In their classic book, The Amish, authors Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt reprint just a few of the North American newspaper headlines that almost unfailingly portrayed the Amish ignorant and backward at the turn of the 20th century.

Here are three of those headlines: “A Queer Religious Sect, A Queer People and Their Ways, Odd in Many Ways, They Are A Strange People.”

The Amish had been in America for 400 years by 1900, but it wasn’t until 1960 when they became a tourist attraction, and 1930 when their defense of rural one-room schools made them famous, that their image began to soften, and people took a closer look.

In 1985, the popular film Witness, and seven years later, Vogue Magazine’s fourteen-page,  full-color spread of new fashions, took pictures of the Amish in Lancaster County.

The Vogue piece, titled  The Great Plain, pointed to the rise of the Amish in popular culture.

In 2011, the New York Times, in an article titled Amish Fashion Week, reported that a famous fashion house was featuring “soft, draped, plain, clothing with the boys wearing flat, wide-brimmed hats…a sudden flashback to Alexander Godunov playing an Amish dreamboat farmer in Witness.”

The Amish became more and more an object of fascination than ridicule, and the odd thing was that over the years, they became more popular and more controversial than ever before at the same time, perhaps reflecting the increasingly bitter divides in the rest of the country.

What is the mystery of the Amish, who reject or ignore so many of the values and traditions of the “English,” their uneasy co-habitants in North America?

The Amish are the most postmodern element of modern society.

They repudiate almost all of the themes and practices of western civilization – relativism, consumerism, inclusiveness, religious authority, contemporary animal rights, conflict and partisanship, spectacle, feminism, corporatism,  boundless capitalism, organized religion, health care, education, and child-centeredness.

As I’ve learned since writing about them, the Amish enrage or irritate many people, almost everyone at one point or another.

How it is that a “queer” people who erect great walls of separation from our supposedly open society and who practice patriarchy in the age of MeToo liberation captivate so many of the people they call The English.

Many Americans find the Amish troublesome at best and offensive at worst. My small town, conservative, even xenophobic at times, has always been suspicious of outsiders, especially the flood of urbanites who have moved here with new ideas about politics, race, and education.

There is widespread admiration for the new Amish residents, who are seen as independent, conservative, hard-w0rking, knowledgeable about rural life,  deeply Christian, and yes, of course,  white.

There is no conflict when dealing with the Amish, no extreme sensitivities, no arguments. They are nothing if not understanding, and any reservations or resentments are not expressed publicly.

But there is more to it than that.

The Amish are quiet at the core, gentle, forgiving, tolerant. They do not argue their beliefs, hire PR specialists, judge, or sue people. They live their lives as quietly and peacefully as possible. This is in striking opposition to our angry, fractious, and divided society.

I have no desire to be an Amish church member; I have no interest in riding a horse and buggy around all day, wearing a straw hat every day and a kind of uniform, living with bare walls, or never going on the Internet.

My friend Moise rejects almost all of the values that I hold dear – individualism, feminism, inclusivity, higher education, tolerance, choice, and diversity.

We don’t fight about this; we don’t even talk about it. We respect one another and treat each other with kindness, love, and dignity.

In our culture,  many people are annoyed by those who would limit their children’s education, reject the theory of evolution, ignore the idea of gender equality, curb personal freedom, and reject almost all of the popular culture.

I’ve always been one of them.

Who else refuses to benefit from Thomas Edison’s brilliance (or Henry Ford’s), stifle personal achievement and most artistic expression?

I am no fan or prisoner of tradition, but the Amish, criticized for always yielding to community and absolute male authority, feel oppressive, even suffocating, to people.

Moise subscribes to rigid tradition – church regulations, driving the same kind of carriage,  dressing like everyone else, following the church obediently – nags other people and me.

After the very mixed response to my writing about the Amish, I see clearly now that their ways trouble the modern soul.

Yet our reservations about them have often been proven to be short-sighted, even shallow, and increasingly knee-jerk.

Moise and his family have given me a lifetime of things to think about. I always feel around them that I have things to learn, not to teach.

Amish homes are secure and permanent without the need or aid for higher education. The Amish do not rely on government safety nets; there are no homeless and uninsured people in their communities. They refuse Social Security benefits or money from the government’s stimulus package.

No Amish person has health insurance or needs it; the community will pay all the hospital bills.

Widows and orphans, the destitute, the disabled, and the mentally ill all receive (by all accounts) respect and dignity for all of their lives within the community.

Drug abuse and poverty are rare.

Their notoriously humane and responsive social security programs spring into action in the face of fire, disability, sickness, senility, and death.

Amish children sometimes get into trouble with local police, but violent crime is virtually known in their communities.

The Amish do not live in paradise. Marriages fail, people can be cruel and dishonest,  people hurt one another, good people and bad people, just like in any other community.

They also fear us; getting too close is dangerous. In our arrogant way, we think the whole world wants to be us, but they want to be anything but.

In the months that I’ve known him, Moise has only asked me two or three questions about my life.

This isn’t bad manners; it’s self-preservation. He wants to know the man he sees in front of him, not the rest.

When all is said and done, every writer, scholar, or social scientist who examines the Amish church finds Amish quality-of-life robust and almost unparalleled in our country’s history.

That is not what most people think when they see these horse and buggy carriages trotting purposefully through their towns.

When I met Moise, became his friend, and spent some time with his family, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I did anticipate a sort of quaintness, even slightly primitive culture.

That isn’t what I found.

At first, I couldn’t quite see the work that went into the Amish effort to shape their life and destiny; they seem to put all of their energy into visible work, the land, family, and the church.

But I see now that they have constructed a remarkably humane,  efficient, and highly successful system, one that has left them one of the longest-lasting and most successful small communities on the earth.

What Moise and his family forced me to come to grips with – and this, I think, is that the core of our fascination with their culture –  is something it is  impossible to dismiss:

Despite our arrogance and wealth, our abundance of high-tech devices and gadgets, or prized leisure time, our nation struggles to govern itself.

In the face of our claims and aspirations of dominating the world and being an almost perfect union, I was stunned to see that the Amish people’s pursuit of faith and happiness seems to have produced more satisfied, fulfilled, and even happier lives than most Americans experience.

I didn’t expect that.

I didn’t anticipate that the Amish I was meeting might be more content and fulfilled than I was, or many of the people I know are trapped as they are on the corporate and never-ending rat race.

And I love my life.

This didn’t mean I wanted to become one of them. It did mean I might have to re-think much of how I see our world.

I see why it is that the Amish trouble us so much.

The challenge almost every assumption we make about corporatism and its bigness, progress, diversity, education, freedom, equality, individual dignity, and own traditions.

That is unsettling to some, enraging to others.

Their values are upside-down when it comes to mine. God comes before family; the community comes after God; family comes after them both.

They blow off our ideas about bigger, faster, more powerful as always being better. A lot of us are seeing these things are making us worse and threatening the very earth.

Soon after we met, Moise asked me to drive him around our beautiful county. We rode on roads I have never seen or knew existed. How, I asked, did he,  a newcomer, know so much about them?

“It’s the horse and buggy,” he said, “I take my children out as often as I can, and we ride on all the back roads and dirt roads and forgotten roads. We see everything in a carriage, things you never see if you have to stay on an asphalt road and rush by.”

He knew the name of every farmer and the crop in every field.

What is it exactly that I love so much about my friend Moise, who is so different from me?

I love his integrity. I love his almost child-like naivete.

I love his willingness to listen. I love his trust in me.

I love the caring he brings to his church, community, and family. I love the responsibility he takes for his own life and his children.

I love his conviction, his refusal to compromise his own beliefs. I love what he accomplishes with his bare hands and his refusal to ease his life with expensive and powerful new tools.

I love that he would never live in a left or right or red or blue world; that would be anathema to him. He cares nothing for politicians, he says; they have nothing to do with his life.

Every day, his life tells me that firm limits and boundaries may best preserve human dignity and human welfare.

He tells me that he will not turn his children over to these powerful and increasingly destructive new tools for the profit and benefit of others. How could I not be mesmerized by that?

I love him for challenging me with the idea that loving plainly and with modest humility in an orderly and united community is a valuable and even desirable road to happiness and well-being.

Moise is where so many people in the modern world want to be and don’t even know it. And where more and more people are beginning to crave it.

That makes him fascinating, puzzling, and troubling to all of us.

I am lucky to have him as a neighbor and a friend.