What the Amish Actually Believe

1. What the Amish Believe, Stated Plainly

Amish belief can be set out in a short list, and almost every item on it is shared with the whole of historic Christianity. The Amish confess one God in three persons, the incarnation of the Son, the virgin birth, the atoning death of Christ, his bodily resurrection, his ascension, and his return to judge the living and the dead. They receive the Old and New Testaments as the word of God. They practise the Lord's Supper, they pray, they hold marriage to be lifelong, and they expect heaven and hell to be real.

Their written confession is the Dordrecht Confession of Faith, drawn up by Dutch Mennonites in 1632 and adopted by Alsatian Anabaptist ministers in 1660. Its eighteen articles cover creation, the fall, the promise of a redeemer, the incarnation, the church, baptism, the Lord's Supper, footwashing, marriage, the civil government, the refusal of revenge, the refusal of oaths, excommunication, shunning, and the last judgment. An Amish minister will not preach from a systematic theology, and the Dordrecht articles stand behind the preaching all the same.

The Distinctive Convictions

Four convictions carry the weight of everything an outsider notices about Amish life:

• The church is a voluntary body of baptized adults. Infants are not baptized. A person joins by a free and informed vow, usually between sixteen and their early twenties.
• The church is visibly separate from the surrounding society. Separation is a doctrine drawn from 2 Corinthians 6:14-17 and Romans 12:2, and it is worked out in dress, in schooling, in commerce and in technology.
• The church is disciplined. Members hold one another to a shared rule, and a member who breaks it and refuses correction is excommunicated and shunned until repentance.
• The church does not take up the sword. Amish nonresistance forbids military service, litigation and retaliation of any kind, on the plain reading of Matthew 5:38-48.

Every article on that list belongs to a single theme, which is that the gospel produces a community you can see. The Amish read the Sermon on the Mount as a rule for a society, and they built one. Whether that reading is right is the question this guide works through, from the Anabaptist beginning to the Catholic response.

2. Swiss Anabaptist Origins and Jakob Ammann

The Amish descend from the Swiss Brethren, the radical wing of the Reformation that began in Zurich in 1525 when Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock in a private house, a few streets from the pulpit of Huldrych Zwingli. Their opponents called them Anabaptists, meaning re-baptizers, because they were baptizing adults who had already been baptized as infants in the Catholic Church. The Anabaptists themselves rejected the label, holding that an infant baptism had never been a baptism at all.

Persecution followed immediately and lasted for generations. Anabaptists were drowned, burned and beheaded by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike, which is a fact Catholics should state plainly rather than pass over. The Anabaptist memory of that century is preserved in two books that still sit in Amish homes: the Ausbund, a hymnal whose oldest hymns were written by Anabaptist prisoners held in Passau castle in the 1530s, and the Martyrs Mirror, a thousand-page martyrology compiled by Thieleman J. van Braght in 1660. A people formed by those books does not think of separation from the world as an eccentricity.

The Schleitheim Articles, 1527

The Swiss Brethren set out their programme in the Schleitheim Articles of 1527, associated with Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine prior who was executed within months of the meeting. The seven articles covered baptism of believers, the ban, the breaking of bread, separation from what the document called the abomination, the office of pastor, the sword, and the oath. Read the list against Amish practice today and the continuity is exact. Schleitheim is the seed and the Amish are one of the plants.

The Division of 1693

The Amish became a distinct people in 1693, through a division among Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptists led by an elder named Jakob Ammann. Ammann pressed three things: strict shunning of excommunicated members in daily life rather than exclusion from communion alone, the observance of footwashing at the Lord's Supper, and uniformity in dress and grooming, including untrimmed beards. He also held that the Dordrecht Confession should bind the Swiss congregations as it bound the Dutch.

Several senior Swiss ministers, Hans Reist among them, refused. Ammann excommunicated them, the breach hardened, and later attempts at reconciliation failed. Those who sided with Ammann came to be called the Amish; those who did not remained in the stream that became the Mennonites. The two bodies remain cousins, and the boundary between the most conservative Mennonites and the Amish is thin.

Amish families began arriving in Pennsylvania in the 1730s, and the last Amish congregations in Europe eventually merged into Mennonite bodies or disappeared. Every Amish community today is in North America. For the wider map of how the Anabaptists sit alongside the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican traditions, see our guide to the Christian denominations and their family tree, and for the Reformation setting see the Reformation and what it changed.

3. Adult Baptism and the Vow of Membership

The Amish baptize adults on a confession of faith, and they regard baptism as the moment a person binds themselves for life to Christ and to the congregation. Candidates are usually between sixteen and their early twenties. They attend a series of instruction meetings over several months, working through the eighteen articles of the Dordrecht Confession with the ministers, and they are told repeatedly that it is better not to make the vow than to make it and break it.

The baptism itself takes place at a Sunday service, ordinarily in the autumn. The candidates kneel. The deacon pours water into the bishop's cupped hands, and the bishop pours it over the candidate's head three times, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The bishop then takes the new member by the hand, raises them up, and gives the holy kiss. Pouring rather than immersion is the historic Swiss Anabaptist practice, which distinguishes the Amish from Baptists, who ordinarily immerse.

Three Questions the Vow Answers

Amish baptism asks a candidate to affirm faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, to renounce the world, the devil and their own flesh, and to submit to the Ordnung of the church and to the discipline of the church for the rest of their life. That third promise is the one that gives the ban its whole moral force. A shunned Amish person is being held to a promise they made freely as an adult, in front of the congregation, with the option of walking away still open.

Mark 16:16 is the Anabaptist proof text, read with the pattern of Acts, where those who hear the preaching believe and are then baptized (Acts 2:41, Acts 8:12). Belief precedes baptism, the Anabaptists argue, therefore only those who can believe may be baptized. The same argument is made by Baptists, from a different history and with a different mode, and we work through it in detail on our guide to Baptist beliefs and believer's baptism. Amish practice differs from the Baptist pattern in one decisive respect. Amish baptism admits a person to a governed community with real authority over their life, where a Baptist baptism admits a person to a congregation that ordinarily makes no comparable claim.

The Catholic Position

The Catholic Church baptizes infants, and has done so from the earliest centuries. Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration, given by God rather than earned by a decision, and the Church holds that the sheer gratuitousness of grace is displayed most clearly when it is given to someone who cannot yet ask (CCC 1250). The Amish objection deserves a straight answer, and the full case is set out on our guide to baptism, infant baptism and what the sacrament does. The Catholic answer to the Amish is that the covenant precedes the response, as circumcision preceded a Hebrew boy's understanding of it, and that confirmation is where the personal ratification belongs.

4. The Ordnung: An Unwritten Rule of Life

The Ordnung is the agreed rule of an Amish church district, covering dress, technology, work, transport, hospitality and conduct. It is almost never written down. New members absorb it by growing up inside it, and it is reaffirmed as a whole rather than consulted as a code. The German word means order, and the sense is closer to a settled way of doing things than to a legal text.

Twice a year, in spring and autumn, each district holds an Ordnungsgemee, a council meeting held before communion. The ministers review the Ordnung point by point. Every baptized member is asked whether they are at peace with the church and with the rule. Communion proceeds only if the answer is unanimous. If one member holds out, the matter is worked through until agreement is reached, and communion may be postponed for weeks. Unanimity is the mechanism, and it is why Amish practice changes slowly and why it varies so much between districts.

What the Ordnung Actually Governs

• Dress. The cut of a coat, the width of a hat brim, the colour of a dress, whether hooks and eyes or buttons fasten a man's coat.
• Technology. Which power sources are permitted, whether a business may own a telephone, what farm machinery may be pulled and by what.
• Transport. The style and colour of the buggy top, whether the buggy carries a windshield or battery lights, whether members may ride in a hired car and for what purposes.
• Work and commerce. Which trades are acceptable, whether a member may work in a factory owned by outsiders, how a business may advertise.
• Conduct. Courtship standards, the use of alcohol, participation in litigation, insurance and government programmes.

Outsiders read the Ordnung as a list of prohibitions. Amish members read it as the shape of a shared life, in the way a family has a way of doing things that no one has written on the wall. The rule exists to protect the community from fragmentation, and a district that could not agree on a rule would soon stop being a community at all.

5. Gelassenheit and Separation from the World

Gelassenheit is the central Amish virtue, and the nearest English words are yieldedness, submission and self-surrender. A person who has Gelassenheit does not push forward, does not insist on their own way, does not seek attention, and accepts the judgment of the church over their own preference. The word came into Anabaptism from late medieval German mysticism, where it described the soul's abandonment to God, and the Amish carried it into the ordering of an entire society.

Almost everything that looks strange from outside follows from Gelassenheit. Plain dress suppresses individual display. Photographs are avoided, on the commandment against graven images (Exodus 20:4) and because a posed portrait singles out one face. Amish gravestones are small and identical. Amish quilts and furniture are exquisite and unsigned. Amish teaching on schooling past the eighth grade turns partly on the content of that schooling and largely on what a career of personal advancement would do to a person's willingness to yield.

Separation as a Doctrine

Amish separation rests on a cluster of texts read together: Romans 12:2 on refusing the world's pattern, 2 Corinthians 6:14-17 on being unequally yoked and coming out from among them, James 4:4 on friendship with the world as enmity with God, and 1 John 2:15-17 on the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. The Schleitheim Articles of 1527 gathered those texts into the fourth article, on separation, and the Amish have applied it consistently for five centuries.

Separation is practical rather than absolute. The Amish trade with outsiders, employ them, sell to them, use their hospitals, hire their drivers and pay their taxes. What separation blocks is entanglement: marriage outside the church, membership of worldly organisations, dependence on public assistance, litigation, and any relationship that would place an Amish person under an obligation that competes with the church. Amish mutual aid stands in place of insurance, so when a barn burns the district builds it back, and when a hospital bill arrives the district pays it.

Catholic theology holds a different balance, and the difference is worth naming early. The Church teaches that the baptized are sent into the world to sanctify it from within, and the Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes made that engagement a defining Catholic commitment. Christ prayed that his disciples be kept from evil while remaining in the world (John 17:15-18). Section twelve of this guide takes up the one place in Catholic life where something close to Amish separation has always been practised.

6. Rumspringa: What It Actually Is

Rumspringa is the Pennsylvania Dutch term for the running-around years, the period from about age sixteen until baptism or marriage when an Amish young person socialises widely and decides whether to join the church. Television has turned the word into a story about wild rebellion, and the ordinary reality is far quieter: Sunday-evening singings, volleyball, courtship, visiting other settlements, and for many young people a first job outside the home.

The period exists for a doctrinal reason. Because Amish baptism must be a free adult choice, there has to be a stretch of life in which a young person is not yet under the vow. During Rumspringa a young person is not a baptized member, so the church's discipline does not formally bind them, and parents have limited authority to enforce the Ordnung on a working sixteen-year-old. Some young people use the latitude to buy a car, own a phone, wear English clothes or drink. Others barely change anything.

What Happens at the End

Rumspringa ends when the young person applies for baptism, which the great majority do. Researchers at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, which maintains the standard academic reference work on Amish life, report retention rates that are high and that vary by affiliation, with most Old Order communities keeping the large majority of their young people.

Source: the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, which publishes the Amish Studies research collection and, with Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner and Steven M. Nolt, the standard reference volume The Amish (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Population and retention figures on Amish life should be attributed to that centre rather than to journalism about it.

A young person who leaves before baptism is not shunned. They may be grieved over, and the family relationship is strained, and the formal ban does not apply because there is no vow to have broken. That distinction is the single most misunderstood fact about Amish practice, and it explains why Amish parents allow the running-around years at all. Better a young person departs unbaptized than takes a vow they will break.

7. The Meidung: The Ban and Shunning

The Meidung is the Amish practice of social avoidance applied to a baptized member who has been excommunicated and has not repented. It is the hardest Amish practice for outsiders to accept, it was the issue that created the Amish in 1693, and it remains the sharpest internal fault line among Amish and Mennonite groups today.

How Discipline Proceeds

The process follows Matthew 18:15-17 in order. A member who sins is approached privately. If that fails, two or three go. If that fails the matter comes before the congregation. Most cases end in a confession, made kneeling or standing before the members, after which the matter is closed and, in principle, never raised again. Amish practice takes the forgiveness side of Matthew 18 as seriously as the discipline side, and the great majority of disciplinary cases never reach excommunication.

Excommunication, the Bann, follows when a member refuses correction or leaves for another church. The ban is announced at a members' meeting and the Meidung begins. In practice it means members will not eat at the same table with the person, will not accept money or goods directly from their hand, and will not do business with them in the ordinary way. Family ties are not severed. A shunned son still comes home. The visible markers of the ban are worked into the family meal, which is exactly where they will be felt.

The Texts and the Purpose

The Amish ground the Meidung in 1 Corinthians 5:9-13, Romans 16:17, 2 Thessalonians 3:14-15 and Titus 3:10. They insist that the purpose is redemptive. Paul's own instruction in 2 Thessalonians 3:15 is to warn the person as a brother rather than treat them as an enemy, and the Amish cite it. The ban is lifted when the person confesses before the congregation, and it is lifted without residue.

Strictness varies. The Old Order position, inherited from Jakob Ammann, is streng Meidung, strict avoidance, applied even when the person joins another Christian church. Other Anabaptist bodies apply the ban only to the unrepentant and lift it when a person joins a church of sound doctrine. That difference produced the Beachy division of 1927, described in section eleven.

The Catholic Comparison

Catholics have no standing to call excommunication foreign. The Catholic Church has excommunicated, interdicted and suspended for two thousand years, and canon law is explicit that such penalties are medicinal, imposed to bring the offender to repentance and lifted when repentance comes. The Church excommunicated the Anabaptists themselves. The Catholic critique of the Meidung is narrower and turns on two points: the ban should never fall on a person for joining another Christian community that professes Christ, and a penalty that reaches into a family's shared table risks doing more damage to charity than to sin. Where an Amish district applies avoidance to a member who left for a Mennonite congregation, Catholic theology sees a discipline aimed at the wrong target.

8. Nonresistance, Oaths and the State

Amish nonresistance, Wehrlosigkeit in the German, forbids the use of force against another person under any circumstance, including self-defence, military service and litigation. The Amish take Matthew 5:39 without qualification: do not resist an evil person. They add Romans 12:19 on leaving vengeance to God and 1 Peter 2:21-23 on Christ, who did not retaliate when he suffered.

The word nonresistance is chosen deliberately and differs from pacifism as commonly practised. Political pacifism campaigns against war. Amish nonresistance withdraws from the whole apparatus of coercion without campaigning about it, because campaigning is itself a form of engagement with worldly power. Amish men have served as conscientious objectors, doing alternative service in Civilian Public Service camps during the Second World War and in hospital work during the Vietnam-era draft.

Oaths, Office and Voting

The Amish refuse to swear oaths, on Matthew 5:34-37 and James 5:12, and they affirm instead, a provision the American and Canadian courts accommodate. They do not hold public office, since office requires the sword. Most do not vote, though some vote in local elections on matters that touch the community directly, such as school and zoning questions. They pay their taxes, citing Romans 13:7, including taxes that fund the military they will not join.

Two American legal accommodations shape Amish life. A 1965 federal law allows self-employed members of religious groups conscientiously opposed to public insurance, having established provision for their own, to be exempt from Social Security and Medicare taxes on filing the relevant IRS form; the Amish qualify and have used it since. And in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) the United States Supreme Court held that compelling Amish children to attend school past the eighth grade violated the free exercise of religion, which is why Amish formal schooling ends at fourteen.

The Amish answer to that is straightforward and worth stating in their own terms. They hold that the magistrate is ordained by God for a fallen world (Romans 13:1-4), and that Christians are called out of that world into a redeemed community which lives by a different law and therefore cannot staff the magistracy. The state is legitimate and the Christian's place is outside it. That is a coherent position, and it is held without bitterness towards the officials who enforce it.

9. Plain Dress and Why It Is Uniform

Amish dress is prescribed by the Ordnung, made at home, and deliberately uniform so that no member stands out. Men wear broadfall trousers without a fly zip, a plain coat often fastened with hooks and eyes rather than buttons, suspenders, and a broad-brimmed hat, straw in summer and black felt in winter. Women wear a solid-colour dress of a set cut, an apron, a cape over the bodice, and a white prayer covering. The colours are plain and the fabrics are simple.

The beard is a marker of marriage. An Amish man grows a full beard once he marries, and shaves the moustache, a custom that traces back to European military officers who wore moustaches, which the peace churches would not imitate. Women do not cut their hair, on 1 Corinthians 11:15, and wear the covering on 1 Corinthians 11:5-6, a text most Christian bodies once applied literally and few still do.

What Uniformity Is For

Plain dress does three things at once. It suppresses individual display, which is Gelassenheit worn on the body. It marks the boundary of the church, so an Amish person is identifiable to themselves and to everyone else at all times, which makes casual sin conspicuous. And it removes an entire category of decision, expense and competition from daily life. An Amish woman does not shop for clothes, does not compare herself with a magazine, and does not spend money on fashion.

The Catholic tradition understands all three purposes because it has practised them. A religious habit does the same three things: it suppresses display, it marks the wearer as belonging to a community, and it ends the question of what to wear. Saint Paul's instruction to dress modestly and without elaborate hairstyles or expensive clothes (1 Timothy 2:9) was read by Christians for centuries as a real constraint. The difference is scope. The Church asks the habit of those under vows and asks modesty of everyone; the Amish ask the uniform of every member, including the children.

10. The Amish and Technology

The Amish do not reject technology. They evaluate it, one item at a time, by what it will do to the family, the church and the community, and they arrive at conclusions that are far more deliberate than the outside stereotype allows. A district considers a new device, weighs whether it will pull members apart or hold them together, and sets a rule. That process has produced a technological landscape of considerable sophistication.

The Distinctions the Amish Actually Draw

• Owning against using. Many districts permit a member to ride in a hired car while forbidding car ownership. Ownership creates a permanent capacity to leave, and the buggy holds the family and the church within a shared radius.
• Connection against power. Grid electricity is generally refused because a line from the utility is a permanent tie to the outside world. Batteries, twelve-volt systems, diesel generators, compressed air and hydraulics are widely used, and Amish shops run substantial machinery on them.
• Where a device sits. Telephones are commonly permitted in a shanty at the end of a lane or shared between families, and kept out of the house. A phone in the kitchen interrupts the family meal; a phone at the end of the lane has to be walked to.
• Business against household. Many affiliations that forbid a household phone permit a business phone, and some permit a mobile phone for a member running a trade. The line moves as commerce forces the question.
• The horse in the field. Old Order districts generally keep horses for field work while permitting engines at the barn for belt power. Field tractors would enlarge farms, push neighbours off the land, and change the scale of the settlement.

Read those rules together and a coherent philosophy emerges. The Amish are asking a question that most people never ask, which is whether a given tool will strengthen or dissolve the bonds between them. They accept a real cost in convenience to keep those bonds. Anyone who has watched a family's attention dissolve into six separate screens can recognise the question as a serious one, whatever they make of the answers.

11. Church Districts, Old Order and Beachy

The basic unit of Amish life is the church district, a congregation of roughly twenty to forty households living close enough to reach one another by buggy. Districts have no building. Worship rotates through members' homes and barns, held every other Sunday, running about three hours, with singing from the Ausbund in the old slow style, two sermons in Pennsylvania Dutch with Scripture read in High German, and a shared meal afterwards. When a district grows too large for a home to hold it, the district divides.

How Leaders Are Chosen

Each district has a bishop, two or three ministers and a deacon, all of them unpaid, untrained, and serving for life alongside their ordinary work. They are chosen by lot. Members nominate candidates, and the nominees who reach a threshold each select a hymnbook from a set on a table, one of which contains a slip of paper. The man who draws the slip is ordained. The practice follows the choosing of Matthias in Acts 1:23-26, and it makes ambition for office structurally impossible. No man can campaign for a lot.

The Main Divisions

Group descriptions are drawn from each body's own practice as documented by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. The Amish have no central authority and no official directory of affiliations, so any table of this kind describes tendencies rather than fixed boundaries, and individual districts vary.

Amish numbers are growing, which surprises people who expect a shrinking sect. Large families and high retention together produce sustained growth, and the Young Center's Amish Studies research reports a North American Amish population in the hundreds of thousands, spread across more than thirty states and several Canadian provinces, roughly doubling over each generation. Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana hold the largest settlements, and new ones are founded regularly as land prices push families outward.

Source: Amish Studies, the research collection of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, which compiles the annual Amish population estimates and settlement counts used by researchers. The Amish keep no central membership register, so all population figures are researchers' estimates built from church directories.

12. The Amish and Catholic Monasticism

The closest thing in Catholic life to an Amish community is a Benedictine or Trappist monastery, and the resemblance runs deep enough to be worth working through carefully. Both are communities that withdraw from the surrounding society, submit to a written or customary rule, wear a uniform habit, work with their hands, obey a leader drawn from among them, and treat obedience itself as a spiritual discipline rather than an administrative convenience.

The Parallels, Point by Point

• A rule. The Ordnung and the Rule of Saint Benedict do the same work: they settle the shape of a common life so that the members do not have to renegotiate it. Benedict wrote his down. The Amish keep theirs in the memory of the congregation, and reaffirm it twice a year.
• Stability. Benedictines take a vow of stability, binding themselves to one house for life. An Amish member's baptismal vow binds them to one district and, in practice, to one settlement. Both traditions concluded that a Christian who can always leave will eventually leave.
• Obedience and self-surrender. Benedict devotes his longest chapter to humility, and its summit is a monk who prefers the will of another to his own. Gelassenheit is the same instinct, taught to farmers and mothers instead of monks.
• The habit. Plain dress and the religious habit both suppress display, mark belonging, and end the question of what to wear.
• Manual labour. Benedict made work a spiritual duty and treated the monastery's self-sufficiency as part of its separation. Amish life makes the same connection between the workshop, the field and the health of the soul.
• Correction within the community. The Rule of Saint Benedict has chapters on excommunication from the common table and from the oratory, imposed for a season on a brother who will not amend, and lifted on his amendment. The Meidung is a harsher instrument applied to a whole society, and the logic behind it is one Benedict would recognise.

The Difference That Matters

Catholic monasticism is a particular vocation inside one Church, freely embraced by some of the baptized for the sake of all of them. The evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience are counsels, addressed to those called to them, and the Second Vatican Council set out that teaching in Lumen Gentium 43 to 47. A Catholic monastery is separated from the world on behalf of a Church that stays in the world. The monk withdraws so that he can pray for the farmer, the soldier, the nurse and the legislator, and the Church needs all of them.

The Amish took the monastic instincts of rule, obedience and separation and made them the ordinary standard for a whole people. They did it without the counsel of celibacy, which is the point at which the parallel breaks: the Amish marry, raise large families, and place the household rather than the cloister at the centre of the separated life. So the separation covers children who did not choose it and who will not be free to weigh it until they are old enough to be baptized. That is the genuine theological difference, and it is where Catholic teaching parts company. The Church holds that the world is to be sanctified from inside, by lay Christians in ordinary occupations, and that a Christianity which withdraws entirely leaves the world unevangelised. Old Order Amish do not send missionaries and do not seek converts, holding that a faithful community is itself the witness, though Beachy Amish Mennonite congregations do carry on mission work. Catholic teaching cannot accept a settled refusal to seek converts as the whole of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20).

What Catholics should take from the comparison is that the Amish have preserved, at the scale of a society, a set of instincts the Church has always honoured and mostly confined to the cloister. The parallel also disposes of the lazy idea that Amish life is a Protestant oddity. It is closer to a Catholic monastic instinct, carried by people who would be startled to hear it described that way, and it grew out of a movement whose first leaders included a Benedictine prior.

13. Where the Catholic Church Differs

The Catholic Church holds four substantial disagreements with Amish belief, and each of them concerns the church rather than Christ. On God, on the incarnation, on the resurrection and on the moral law, a Catholic and an Amish bishop would recognise one another's faith without difficulty.

Baptism and Who May Receive It

The Catholic Church baptizes infants because baptism is God's action rather than the recipient's decision, and because the Church has done so since the apostolic age (CCC 1250). Amish practice makes baptism the seal of a mature choice, which secures a committed membership at the cost of making grace wait on comprehension. The Catholic answer is set out in full on our guide to what baptism does and why infants receive it.

The Sacraments and the Ministry

The Amish keep two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper, together with footwashing, and they understand the bread and cup as a memorial and a sign of the union of the church. The Catholic Church holds seven sacraments and teaches that the Eucharist is the true body and blood of Christ, on John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11:27-29; see the Eucharist and the Real Presence. Amish ministers are chosen by lot from among the members and receive no ordination in the Catholic sense, where Catholic teaching holds that the ministry is conferred by a sacrament in unbroken succession from the apostles, as our guide to the priesthood and apostolic succession explains.

Assurance, Presumption and Works

Old Order Amish decline to claim certainty of their own salvation, calling such a claim presumption, and speak instead of a living hope while striving to remain faithful. That instinct is closer to Catholic teaching than to most of Protestantism. The Council of Trent taught that no one can know with the certainty of faith, apart from a special revelation, that he has obtained the grace of God, and the Catechism treats presumption as a sin against hope (CCC 2092). Catholic teaching adds what Amish practice can leave unsaid: the Christian's confidence rests on the merits of Christ received in the sacraments rather than on the record of a life, and hope is a theological virtue that God gives. Our guide to faith, works and how Catholics are saved sets out the whole position.

Separation and the Mission of the Laity

The largest disagreement is over separation itself. Catholic teaching sends the baptized into ordinary work, ordinary politics and ordinary neighbourhoods to sanctify them from within, and treats the leaven in the dough (Matthew 13:33) as the normal Christian posture. Amish withdrawal preserves a community at the cost of a mission. The Catholic Church honours the withdrawn life in its monasteries and refuses to make it the pattern for everyone.

How Catholics Should Speak About the Amish

The Second Vatican Council taught that those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are in a real, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church, and our guide to Catholic ecumenism and separated Christians works through what that means. Amish baptism, performed with water in the name of the Trinity, is valid. The Amish are Christian brethren, and they are the descendants of people the Church once put to death. Catholics owe them accurate description, respect for a discipline more demanding than our own, and honesty about the four disagreements above. Tourist curiosity is the wrong register, and gawking at a buggy is a poor way to treat a church of martyrs.

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