Stoned and Starved at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord
Amish, the Rastafari, and Flawed but Effective Anabaptist Self-Reliance
[This week’s post is a short one because I had a freelance gig at Hellworld I’m looking forward to sharing when published. Still a fun one, I hope. Maybe I’ll write lighter ones like these more often. I still have no idea, who cares, it’s free. Please subscribe if you enjoy.]
The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us: it is in which way that our end will occur?" Jesus said, "Have you indeed revealed the beginning in order that you may seek after the end? For in the place there which is the beginning there the end will be. Happy is he who will stand firmly in the beginning, and he shall know the end and he shall not taste death."
-Gospel of Thomas, Saying 18
In high school, we used to cut class and get high in the front seat of my brother’s Nissan Sentra (he was in college at the time and I inherited it) riding down 322 West to eat the best breakfast in America. On the way, inevitably, we’d have to slow down and pass a horse and buggy from the community responsible for it. For those from Southeastern Pennsylvania, the Shady Maple Smorgasbord is legendary and the Amish who run it are as essential to the history of Pennsylvania as just about any other church movement.
Growing up in Chester County, the next-door neighbor to Lancaster County where the Amish have their largest populated settled, I was familiar with the culture but not especially informed about it. We knew they didn’t use electricity for the most part, and the horse and buggies, that it was a remarkably conservative community in more than just its rejection of the modern world. The Amish were usually the butt of a joke to us (not that they cared), but for reasons that were mostly immature rather than grounded in any sort of principled rejection.
Now that I’m a bit older and more informed about them, I can more definitively say that I’m not a fan for reasons that go beyond giggling off dirt weed at the visibly antique lifestyle. Anabaptists are generally far too strict, too puritanical in a way that goes beyond just incompatibility with the modern world but veers into otherness and hatred too easily. In general my approach to this stuff is to marry the theological differences with the historical outcomes, and the historical outcomes for the Amish are reflective of the mixed bag you see from most puritanical movements. With regards to slavery, the Mennonites were ahead of the curve like the Quakers. With regards to treatment of women, the queer community, and the types of crimes fomented by a culture of silence–like many patriarchal Western Christian movements, Jesus’ love only extends so far once that enters the equation.
However, if there’s one thing that you always have to admire about the Amish, it’s that they aren’t going anywhere. Throngs of people still line up to eat the breakfast, Amish made furniture still sells like crazy around Pennsylvania, and it’s not just folksy economics powering the sustainability of the community: the Amish have direct ownership or stakes in about a fifth of the United States dairy farms. This isn’t just a community with historical roots here, but one with genuine economic bonafides. It’s hard to call any community successful when it has a track record of some pretty bad shit. But on a long enough historical timeline, there are two definitions of success and with the urgency of climate change and the impending collapse of our own state, humanity is starting to familiarize itself with the more primitive one. The Amish survive. They have survived revolutions, and wars, and persecutions, and depressions, and onward etc. One of the reasons they had an inside track on dairy farming was that the land and cattle were mostly secured, they just needed permission from church authorities to use machine milking so they could catch up with the scale of an industrialized society.
The big misconception about the Amish is that they refuse to adapt with the times–this is mostly true, obviously, and I’m not trying to argue that the Amish are secretly some advanced society. But they do pick stuff up when it’s helpful without compromising the core lifestyle; the Amish go to hospitals, and run storefronts in strip malls, and have phones and the like. Technology is adopted after a significant amount of time and high level of skepticism, some of which is irrational (i.e. scripture literalism) and some of which is rational (as a parent of three kids, I think I side with the Amish on kids using smartphones, for example).
I don’t mean to go full Manu Ginobili on this Eurostep from one topic to another, but when talking with friends about some of the self-reliance scriptural communalist movements that I’m researching, it struck me how much philosophical and scriptural overlap there was with Amish and Rastafari in Jamaica. Obviously, given the Rastafari connection with slavery, I want to be clear about what I do and don’t mean here: I would hope it’s obvious I’m not trying to say that the Amish struggled in anywhere near the same way that the Rastafari did. Instead, what I’m saying is that the movement’s dedication to self-reliance, modeled behavior, and a complete fracturing from the state is deeply reminiscent of the Amish in Lancaster County. The Amish are very rebellious, despite the fact that they obviously don’t look it or fit what you’d consider to be the stereotype of an anti-authoritarian.
The connection is more than just aesthetic, too. Rastafari are largely born out of the Arminian Baptist movements, and Anabaptist theology (which is the root of Amish tradition) was a major influence on Jacob Arminius, the Arminian Baptist movement’s namesake. On that side of things 500 years ago, it’s actually a little bit easier to make the more direct comparison, as early Anabaptist theology involved charismatic demonstrations like speaking in tongues “under the power of the Holy Spirit” and the like. That’s the root of Arminian Baptist theology, where each individual has an equal vessel to the Holy Spirit, and therefore all in a congregation are equally able to know and express their oneness with God in their own way. Anabaptists, and the Arminian Baptists that powered Antebellum and Caribbean separatist movements, all preached a message of self-reliance that included nonconformity to the modern world. The Rastafari were also scripture literalists (early on, at least) who syncretized scripture from the Bible and the Kebra Nagast, an Ethiopian nationalist historical epic. Scripture literalism is how separatist movements get away with it, so to speak. I’m not doing shit unless God tells me, buddy.
Growing up out near Amish country, I would be lying if I said I envied any of it, and I’m not feeling that much differently in my thirties. This isn’t meant to romanticize the literal Amish tradition. I’m not a scripture literalist in how I interpret the holy texts, nor am I a literalist in terms of how I assess the Amish tradition. Hopefully, the body of my work and how I live my life is evidence enough that I have no tolerance or patience for any religion or tradition that subjugates members of its own community. As such, I don’t feel like I risk endorsing the bad parts of the Amish tradition (or some of the more dogmatic / orthodox / conservative Rastafari views on women and gay people, for that matter) by pointing out that maybe the agrarian communalists figured some stuff out. Specifically, right about now I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I was part of a community that was taking care of its own needs. Things are pretty fucked up, and I don’t know if they’re gonna get better–soon or ever, really, in this part of the world.
The Amish held firm in their county as Episcopalian wealth flooded surrounding lands, refusing to move with the times. They stayed leadened, for good and ill, and now that global supply chains are crumbling such that we likely need to reassess our economies–well, it follows that the Rastafari, Amish, Mennonite, Maoist, etc. theories of communalism have some lessons that might come in handy. With the way climate change is already starting to completely disrupt our centralized food production system, local is going to soon be a lot more than a bougie label on produce.
You always have to caveat any praise for an orthodox tradition. They’re orthodox for a reason, and that includes the stuff that is very ugly. But they also survive because they are orthodox; because they found a tradition that will not fail even as the rest of the world completely spins off of its axis. As a species of modeled behavior, it’s important to have those traditions so that we can fall back on tangible examples of what is needed in times of severe distress, but it’s also equally important to advance our thinking such that the tradition becomes more and more niche (thus reducing in scale the reverberating spiritual cruelty of orthodoxy). Ideally, the ones with a clear track record of causing harm would become so niche as to disappear, but the oppressive survives alongside the useful, thus increasing the need for a constant moral reckoning for religious tradition. The goal should never be to create more dogma, but to syncretize what works and shed what doesn’t as we soldier on in failure together. Unfortunately, when it comes to the wealthiest churches on Earth, reality once again fails the ideal.
Casey Taylor is a writer manufactured in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.