One of the first conversations I had with Moise – I love to stop by his farm; he rests every 15 minutes or so on his plow and is happy to talk with me as he rests – was about Amish and technology.

One of the first things he taught me was that Amish do not reject all technology, and there are some Amish – he calls them “upper class” Amish – who drive, electrify their homes, and have cellphones.

(I am grateful to Moise Miller and his family for welcoming me into their lives and speaking with me. I also lean heavily for my Amish history on authors Donald B. Kraybill and Joseph Hostetler, James E. Cates,  and Suzanne Woods Fisher.)

Most of the Amish do not use any electricity or phones of any kind.

They use technology, but they do it selectively. Televisions and computers are rejected out of hand in Moise’s world, but other technologies are used selectively and in conditions.

Moise is a miller, and he needs powerful saws to cut down his trees and saw the wood he and his sons sell. His big saws are all diesel-powered, but they require technology to run, just not electricity.

He says he wouldn’t have a gas or electric-operated tractor in his fields.

Some Amish bend the rules and have battery-powered sides inside of their barns. Moise makes no compromises with electricity purchased on a public grid.

A nearby Amish shop owner has a 3-D printer in his office.

It was running off a battery-powered inverter and had been programmed to create special couplings to connect LED lights to batteries for lighting Amish homes.

State-of-the-art technology – gas grills, shop tools, camping equipment, and some farm equipment – is often purchased from English vendors without needing any Amish refitting.

Amish mechanics can and do adapt commercial equipment to fit church guidelines, as long as they avoid tapping into public grid electricity.

I asked Moise why the Amish are so anxious about using electricity; he said there is a great fear within the Amish communities that left unrestricted, powerful new technologies will disrupt their communities, introduce foreign and unwanted values through mass media, and undermine their bonds with their children.

As I h eard this and read this, I was thinking that all of these fears have come true for most of us.

Technology is not considered evil in itself, Moise says, but its consequences are.

Moise said a bishop told him that a car could not be immoral, but having a car would tear their communities apart, as they have torn so many English communities apart.

He believes that, and very strongly. Technology is something he feels he must protect his children from, not surrender to them.

Moise has a keen and dry sense of humor, we kid each other. “Hey, how come it’s not okay for you to go on the Internet, but it’s okay for you to ask me to do it for you?” I asked him this afternoon.

“Well,” he said, seeming to think about it, “I guess I must be smart. I don’t have to buy a computer.”

There is something to that, and we both got a good laugh out of it. I notice that the Amish do not defend themselves when questioned, they leave that to God.

If you read Amish history, the Amish have used cultural compromises to slow but not completely halt the pace of social change.  They are keenly aware of technology and what it does, even as they resist turning their families over to it.

I can’t imagine any Amish family bringing Alexa into their homes to navigate the world for them and listen to them day and night. I don’t think there will be compromises on that, even though more than 100 million Alexa-powered devices had been sold since 2019. And there are now more than 100,000 Alexa skills.

The Alexa tidal wave says a lot about us, but it also says a lot about what the Amish fear so intensely. Just a few years ago, a few people bought this device. Now they are half the homes in our country, their “skills” are radically altering the way we talk to one another, and even the need we talk to each other.

Aside from a few nervous academics, there are very few serious discussions or research underway about just what Alexa is doing to family life, our privacy, and our interactions with actual humans.

I asked Moise how he figures out the weather. “I look out the window,” he says.

As much as any small community on the earth, the Amish struggle to balance tradition and progress without being consumed or wiped out by contemporary life.

Few subcultures or small communities have managed to do that and survive. This raises a lot of questions.

You will find tractors in many Amish barns but none in the field.  Cars are forbidden, but rides from outsiders are accepted and necessary.

The use of horse and buggy transit keeps the community anchored within a local geographical base. It prevents the community from scattering and melting apart, as has happened to so many English communities.

You have only to look at communities all across America to see what cars and TV, and computers have done to communities.

That is what farmers like Moise are trying to avoid.

Most Amish groups forbid electricity from the public grid.

“It’s not the electricity that is so bad,” said one Amish elder,  as quoted by Donald Kraybill in his book Simply Amish, “it’s all the things we don’t need that would come with it.”

Why are tractors okay inside a barn but not for plowing the field?

Because Amish leaders fear that using tractors for fieldwork would inevitably lead to full-scale mechanization and the destruction of small family farms, as has happened to a devastating degree to American family farms, drowning in debt, government meddling, and crushing the competition.

I believe the Amish are saving the very idea of the American Family Farm, once the moral and cultural foundation of our country. They have a lot in common with the old family farmers, not so much with their kids.

We have only to look at ourselves to see the implications of unfettered change and unchecked technology. It’s a monumental moral and spiritual choice.

Batteries were long forbidden – Moise won’t have a battery anywhere on his farm – but batteries are now used to power numerous things in many Amish farm and houses: lights on buggies, calculators, fans, flashlights, cash registers, copy machines, and in some “upper class” Amish homes, LED lights and solar energy.

More and more Amish people now work off of the farms and out of their communities. An Amish person employed in an English-owned factory has no restrictions on using its technology.

As farms become more expensive and threatened by mass-scale corporate farming, new Amish businesses have dramatically increased the adoption of phones. They figured out how to economically raise organic food that is healthy and inexpensive.

They do it in part the way the old farmers did it – by having a lot of kids to help out. Their costs are very low.

When Mosie wants to look up something on the Internet, he asks other neighbors or me to do it for him. But Amish shopkeepers and businesses can’t afford to do that.

They increasingly use telephones to do their business, communicate with customers, and get the products they want to sell.

Some communities have phone booths at the end of a road; most Amish churches still prohibit them.

The growing use of cell phones is a monumental development for separatist people that fear easy access to the outside world. Unlike a television, a smartphone can easily be hidden in a pocket.

They bend but they don’t break.

“From cars to phones,” writes Kraybill, “the Amish seek to master technology rather than be enslaved by it.” Good luck with that, I think.

Kraybill says they seem to tame technology rather than simply forbid it; they dread the harm it can do to their family and community.

Mosie has made very few concessions to technology. There are no cellphones or other phones or computers or electric light and fans on his farm.

What I see is a community caught between deep faith and the roaring waters of the modern world. They seem much more thoughtful about technology and its impact on social interaction than we are in many ways.

I hear parents agonize about the time their children spend online and the damage they see it doing to them, yet hardly anyone seems able or willing to stop it, control it, or place genuine limits on it.

Mosie’s children keep coming to mind when I think about Amish simplicity and technology. I admire their children and their dignity, grace, and love of family. They look me in the eye, know my name, wave to me,  ask me about my work and talk to me in a way I rarely see among children their age.

It’s strange for me to say this, but I am respected for my age and experience, something unusual in most children I meet.

It’s difficult for me and for many of the people who inhabit my world to be at ease with the subservience of women in the Amish culture, the number of children they feel obligated to have, and the almost blind obedience women must show to men.

But it’s too easy to judge and reject the wisdom and lessons of other cultures because there are things about them we disapprove of.  The women I have met seem content and feel their lives have real meaning.

We aren’t doing ourselves any favors by dismissing or failing to see the great struggle underway in the Amish world to keep many of the values the rest of us have long abandoned.

We gobble up every new device we can; we fear living without it in our high-tech world.

The Amish are proceeding more carefully. Technology is upon them but in a stream, not a wave. Perhaps this is why their communities continue to grow while ours continue to shrink.

Tonight, I’m going online to help Moise find a stone-crusher for the numerous stones he is pulling out of the ground.