Lake City; this spot, along with Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is probably the closest they come to an idea of God’s Country.
Earlier that morning, I was introduced to Alex Samuelson*, a baby-faced 31-year-old member of the Beachy Amish-Mennonite faith who, along with his wife Rebecca*, would be my guide for the day. Alex suggested that he might be better equipped to drive and he was right: he glided along the twisting back roads and gave me an orientation to the area not even the all-knowing Siri could have provided, especially considering the spotty service.
As a Beachy Amish-Mennonite, Alex is permitted to drive–the church is what Alex calls “car-type”–but adheres to prohibitions against television, popular music, and limitations on the Internet. (These prohibitions vary somewhat from congregation to congregation, although certain stringencies–like not owning televisions–are uniform throughout Beachy society.) Like all Mennonite and Amish groups, Beachy doctrine is firmly Anabaptist, which means that they don’t accept infant or childhood baptisms. They also believe in keeping themselves separate from the world, which is one motivation behind their Plain garb (although it’s worth noting that the style of dress also differs between congregations.)
Faith Mission church in Virginia. (Photo: Supplied)
I have arranged to meet the couple because they offer insight into one of the rarest religious experiences in America: they are established converts to an Amish-Mennonite group. It is not immediately apparent that they were not born into the culture. Alex and Rebecca look, to be simple about it, like your average Amish couple: Alex has the stereotypical facial hair of an Amish man (beard, but no mustache, a prohibition which harkens back to the days when mustaches were associated with the military) and Rebecca wears an ankle length cotton-polyester dress, her hair in a neat bun underneath her white gauze cap. Alex is an expert in Plain life because he spent years adapting to it, but also because he has a doctorate in rural sociology, and so spends much of his time studying his adopted culture, or “thinking about Plain People,” as he puts it. (He relaxes, I’ll learn later, by tending to his many aquariums.) Because of his work, he’s accustomed to interviewing others about their religious identification, which meant that frequently during the drive, the conversation swerved toward my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. When the ball came back to my court, I asked Alex what it felt like when he first attended a Mennonite church when he was 18, after a year of nurturing a fascination with the culture.
“It’s like walking into a room full of celebrities,” he says. “You’ve thought about these people for so long, and they just feel so inaccessible and remote and just, here you are! They’re all around you!”
Reverent, giddy, almost lustful: it’s the way you’d expect a teenage girl to talk about her favorite pop star, and yet it’s a tone I’ve come to expect among a certain group of people when you invoke the name of the Amish. Before the internet, these “wishful Amish” wrote emotional missives to newspaper editors in areas with large Plain populations; one man I spoke to, who publishes a series of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania guidebooks, composed a form letter so as to minimize the time he spent replying to such requests. Now, the wishful Amish have dedicated internet forums (ironically) on which they write with the feverishness of the unrequited lover about their long-held desire to get close to the aloof objects of their spiritual desire.
Many say they’ve wanted to become Amish for “as long as [they] could remember,” though most of them say they have only seen Amish people on a few occasions, and don’t know much, if anything at all, about Amish theology. Some talk about wanting to find an Amish partner, others, about the fear they won’t be accepted into the community because they are single parents, or divorced, or have tattoos or once dabbled in drugs. Many are hesitant that they won’t be able to fully adjust, and so wonder if it might be possible to stay with an Amish family for a week or two, just to try out the lifestyle. Although a few commenters say they’ve taken the initiative to make their own lives more Plain–given up television, say, or started to dress more modestly–most of them appear to be banking on integration into the community to transform them, like alcoholics who decide to wait until detox before examining the deeper motivations behind their drinking.
An Amish girl mending one of her dresses on her family’s sewing machine. (Photo: Tessa Smucker)
The thread that runs through all the testimonies is one of dissatisfaction, at times, near disgust, with modern society. “As I see it, the world at large is doomed,” writes a single mother of five on the informational site Amish America. One word is consistently invoked to describe Amish life: “perfect.”
The wishful Amish will do what most obsessed people do these days: they’ll Google around a lot, devouring whatever articles or listicles they can get their hands on. During this self-directed study, many will come across the website Alex founded back in 2005, when he was attending college in his home state of Virginia. (He’s currently employed as an adjunct professor of rural sociology at a local university.) Alex built his site in order to provide access to rare documents related to Anabaptist history and culture he had discovered in his campus library (titles include “Amish-Mennonite Barns in Madison County, Ohio: The Persistence of Traditional Form Elements” and “Caesar and the Meidung [shunning].”)
“Then I began getting out-of-the-blue requests from people who were interested in visiting a church, so after a while it was more directed toward an informative website,” he says.
Amish conversion is extremely uncommon, which makes sense: who actually wants to give up modern convenience for more than a week or so? For those who have made the leap, the lived experience of conversion deviates greatly from the fantasies moving across web pages every day; it’s harder, crueler, slower than the hopeful could imagine. It’s also not a static state–for most converts, the emergence of a perfect Amish self never truly occurs.
But we couldn’t get too deep into a discussion of conversion yet, because he began turning the car into the parking lot of the converted elementary school building where his congregation holds services every week. We were late for church.
‘God’s Early Promptings’
Born in 1984 in Loudon County, Virginia, a verdant area long favored by vintners at the base of the Blue Mountain, Alex was raised in a nominally Christian family. His dad owned his own exterior housing repair business; the family lived on 10 acres in an old Victorian home, and attended church on Christmas and Easter some years, but otherwise didn’t talk much about religion. His family, which included his younger sister, was a mostly happy one, although beset by what Alex calls the “typical American plagues”: sibling rivalry, discord between his mother and father, his father drinking too much. To the latter, Alex was especially sensitive.
In second grade, Alex began to experience what he now refers to as “God’s early promptings,” although he didn’t see them that way at the time. He developed an instinctual aversion to designer clothing, particularly shirts with garish logos on the chests. “I felt like it sold me out to something else I didn’t want to sell myself out to,” he said, as I mentally compare this to my unholy childhood yearning for Adidas Sambas. His friends were starting to swear and share “bad ideas” on the playground, and Alex briefly dabbled, but then decided foul language was unequivocally wrong, so he vowed to clean his up.
No voice from the heavens, beseeching him to recognize Jesus. No 49 days spent under a fig tree, contemplating the nature of meaning. No vision of God’s Kingdom as a rural compound full of happy celibates. No, Alex’s awakening was gradual, and in those early days, inconsistent. He didn’t, in other words, connect his distaste for cursing and Polo Ralph Lauren shirts to a burgeoning religiosity, nor did he feel any paralyzing guilt at abandoning his children’s Bible in favor of his DOS video games. But his curiosity about religious life was strong enough that when his younger sister’s bus driver, whom the girl had befriended, offered to take the two children to his Southern Baptist Church one Sunday, Alex agreed. Alex’s sister lost interest after a few Sunday school classes, but Alex, then 13, was hooked. Every Sunday, he’d grab one of the free donuts and then head to Sunday school. A year later, he was baptized.
As a teenager, he was involved in school theater, history club, and Civil War reenactment. Eventually, he took a job that took his love of costuming––a core difference between Amish and other Christians—to a new level. The summer before his senior year in high school, he worked at Harpers Ferry National Park, a historical village located where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet. At Harpers Ferry, Alex dressed in period garb (he had two costumes, one an 1860s shopkeeper and the other a Union private soldier) and gave tours to groups of visitors, including families of Conservative Mennonites. “I started to become obsessed with their appearance,” he remembers. “My friends learned this and they would tell me when Mennonites appeared and I would go on break, grab a root beer and find them and just kind of be near them.” When he tells me this, I remember how I used to similarly side up to Hasidim on the New York City subway in my pre-conversion days, hoping that sheer proximity would allow me to glean some spiritual energy from them.
An Amish teenage boy takes a moment break from his daily chores. (Photo: Tessa Smucker)
Around that time, he was simultaneously examining the practices of Baptist Church to which he belonged, mostly because he felt that no one there could answer the questions he had about certain Biblical mandates, or perhaps they didn’t care enough to ask those questions themselves, which was worse. For example, he found himself particularly struck by a passage in Corinthians that states a woman should have her head covered when praying.
Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.
Alex thought the teaching was pretty clear, and was unmoved when his pastor told him that it was antiquated conve
