The Amish, Jews, Muslims and the future of religion
By Damian Thompson
The Amish are good at keeping members inside the fold: 85 per cent of children keep the faith. Combine this with an average of seven children per family, and you begin to understand why the Amish have grown from 6,000 to 275,000 over the past century.
There’s more to this success than big families combined with social pressure. The Amish spell out how to live your life, leaving little space for speculating about the supernatural. They have no seminaries; their aim is not to understand God but to follow him by perfecting their daily living. That’s a modern recipe as well as an ancient one.
The Amish, Hasidic Jews and Salafist Muslims are all good at holding on to their flocks. These three groups have different attitudes to conversion – almost no one joins the Amish, a few secular Jews become Hasidic, lots of Muslims embrace strict observance – but their emphasis on behaviour rather than belief gives them a certain robustness in a sceptical 21st century. Mainstream Christianity, in contrast, still requires adherents to believe “six impossible things before breakfast”, to quote Lewis Carroll – and then to debate them earnestly with others.
The Amish show that you can spend most of your time living the Gospel rather than thinking about it. (An example: when a gunman killed six Amish girls in 2006, their parents shocked the media by promptly forgiving him.) Perhaps there’s a hint of this in Pope Francis’s sermons, which focus on deeds rather than doctrine. At any rate, it’s a pleasing thought that the visitors gawping at the beardies in their buggies may, to some extent, be looking at the future of Christianity.
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The Amish are good at keeping members inside the fold: 85 per cent of children keep the faith. Combine this with an average of seven children per family, and you begin to understand why the Amish have grown from 6,000 to 275,000 over the past century.
There’s more to this success than big families combined with social pressure. The Amish spell out how to live your life, leaving little space for speculating about the supernatural. They have no seminaries; their aim is not to understand God but to follow him by perfecting their daily living. That’s a modern recipe as well as an ancient one.
The Amish, Hasidic Jews and Salafist Muslims are all good at holding on to their flocks. These three groups have different attitudes to conversion – almost no one joins the Amish, a few secular Jews become Hasidic, lots of Muslims embrace strict observance – but their emphasis on behaviour rather than belief gives them a certain robustness in a sceptical 21st century. Mainstream Christianity, in contrast, still requires adherents to believe “six impossible things before breakfast”, to quote Lewis Carroll – and then to debate them earnestly with others.
The Amish show that you can spend most of your time living the Gospel rather than thinking about it. (An example: when a gunman killed six Amish girls in 2006, their parents shocked the media by promptly forgiving him.) Perhaps there’s a hint of this in Pope Francis’s sermons, which focus on deeds rather than doctrine. At any rate, it’s a pleasing thought that the visitors gawping at the beardies in their buggies may, to some extent, be looking at the future of Christianity.
Read more