Anabaptists: A Faith Born Under Persecution

The plain people you see farming these fields trace their faith to a dangerous idea born five centuries ago in Europe. In the fifteen hundreds, a movement arose that insisted baptism should be a choice made by believing adults, not infants. Because they baptized one another again as grown men and women, opponents called them Anabaptists, meaning rebaptizers, and both Catholic and Protestant authorities treated the movement as a crime.

Many Anabaptists were arrested, tortured, and put to death, and the survivors scattered across what is now Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. In sixteen ninety-three, an Alsatian Mennonite elder named Jacob Ammann pressed for a stricter, more disciplined church, including the practice of social avoidance, or shunning, for members who strayed. The disagreement split the community, and Ammann's followers became known as the Amish.

Both the Amish and the related Mennonites found their refuge in Pennsylvania, drawn by William Penn's holy experiment, his promise of religious tolerance in a colony where they could worship and farm in peace. The first sizable group of Amish reached Lancaster County in the seventeen twenties and seventeen thirties. Here, in the rich limestone soil, a people who had been hunted for their beliefs finally put down roots that have held for three hundred years.