The Beauty Suit by Lauren Shields

Author:Lauren Shields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

BUGGIES AND BONNETS: AMISH MODESTY

I never seriously considered Amish dress for the Modesty Experiment, because it had the same problem as wearing a burqa or salwar kameez: it would have been inappropriately costume-y for me. I was not Amish, but people would think I was. Additionally, being in the Deep South and not the Midwest or Pennsylvania, I expected that people would stare, and that was the opposite of what I wanted. What I didn’t know at the time was that in doing the Experiment, I was already exploring some of the values held by this unique community of believers.

Before the Protestant Reformation, infant baptism was not only a religious ceremony that was almost universally instituted; it also “determine[d] taxation and conscription for war.”17 Born of the union of church and state, infant baptism was at least as political as it was spiritual. Beginning in 1525, the Swiss Anabaptists, from whom the Amish, Quakers, and other Mennonites are descended, “rejected the state-church system that linked Christianity to citizenship and that routinely baptized all infants,” believing that only adults could make a promise to live a life aligned with scripture.18 The Anabaptists’ refusal to obey the state-backed church resulted in violence that still colors the worldview of sects such as the Amish. Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell, in their wide-ranging book An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World’s Largest Amish Community, explain, “The subsequent bloody persecution of Anabaptists, which is chronicled in both the solemn hymns still sung in Amish church services and in the Martyrs’ Mirror, an eleven-hundred-page book kept in many Amish homes, created a skeptical and even fearful view of the outside world.”19

Jakob Ammann, the man credited with starting the Amish tradition by branching out from the Anabaptists, was a tailor by trade who supported a stricter version of shunning—meaning to exclude the excommunicated—than the Anabaptists did. Ammann believed that instead of just keeping the excommunicated from the Communion table, they should be avoided altogether. This view of separation was too extreme for many, so he and his followers moved to the New World in the 1700s and 1800s. Interestingly, the Amish no longer exist except in the United States and Canada: the European Amish eventually merged into other Christian traditions.20

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