Small communities – where life is stable and simple and intensely human – are disappearing from America and much of the world.

Some have vanished completely; some are dying slowly, all are grappling with what the sociologists call the machine civilization. It’s hard for any smaller community to survive and the rapacious juggernaut of corporatism.

The Amish seem to have figured out how.

I don’t really care about their hats and horses, I am transfixed by the way they live their lives. They are not tourist attractions, in many ways they are models for us poor souls hoping to figure out how to survive our own kind.

All over the world, diverse peoples are merging into a common mass, sparking tension, resentment, and confusion for minorities and majorities.

In my writing about the Amish, I want to be personal – I love writing about our road trips – but also step back and try to understand what I am seeing and what we could be learning from them.

They are not curiosities to me, they are far ahead of most of the rest of our world.

In his classic work Amish Society, Amish Scholar John Hostetler writes about how the Amish arrived in the United States during colonial times.

Today, the Amish are perhaps the most successful minority or small community  (or communities) to survive the chaos and conflict, and ravaging growth of the modern world.

Their communities are distinctive and viable.

They have resisted the assimilation and homogenization process more successfully than any other. They center their culture on small farms, which Western society has largely abandoned to corporate agriculture.

Although the Amish are often perceived as relics of the past who live an austere and unyielding life, people seem to admire them for doing things the old-fashioned way.

As we become more and more disenchanted with our divisive and disconnected culture, the status of the Amish in the minds of most Americans has become more and more favorable.

I find myself admiring my Amish neighbors and wondering how they stay so grounded and peacefully content in a world of so much violence,  disconnection and anger.

I want to understand how they did it. That’s something worth sharing.

The media continues to portray the Amish as quaint and primitive. The Animal Rights Movement sees nothing but puppy mills and skinny horses.

But the Amish society I see is anything but quaint or primitive. They are, in many ways, wiser, more spiritual, and far more innovative than the “English” who line up to buy their pies and sheds.

In part, I realized right away, this is because the Amish keep their distance from us and from our wastefulness, greed, faithlessness,  soulless work, violence, and competitions.

We are polluters of nature and the human soul, the Amish saw that in humans five hundred years ago and keep their distance.

We are a pandemic all of our own.

Here’s what my Amish neighbors and friends are teaching me so far:

The Amish are a church, a community, a spiritual union,  a conservative branch of Christianity, a religion, a community whose members practice simple and austere living.

They are also, says Hostetler, a familistic entrepreneuring system, a highly adaptive human community willing to change, move and evolve as is necessary for them to survive.

Moise and his family are leading a significant migration from their community in the north to Southeastern New York State because there is less development, more population and potential customers, and lots of available farmland.

It didn’t take decades of study, argument, data surveys, and arguments for Moise’s community to start moving. All it took was him to come and visit and pay cash for his farm.

The rest of his community are on their way.

The move is more entrepreneurial than spiritual, more practical than visionary. Every couple of weeks another family arrives to support the families that are here, help them to build barns and homes, and to plow and plant fields. and attend church together and speak German to.

There are many more customers down here for wood products, inexpensive and tasty baked goods, and farm produce than up near the Canadian border.

There is also more available farmland.

They make all of those things and sell them. For the Amish, smart marketing is spiritual, despite them as ghosts of a lost world.

Ever since they were driven from the cities of Europe centuries ago,  farms have been the center of the Amish’s spirituality and tradition. In a way, each one is a church of its own.

As the dairy farms in my county fail, the Amish come and succeed. You can’t tell me there aren’t lessons here, and it isn’t just that they have a lot of kids.

In Amish Society, Hostetler offers us several models that can help us understand Amish society and figure out what we can learn from them. It is already clear: we have a lot more to learn from them than they have from us.

I want to skip over the sociology and find answers to these questions: What is the meaning of the Amish system? What, if anything, is the Amish trying to say to us, to tell us?

First, Commonwealth: In some ways, the Amish are a small commonwealth; their members claim to be ruled by the law of love and redemption. The bonds that unite them are many and strong. But they do not occupy and defend any particular territory; they will move to other places when circumstances pressure them to do so.

The radicalism of the Amish suggests that their respect for locality, place, custom, and spiritual idealism can go a long way in checking the monstrous and uncontrolled growth of modern society. They can also help teach us how to preserve human freedom, and especially, human dignity.

Secondly, sociologists classify the Amish as a sectarian society.

The Anabaptists were founded when the established church was seen as anarchic and conservative, much as the Catholic Church is seen by some today.

The “sects” like the Amish were seen as egalitarian; the Amish rejected the authority of the established religious leaders and their leaders. They separated from all other religious institutions and remain separated five hundred years later.

The British sociologist Bryan Wilson believes that the sects like the Amish are the self-conscious attempts by people to construct their own societies. Thus the Amish recognize the evil traits and circumstances of humanity, moderate that influence upon themselves,  and retreat into a community to experience, cultivate, and preserve the true beliefs of God in their ethical relationships with one another.

Isolation and a self-contained culture are walls against the depravations, spiritual bankruptcy,  violence, and greed of the outside world.

In our culture, we worship greed and money. In Amish society there is no greed and little money in daily life. Nobody has to worry about hospital bills or retirement – it comes with the community. The church takes care of all, just as Jesus suggested.

The Amish do not attempt to send the world their message.

Yet the Amish message is as clear as it is powerful. They tell us that a way of living is more important than communicating it or preaching it to others.  They don’t even try to defend it.

The ultimate message is the life itself, not the words that describe it.

I’m learning that the Amish I know do not agonize about their beliefs or seek approval from others. They do not doubt their basic convictions.; they are sure of their beliefs and cannot or will not explain them except through the teachings of Jesus, and the example and conduct of their lives.

That is true humility, and humility is incompatible with Western society.

Are the Amish A Folk a society? Anthropologists use the term “folk societies” for semi-isolated people. They call them “folk societies,” “primitives,” or merely “simple societies.”

The folk society is a small, isolated, traditional, simple, homogeneous society in which oral communication and traditional ways come together and form what the Amish call “the integration of life.”

More important than science, the custom is valued more than critical knowledge, and interactions with people are personal and emotional rather than abstract and transactional.

In the “English” world, life is rarely seen as something to integrate. We lurch from one phase of life to another,  hoping that somehow we can make enough money to be safe and sheltered.

Folk societies resist change.

Young people do what the older adults did when they were young. Members communicate intimately with one another – not in texts or e-mails –  and not only by word of mouth but by through customs and symbols – straw hats, bonnets, horse carts –  that reflect and reinforce a strong sense of community, what the scholars call “we-ness.”

When you see an Amish person riding in a horse and carriage dressed in straw hats and bonnets, you know exactly who they are. Their lives may be simple, but their instincts for presenting themselves are sharp and contemporary.

The folk model, says Hostetler, helps to understand the tradition-directed nature of Amish society. The Amish, for example, have retained many of the customs and small-scale technologies that were common in rural society in the nineteenth century.

Amish beliefs – this is so visible to me on their farms – have fused with an earlier period of simple country living when everyone farmed with horses, not machines, and on a scale where family members could work together and remain connected another.

I see in Amish lives many balms for our angry and raw society – smaller communities, less technology, natural and continuous interaction with one another.

So the Amish exist as folk or “little” communities in a rural subculture within the modern state.

But they should never be confused with peasants or primitives. Their farms may not be battery-powered, but they are extremely sophisticated. If they didn’t wish to be seen, why drive in horse-pulled carriages and wear clothes that set them aside from everyone else.

The Amish are humble but distinctive, small in scale, homogeneous in culture, and self-sufficient. These are, in my mind, all potential lessons for us.

Amish life is distinctive.

The Amish people are highly and consciously visible. They are instantly recognizable by their clothing, farms, homes, furnishings, fields, and even their language.

Although they speak perfect English to people like me, they speak a dialect of German among themselves.

They profess to be private and humble, yet they make sure we can spot them instantly. Amish life, then, is distinctive in that religion and custom blend into a way of life.

Outside of their culture, and as Wendell Berry writes so eloquently, corporatism is stripping us of both our religion and our customs and our farms.

We are losing the communities we need to be able to turn to and offer and receive support from.

The Amish are not losing their communities; they are growing stronger.  They have been spared some of the worst deprivations of modern life – inescapable debt, joblessness, homelessness, health care terror, panic attacks, loss of faith.

Rather than be curious about them, or see them as quaint (they are not quaint) I  want to know how they do it.

By living in closed communities where custom and a strong sense of togetherness prevail, the Amish have formed an integrated way of life and a folklife culture. The needs of the individual from birth to death are met within an integrated and shared system of values and meanings.

Tradition and custom keep the group functioning as a whole.

It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out that our culture does not meet the needs of the individual, not in birth, work, life, or death. Surely, this is one reason for so much of the political turmoil in America, a country where millions of people feel no allegiance at all to their government.

That may be one of the most important messages I am taking from the Amish I am getting to know.

They revere the sanctity of the individual, even as their community is centered around a common faith. And so the individuals in their community revere them.

The Amish farm of my neighbor Moise is a miracle blending of human labor, stewardship, and cooperation with nature.

Most of the American farms I see failing are nothing like that, and that is yet another lesson to be taken from this so-called “simple” way of life, which is not very simple but remarkably successful and effective.

It is possible to keep those farms alive and producing food. There are many people willing to do it.

While the animal rights people obsess about the puppy mills in Lancaster, the growing Amish community can show us several ways to live in a better, healthier, and more connected way.

I used to see the Amish as a curiosity, a tourist attraction, an oddity. The Amish smile whenever I mentioned the Lancaster Amish. They call them the “upper class.” That is, the fancy people.

The idea of the Amish as a tourist culture is a grotesque underestimation of people who have learned to survive in a better and healthier way- in many ways –  than the rest of us.

I’m looking forward to learning a lot more.