Amish

• 1. Introduction

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  The Amish population surpassed 405,000 people in the United States alone, a figure that has roughly doubled every twenty years since the 1990s. Yet this community traces its entire identity back to a single schism in Switzerland in 1693, when a bishop named Jakob Ammann broke away from the Swiss Mennonite Anabaptists over a question of table fellowship: should members who had been formally banned be avoided even at common meals? Those who followed Ammann became the Amish. Those who disagreed, led by bishop Hans Reist, eventually became the Swiss Mennonite Conference.

  From that original rupture, several questions unfold. How did a small 17th-century Swiss sect become a distinctly American phenomenon, with nearly half the population of Holmes County, Ohio, identifying as Amish? What does it mean to live inside a community that explicitly rejects the individualism of the surrounding culture, and how has that community navigated compulsory schooling, military service, and genetic disease? And why, as recently as 2023, were 39 new Amish settlements established across the United States in a single year?

• 2. Roots in Radical Reform

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  On the 21st of January 1525, in Zurich, Conrad Grebel and George Blaurock baptized each other as believing adults, then baptized others. This act was illegal, seditious in the eyes of both the Catholic Church and the early Protestant reformers, and it launched the Swiss Brethren movement, which became part of the broader Radical Reformation. The Anabaptists, as they were called by their opponents, insisted that baptism had to be a conscious adult commitment, not an infant rite.

  Huldrych Zwingli, who had led the Swiss Reformation and under whose circle Grebel and Blaurock had once worked, rejected their position entirely. The split was immediate and violent in its consequences. The Swiss Brethren faced persecution from both Catholic and Protestant authorities.

  Within the Swiss Brethren, tensions between communities in different geographic regions developed. The Oberland communities, those from the Bernese Oberland, tended toward stricter practice and moved into more remote areas. The Emmental communities were more moderate. By the late 17th century, this internal geography of zeal had set the stage for the founding break.

• 3. The Founding Schism

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  Jakob Ammann first appeared as a named figure in 1710, when the word "Amish" was coined by his opponents as a Schandename, a term of disgrace. The actual split Ammann drove had happened in 1693, focused on a single disciplinary question that the Emmentalers, following Hans Reist, thought should remain mild. Ammann insisted that those placed under the ban, the formal Meidung or shunning, should be avoided not just at communion but at the family dinner table as well.

  The stakes of this argument were not merely procedural. They touched the deepest question of what it means to belong to a community. For the Amish, the boundary between inside and outside had to be visible in daily life, not just in ceremonial moments.

  Those who took Ammann's side carried this logic of visible separation forward across the Atlantic. Between 1717 and 1750, roughly 500 Amish migrated to Pennsylvania, drawn by its lack of religious persecution and its affordable land. Many settled first in what became Berks County before moving, partly because of the French and Indian War, to Lancaster County, which remains the largest single Amish settlement in the world with about 44,700 people as of 2025.

• 4. Divisions on American Soil

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  Between 1862 and 1878, a series of annual ministerial conferences called Dienerversammlungen were held at different locations across the country. The very idea of bishops assembling to discuss uniformity was itself unprecedented in Amish church life. More traditionally minded bishops boycotted the meetings within the first several gatherings.

  The roughly two-thirds of participants who engaged with the conferences eventually became known as Amish Mennonites and drifted toward merger with the broader Mennonite Church, mostly in the early 20th century. The holdouts became the Old Order Amish. This was less a clean split than what the source describes as a "sorting out."

  Further fractures came later. In 1858, the Egli Amish began withdrawing, and by 1908 they had renamed themselves the Defenseless Mennonites. During World War I, two particularly conservative affiliations formed: the Swartzentruber Amish in Holmes County, Ohio, and the Buchanan Amish in Iowa. In the late 1920s, those who wanted to adopt the car broke away and organized under the name Beachy Amish. In 1966, congregations that wanted both personal assurance of salvation and modern agricultural methods left to form the New Order Amish. Each division followed the same logic: draw the line slightly differently, and a new fellowship forms.

• 5. The Ordnung and Technology

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  Until about 1950, Old Order Amish identity was not tied to the limited use of technology. Amish farmers and their rural neighbors used the same farm and household tools. Telephones were the first invention that was formally rejected, followed by cars, tractors, and radios.

  The reasoning behind these rejections is rooted in two German concepts: the rejection of Hochmut, meaning pride or arrogance, and the embrace of Gelassenheit, a kind of composed submission to God's will that also implies a reluctance to be self-promoting. Modern innovations such as electricity might spark competition for status goods. Photographs might cultivate personal vanity. Labor-saving machines reduce dependence on the community, which is precisely what the Amish do not want.

  Each congregation's specific rules are codified in the Ordnung, reviewed twice a year by every baptized member. Consensus is required: Lord's Supper is held only when all members give their consent to the current Ordnung. The result is that permissible technology varies significantly across affiliations. The Lancaster affiliation, the largest with 291 church districts as of 2011, sits toward the more permissive end of the Old Order mainstream. The Swartzentruber affiliation, with 119 districts, sits at the most conservative end. No Old Order or New Order affiliation permits cars, radio, or television. In recent years, many Amish have adopted electric bicycles as faster than either walking or harnessing a horse.

• 6. Language and Identity

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  Pennsylvania Dutch, the primary language of most Amish communities, is not named after the Netherlands. The word "Dutch" is a corruption of Deitsch, the Pennsylvania German word for German, itself cognate with the Standard German Deutsch and ultimately descending from a Proto-Germanic root meaning "of the people." The term persisted in the 19th century as a way for established Pennsylvania Germans to distinguish themselves from the newer German immigrants who arrived after 1830.

  Most Old Order Amish are functionally bilingual. Pennsylvania Dutch governs the dinner table and the church service. English handles reading, writing, schooling, and business transactions. A third language, Standard German, is used for prayers and hymn-singing at services, where it is referred to in Pennsylvania Dutch as Hochdeitsch. This three-language structure is not accidental; it actively marks the boundaries between home, faith, and the outside world.

  Two distinct Swiss Amish subgroups, whose ancestors arrived in the 1850s, speak forms of Bernese German or a Low Alemannic Alsatian dialect rather than Pennsylvania Dutch. According to one scholar quoted in the source, Pennsylvania Dutch is "one of a handful of minority languages in the United States that is neither endangered nor supported by continual arrivals of immigrants." The language persists because the community that speaks it persists.

• 7. Health, Genetics, and Medicine

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  Because nearly all Amish descend from a few hundred 18th-century founders, certain recessive genetic conditions are more prevalent than in the general population. This is the founder effect. Conditions including dwarfism, Angelman syndrome, and maple syrup urine disease appear at elevated rates. The Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, has developed effective treatments for maple syrup urine disease, which was once fatal.

  The cancer picture runs in the opposite direction from what outsiders might expect. Overall cancer rates among the Amish are reduced. Among Ohio Amish adults, tobacco-related cancer rates are 37 percent of the rate for Ohio adults generally, and non-tobacco-related cancers are 72 percent of that rate. Skin cancer rates are lower despite widespread outdoor labor, attributed to protective clothing: wide-brimmed hats and long sleeves.

  Amish communities reject commercial health insurance and most do not participate in Social Security. When medical costs arise, the church may collect money from its members to cover a neighbor's bills. Some Amish travel to Mexico for non-urgent surgery to reduce costs. The community accepts children born with disorders as part of Gottes Wille, God's will, and opposes genetic testing before marriage or during pregnancy. Suicide rates among the Amish run at about half the rate of the general population. The DDC Clinic in Middlefield, Ohio, serves both Amish and non-Amish families with inherited or metabolic disorders.

• 8. Growth and the Modern World

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  From roughly 125,000 people in 1992 to over 405,000 in the United States by 2025, the Amish population grew 84 percent between 1992 and 2008 alone, at 3.6 percent per year. The average was seven children per family in the 1970s, with a total fertility rate of 5.3 in the 2010s. About 85 percent of Amish youth choose adult baptism and remain in the community.

  As land pressure intensified in the late 20th century, many Amish men left farming. In the Greater Holmes County settlement in Ohio, about 75 percent of married males were full-time farmers in 1965. By 1996 that figure had fallen to about 40 percent, and by 2015 only 16 percent of male family heads who listed an occupation were farmers. Construction, carpentry, roofing, metalworking, and small-scale manufacturing now dominate. Approximately 12,000 of the 40,000 dairy farms in the United States were Amish-owned as of 2018.

  New settlements spread to relieve land pressure and to find community-compatible environments. Thirty-nine new settlements were established in 2023 alone. The Canadian Amish, who number over 6,000 today, have since 2015 moved into Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island because of rising Ontario land prices. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Wisconsin v. Yoder that the state could not compel Amish children into high school past the eighth grade, affirming the claim of Jonas Yoder, Wallace Miller, and Adin Yutzy, each of whom had been fined five dollars for refusal. That ruling remains the legal foundation protecting Amish education from state interference.