Amish Indiana and the Covenant with Slowness

Northern Indiana, in Elkhart and LaGrange counties between South Bend and the Michigan border, contains one of the largest Amish communities in the United States. Horse-drawn buggies share the county roads with semi-trucks from the recreational vehicle plants that make the same counties one of the world's largest manufacturers of motorhomes and trailers. The juxtaposition is not accidental. The Amish and the recreational vehicle industry coexist in the same geography, drawing on the same woodworking traditions.

The Amish practice of Gelassenheit, a German term translated roughly as yielding or submission to the community over individual will, produces a community life that looks from the outside like a refusal of modernity. From the inside it is understood as faithfulness to a covenant entered into by each generation. Young people go through a period called Rumspringa, during which they may engage with the outside world before choosing, as adults, whether to be baptized into the community. Those who leave after baptism are shunned. Those who leave before can return.

Amish communities in northern Indiana have navigated the pressure of tourism, the economic integration of Amish-made furniture into national retail markets, and the question of how to maintain a community that depends on separation from the broader culture while being economically embedded in it. The tension is not resolved. It is the ongoing condition.

The Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College holds the primary archival record of Amish and Mennonite communities in Indiana. If you want to understand how a three-hundred-year-old covenant holds together in the twenty-first century, that is a good place to start looking.