Nickel Mines and the Amish Theology of Forgiveness

On the morning of October second, two thousand six, a milk truck driver named Charles Carl Roberts the Fourth drove to the West Nickel Mines Amish schoolhouse in Bart Township, Lancaster County. He entered the one-room building, dismissed the boys, the teacher, and the adult women, and barricaded himself inside with ten girls between the ages of six and thirteen.

Roberts shot all ten. Five of them died. He then killed himself. The girls who died were Naomi Rose Ebersol, Marian Stoltzfus Fisher, Mary Liz Miller, Lena Zook Miller, and Anna Mae Stoltzfus. They ranged in age from six to thirteen.

By that evening, Amish elders from the community had driven to the home of Roberts's widow, Marie, to tell her that they forgave her husband and that they held no anger toward her or her children. Within days, Amish community members attended Roberts's funeral. The Amish held their own funerals for the five girls with the same week. They invited Roberts's family.

The response astonished people who observed it from outside. It was described in news coverage as extraordinary, as superhuman, as difficult to comprehend. Within the community, it was understood differently.

The Amish and Old Order Mennonite traditions are rooted in Anabaptist theology, a movement that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe under persecution. The core concept is called Gelassenheit, a German word that translates roughly as yieldedness or surrender to God's will. It means, among other things, releasing the self's claim on outcomes. The Amish community had been shaped by three centuries of preparation for suffering, and part of that preparation was the practice of forgiveness as a spiritual discipline, not as a feeling or a gesture, but as a deliberate act of faith carried out regardless of feeling.

The community demolished the schoolhouse in the weeks after the shooting and replaced it with a pasture. A small memorial was built nearby. The site is private farmland today. There is no public marker.

What happened at Nickel Mines is not a story about recovering from violence through goodness. It is a story about a community whose theology prepared them, over generations, to do something that looked from the outside like an impossible act of grace and was, from the inside, exactly what they had been practicing for.