The Amish are a tiny slice of modern American society in a nation of more than 350 million people, yet they grow in size and population – and fame – every year.

They are perhaps the most recognized small communities in America, evoked by pundits, writers, Hollywood scriptwriters, cartoonists, pie and donut lovers,  and sociologists.

These observers are obsessed with trying to learn how the so-called plain people have survived so well and prospered and grown for so many hundreds of years, amidst so much dizzying and often hostile change.

By and large, they seem to me to be content and fulfilled with their lives, much more so than most of the “English,” as we are called,  are with ours.

They are also a people caught in the crossroads. They are caught squarely in the middle of two completely different cultures.

One is a radical society of passionately religious who seek simplicity, reject wealth and technology and bottomless greed, and a divided nation that worships wealth and unchecked technology and progress for its own sake.

How do they do it?

They are an oddly American phenomenon, even as they fight to keep the very story of America away from their families and lives.

When I first Google “Amish,” I found more than eight million results promoting Amish products and tourist destinations.

This was not always the case.

A bit of history is important.

The first group of Amish arrived in America on a ship called Charming Nancy in 1737, nearly a half-century before the American Revolution.

They lived quietly and peacefully among their rural, non-Amish neighbors in and around Pennsylvania and New York for two hundred years.

They sought to be invisible, and their dress and buggies did not stand out then as they would in a couple of hundred years.

One of the scores of individualistic and rebellious immigrant and religious groups fleeing brutal persecution and poverty in Europe, they attracted little attention and aroused little interest.

That changed for good two centuries later when Amish people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, protested the local township’s plans to demolish one-room schools and construct one consolidated elementary school.

This threatened the very heart of Amish beliefs about family and learning. As my friend Moise asked me, “could you imagine my children going to public school?”

To be honest, I can’t.

Some of the Amish people went to jail in Lancaster, and the conflict was so intense that it caught the attention of the New York Times, which ran a series of stories on Amish life.

The Amish won that long and difficult struggle, but at an awful cost. They were famous now.

Their children go to school in one-room schoolhouses through the 8th grade, and then work to help their families. At the age of 21, they are free to leave, but if they stay, their parents must pay them for their work.

Since 1937, Amish conflicts with local and state authorities increased and continued to draw general national attention and more visibility than they ever imagined or sought.

The Amish became well known, which was the last thing they wanted. They have also prospered from their fame.

In fact, Lancaster has become the center and showcase of the compromises many Amish are making with the world around them.

My neighbor Moise calls the Lancaster Amish the “upscale Amish,” some have cell phones, battery-powered lights on their buggies, telephones, electric light,  even computers to help them run their business and remain competitive.

Moise is Old Amish, he has none of those things.

But the Amish are not Luddites, and they don’t hate all new technologies and all change. They are much more nuanced than that.

The Amish became better known just as America’s evolution from a rural to an urban, tech, and corporate culture.

InsteaI of seeing them as backward and out of touch, people began to admire their simplicity, security,  humility, and intense focus on family.

The Amish don’t pay electric bills, they don’t sign up for Social Security (they believe they can and should take care of themselves,) they don’t pay for health care, or have debt,  or pay for building their own homes or have mortgages to worry about or face the costs of health care or old age.

In our pressured world, this makes some people pause. It’s not easy to dismiss all of that. Modern lives are tense and anxious.

But the simple people are not so simple. There is no such thing as corporate greed and power, no Amazon, no Alexa to listen in and take notes, no TikTok to obsess their children.

Throughout, they have maintained their quiet but determined public and private dissent from the national American narrative of technological progress, boundless corporate expansion, and individual autonomy.

The Amish have continued their separation and distance from mainstream America, which embraces change, business, money, individual autonomy at every opportunity.

They use it when they need to, without fanfare or apology.

We have become a Corporate, Tech-dominated society, our progress thoughtless, unchecked, and seemingly out of control.  Corporations control our political life and make our most important decisions.

The Amish have created an alternate, almost fantasized universe.

That makes them, interesting to many people, dangerous to others.

America took note of the Amish rejection of telephones, cars, public grid electricity around the turn of the century, but it also began to dismiss them as holdovers from a nineteenth-century world. To modernizing America back then, the Amish seemed mired in the past, outmoded and doomed.

They were once again forgotten, their struggles dismissed..

In the 1950s, Gertrude Enders Huntington, a young Ph.D. student in anthropology at Yale, decided to study the Amish for her school dissertation.

Years later, she recalled that at the time, “the Amish were considered stupid and were universally disliked. They were backward and they impeded progress for everyone.”

Huntington and her professors were all convinced the Amish were about to disappear.

She rushed to interview them; she said, “before they died out.” She and her professors were convinced that their rigid and unchanging religious orientation “was certain to contribute to the death of their culture.”

As it happened, their rigid religious orientation were what sustained and saved them in a country changing so fast it seems hopelessly divided and out of control.

In our time, the Amish are popular.

People love the food they cook, the clothes they sell, the sheds and furniture they make, the restaurants they run. They love all the symbols they see on the surface, but almost never get a real look inside.

Their faith has always been a mystery, mostly because they just don’t talk about it, and it isn’t as easy to see as a straw hat or buggy.

The Amish are also becoming  more controversial as political notions of women’s rights, family, diversity, animal and gay rights, and free choice become more and more popular (and more divisive.) And none of them are things the Amish support or countenance.

The Yale smarties were wrong.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Amish were thriving in America. In 1900 they numbered about 6,000, by 2017 they had swelled to 318,500, and they now live in thirty-one states and three Canadian provinces.

Their population is doubling every twenty years.

For me, and many others interested in learning about them, the central question is this: How has the Amish struggle with modernity shaped their religion and their worldview, cultural patterns, family structure, social organizations, and increasingly complex interactions with the outside world?

My vantage point is unique. Not only are they my neighbors and friends, but I am one of the compromises the faith has made with modernity.

They don’t use computers, but they have enlisted me to help them by using mine to buy supplies for them online. They don’t make telephone calls, but they ask me to make them and receive them for them.   They don’t have automobiles, but I drive them places that they need to go. They don’t own credit cards, but I change things for them online all the time.

Some people see this as hypocrisy on their part and gullibility on mine.

But in fact, the Amish have never been Luddites or rigid about compromise; they are determined to keep Facebook and Ipads and cellphones out of their homes and away from their children.

They are not seeking to ban them.

If they treated their children as the English treat theirs – computers, smartphones, Facebook, Instagram – their entire culture would disintegrate, as ours is doing in some ways, and the Yale Professors would finally be proven right.

We are no one to judge them. We are ourselves struggling to figure out how we can survive as a democracy. And we aren’t doing so well.

Their system does not permit debate, dissent, or radical experimentation. They are an unabashedly Patriarchal society in a country where patriarchies are under siege.

But it’s that very structure – obedience is a sacred obligation – that keeps them alive and growing.

In their book, “the Amish,”  Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, write that while the Amish “have wrestled with the forces of progress, Amish communities have, in different ways, been willing to concede some traditions and in various ways to new technologies, workforce demands, and changes in health care.”

Amish scholars all say that this dynamic struggle with modernity is steadily transforming Amish identity and internal diversity. We are very different from them, but at the edges, we are finding all kinds of ways to connect.

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The Eighteen Articles Of Faith

People ask me all the time how it is that the Amish don’t have computers but it’s okay to ask me to use mine.

It’s a fair question. But my response is always the same. The Amish aren’t trying to destroy computers or credit cards. They want to protect their children from the damage they can do and the problems they can cause.

The Amish make no sense if you don’t understand the faith that underlies their society and shapes their every decision.

So I am learning about their faith, and it is just as revealing as I hoped. I know how it is that they can use my credit cards while not owning their own.

Everyone who has gotten close to the Amish reports that some elements of their existence – their religious foundation, the patriarchy – will never change.

That is true. It is simply impossible to understand the Amish without understanding their religion, especially the Eighteen Articles Of Faith.

The Amish themselves have never written a formal expression of faith or a doctrinal theology as other religions do. They do not have their own Old or New Testament or Koran.

They seem disinterested in the abstract theological concepts that govern Islam, Judaism, or Christianity.

Their theology is mostly orally transmitted rather than kept in books and writings.  Their faith is focused on the practical teachings of Jesus. For them, truth and universal principles of faith are transmitted by older congregants to younger ones.

They are not transmitted by study commissions, panels, scholarly research, or ancient texts.

They are found in the life of Jesus, whose literal example and preaching silences debate about theology and belief and unites their community. Other religions continuously question their faith and purpose; there is none in the Amish church.

That’s a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow, including me. But a united society can function in a way Americans can hardly imagine.

Because the Amish don’t argue publicly or privately about their faith, and because so much of their teaching is oral, not published,  few outsiders know much, if anything, about it.

That makes them a difficult target.

The Amish do not give interviews to the media or go on TV to talk about themselves. There are strict prohibitions about promoting themselves, advertising themselves, bragging about themselves, or defending themselves.

That is God’s work and it blocks humility,  a central element of their faith.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, different Anabaptist groups did compose states of doctrine that the Amish have long used. One of the most important is the Dordrecht Confession Of Faith.

Written by Dutch Memmonites in 1632, the Dordrecht Confession is a statement of faith organized in eighteen sections called articles – the Amish call it “the Eighteen Articles,” and it is the foundation of Amish spirituality.

The Eighteen Articles say scholar Kraybill is accepted in all Amish Churches and is used to instruct baptismal candidates.

These articles cover the basic topics of Christian doctrine – creation, sin, salvation, baptism, and eternal life. Some sections highlight primary Amish themes – a prohibition against revenge, humility, caring for the needy, refusal to swear oaths, the ritual of foot-washing, and the practice of church discipline through ex-communication and shunning.

You can love the faith or hate it, but you can’t stay in it if you break with it or defy it.

The eighteen articles are the foundation of  the mostly oral tradition of oral, rather than written, oral spirituality.

I want to understand this fascinating world that has miraculously landed on my doorstep and invited me in.

It’s much in fashion for angry no-nothings to bash the media. There is much about modern media to dislike. But there is much about good journalism to love and revere.

Know it or not, we miss it and are bleeding from its loss.

This is a good case for journalism.

Journalists are not the enemy of the people; they are people, like all people, they sometimes rise to glory, and they sometimes fall out of the sky.

The best journalists can put their own prejudices and passions aside and look clearly and dispassionately at their subjects. I believe I was and am one of those.

A good journalist can almost ruthlessly detach him or herself from the story in front of them. I’ve had to hurt family members, friends, and ordinary people.

It’s a difficult thing to do, to be honest in a world that values lies more than truth, and uses words as just another weapon. But more than anything else, it’s what helps people trust someone outside of themselves to make their own judgments, and not simply judge by labels and write angry e-mails.

I believe democracies cannot be successful if people cannot share a common truth and trust in common values.

That’s what the best journalists offer.

That’s what I want to do.

I loved every minute I was a journalist, and I’m loving every minute of trying it again.