Overview

The year 1993 marked the existence of 300 years of Amish life. Extinct in their European homeland, today they live in more than 200 settlements in 22 states and the Canadian province of Ontario. The Amish are one of the more distinctive and colorful cultural groups across the spectrum of American pluralism. Their rejection of automobiles, use of horse-drawn farm machinery, and distinctive dress set them apart from the high-tech culture of modern life.

History

Amish roots stretch back to sixteenth-century Europe. Impatient with the pace of the Protestant Reformation, youthful reformers in Zurich, Switzerland, outraged religious authorities by baptizing each other in January 1525. The rebaptism of adults was then a crime punishable by death. Baptism, in the dissidents' view, was only meaningful for adults who had made a voluntary confession of faith. Because they were already baptized as infants in the Catholic Church, the radicals were dubbed Anabaptists, or rebaptizers...