In Amish Country, the Future Is Calling
In Amish Country, the Future Is Calling
By KEVIN GRANVILLE and ASHLEY GILBERTSON SEPT. 15, 2017
A young woman, wearing a traditional full-length Amish
dress and white bonnet, stepped away from a farmer’s market, opened her palm
and revealed a smartphone. She began to scroll through screens, seemingly
oblivious to the activity around her.
Not far away, a man in his late 60s with a silvery beard,
wide-brimmed straw hat and suspenders adjusted the settings on a
computer-driven crosscut saw. He was soon cutting pieces for gazebos that are
sold online and delivered around the country.
The Amish have not given up on horse-drawn buggies. Their
rigid abstinence from many kinds of technology has left parts of their
lifestyle frozen since the 19th century: no cars, TVs or connections to
electric utilities, for example.
But computers and cellphones are making their way into
some Amish communities, pushing them — sometimes willingly, often not — into
the 21st century.
New technology has created fresh opportunities for
prosperity among the Amish, just as it has for people in the rest of the world.
A contractor can call a customer from a job site. A store owner’s software can
make quick work of payroll and inventory tasks. A bakery can take credit cards.
But for people bound by a separation from much of the
outside world, new tech devices have brought fears about the consequence of
internet access. There are worries about pornography; about whether social
networks will lead sons and daughters to date non-Amish friends; and about
connecting to a world of seemingly limitless possibilities.
“Amish life is about recognizing the value of agreed-upon
limits,” said Erik Wesner, an author who runs a blog, Amish America, “and the
spirit of the internet cuts against the idea of limits.”
John, who works a computerized saw at Amish Country
Gazebos near Lancaster, Pa., likened it to the prohibition on automobiles.
“Not using cars is a way of keeping us together,” he
said. (Like most of the people interviewed for this article, he declined to
give his surname, out of an Amish sense of humility; many refrained from having
their faces photographed for the same reason.)
“There’s always a concern about what would lead our young
folk out of the church and into the world,” John added.
The internet also threatens another Amish bonding agent:
For a society in which formal education ends after eighth grade, youngsters
learn a trade or craft alongside a relative or other member of the community.
“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not
thinking,” said Levi, another woodworker. “The more people rely on technology,
the more we want to sit behind a desk. But you can’t build a house sitting
behind a desk.”
“My concern for our future, for our own children,” he
said, “is that they lose their work ethic.”
Some young people do not agree.
Marylin, 18, said that when she and her friends gathered
for church activities, “Our youth leaders ask us to respect that we’re together
and not use the phones, so we only check our messages and the time and stuff.”
But she insisted that some leniency was necessary.
“We can’t live like we did 50 years ago because so much
has changed,” she said. “You can’t expect us to stay the same way. We love our
way of life, but a bit of change is good.”
The Amish community is growing at a rate that may
surprise outsiders — and that growth is helping to push the sect’s adoption of
technology.
The Amish population in the United States is estimated at
around 313,000, up nearly 150 percent from 25 years ago, according to
researchers at Elizabethtown College near Lancaster. Large families are the
chief reason: Married women have seven children on average, and Amish people
marry at a higher rate and at a younger age than Americans over all.
In the Lancaster area, as open land has become scarce and
more costly, the rapid population growth has pushed some Amish families into
more rural areas in places like upstate New York. Others have left farming and
moved into business trades. Moses Smucker, for example, opened a food store and
sandwich shop at Philadelphia’s popular Reading Terminal Market. Six days a
week, he is driven from the Lancaster area to Philadelphia.
“Philadelphia is very fast-paced,” he said. “Then I go
home, and I can drive my horse. I enjoy horses. Some people don’t, but I do. It
slows everything down.”
His business, Smucker’s Quality Meats and Grill, caters
to tourists and office workers near City Hall. It takes credit cards, and has
four and a half stars on Yelp. (“Pot roast beef sandwich was PUUURFECT!!” one
reviewer wrote.)
Referring to technology, Mr. Smucker said, “You have to
do what you have to do to stay in business. People are starting to understand
that.”
There are probably 2,000 successful Amish businesses in
the Lancaster area, many of them multimillion-dollar enterprises, said Donald
B. Kraybill, a retired professor at Elizabethtown’s Young Center for Anabaptist
and Pietist Studies.
This “very entrepreneurial, very capitalistic” tendency,
he said, was all the more remarkable because it was channeled through a
“culture of restraint.”
Many Amish people draw a bright line between what is
allowed at work — smartphones, internet access — and what remains forbidden at
home.
Still, the divisions can get fuzzy. Connecting a house to
the public utility is unheard of, but many homes are electrified with power
generators and solar panels. Propane-powered refrigerators are found in many
kitchens. And “Amish taxi” services, driven by non-Amish people, provide a way
to get around without violating the rule against owning a car.
John, the woodworker at Amish Country Gazebos, spends
part of his time operating the computer-guided saw, which would look at home in
any modern cabinetry shop. His mastery of the machine, at 68, can be a source
of teasing at home.
“We call him the computer geek sometimes,” said his son,
Junior, laughing as the family sat down to supper.
The crowd around the table on this evening made for an
Amish tableau. John and his wife, Lizzie, were there, along with Junior, his
wife, their four daughters, and a son who had been born at home just five days
before.
Lizzie had prepared steak, potatoes, and corn, with
watermelon from the garden for dessert. The family members bowed their heads to
say grace. No buzzing phone would interrupt this meal.
John had his worries about where technology was taking
the Amish community.
“We’re not supposed to have computers; we’re not supposed
to have cellphones,” he said. “We’re allowed to have a phone, but not in the
house. But to do business, you need a computer, or access to one, and that
phone moves into the house. So how do you balance that?”
Lizzie said she was upset by how people had become so
attached to their phones.
“People are treating those phones like they are gods,”
she said. “They’re bowing down to it at the table, bowing down to it when
they’re walking. Here we say we don’t bow down to idols, and that’s getting
dangerously close, I think.”
Professor Kraybill said such insights were not unusual
among Amish people.
They “are more savvy about the impact of technology on
human interactions than most of us are,” he said.
Mr. Wesner said that Amish concerns about the effects of
constant cellphone use may be borne out in the wider world. Things are said
online that would never be said in public. The speed and accessibility of
communicating online can lead people to be impatient and dissatisfied with a
slower, more deliberate life. Regular use of cellphones can result in an
over-reliance on machines and technology to solve problems.
And a phone can pull individuals away from a group.
“A cellphone and some earbuds are all it takes to place
yourself in your own world, isolated from the rest of society,” Mr. Wesner
said. “In some sense that is profoundly anti-Amish.”
For now, some people in the Amish community seem to be
able to keep modern technology at arm’s length.
Sam, 29, who used to make deliveries for Amish Country
Gazebos, now works on a computer in the company’s shop. Learning to use the
machine was a challenge for him.
“I thought, I need to know how this computer thinks, or
the computer needs to know how I think — we need to get along!” he said. Now,
he added, he is amazed at how productive the computer can be. “I can easily see
it helping as far as numbers go — oh my goodness — to get rid of all these
papers.”
But technology has its place, he said, and that is at
work. Speaking outside his home near Lancaster one sun-dappled day, he said,
“I’ve never thought about bringing a computer onto this property.”
Not far away, his wife was cutting the lawn with a push
mower, the blades making a soft whirring sound as they scissored the grass. And
in a nearby vegetable patch, his two young sons were chasing butterflies.
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