I’ve been writing a series on what I think the Amish culture can teach us, but today I wanted to write about what the Amish culture is teaching me.

But I’m thinking the most significant impact the Amish have had on me so far has to do with their passionate belief in nonresistance.

They are pacifists, although not quite in the way we have come to understand pacifism. They practice a kind of super-calming approach they call “non-resistance.”

The Amish are neither liberal nor progressive; they are deeply religious.

Several people have criticized my writing about the Amish for being too Rosey, suggesting they have a perfect life without fault or flaw.

My view of the Amish – and hopefully, my writing and feelings – is a lot more complicated than that.

The Amish way of life is painful, difficult, grueling, relentless, and often uncomfortable. It involves a great deal of surrender and voluntary suffering.

Their views on avoiding regular health care cause them great pain and lead to early heart disease, dental disorders,  even death.

They make sacrifices every day and subject themselves to suffering that the rest of us would find unacceptable, even cruel.

I’ve watched in horror as social media has become a forum for hatred and assault, not a bastion of free speech and independence.

I learned from when I became concerned at the amount of time I had b expending with angry and often hateful people on social media, many of who strongly objected to my writing about the Amish in what they saw as a favorable way.

The social media culture is becoming increasingly angry, dishonest, and destructive, the home of trolls, conspiracy theorists, and bigots. People like me – who share their lives openly on the Internet – are sitting ducks. They are, so many people believe, asking for it.

I think the Amish are showing me another way of thinking about issues like this, sparking new ideas about how to live in such a fractious and turbulent world.

Sometimes, I think Marians are hovering and injecting half of our country with anger and grievance beams. Kindness and compassion are seen as naive and elitist.

I’ve wrestled with how to deal with the deepening hostility online all my working life, but they have gotten much worse. I won’t lie; many of these attacks have been painful and hurtful. I am glad that I never yielded to them.

It was not until I encountered the Amish tradition of nonresistance that I began to understand how I might deal with it in a better, healthier way.

It worked. the first time in my long history of writing online, this anger and hostility are no longer a significant part of my life.

Nonresistance is the bedrock of the Amish moral order, writes Donald Kraybill in his book “What The Amish Teach Us.” The Amish idea does not focus on war and social justice or the defeat of evil, as most nonresistance social movements do.

In many ways, the Amish view of nonresistance and non-violence is more radical than pacifism. Kraybill  defines it as “no payback forgiveness.”

To the Amish, it is both profound and simple.

Since they believe that vengeance is God’s responsibility, not man’s, there is no reason to shoulder the burden of argument or retaliation.

For that reason, Amish people are forbidden to hire lawyers or sue people, which they consider another type of force.

The Amish people are also forbidden from holding public office because the legal obligations of public service might require them to engage in litigation or use force to protect public safety.

The Amish Chuch was founded during a time of savage persecution of Anabaptists in Europe.

Forgiveness was almost unheard of as a governing principle outside of devout Christian martyrs. It was born out of relentless attack and brutality.

It was a response to it.

In recent years, nonresistance has been severely tested by two violent episodes in the Amish world.

In 2012, Samuel Mullet, the leader of a breakaway Amish group in Ohio, was convicted of forcibly cutting off the beards of Amish men and the hair of Amish women who had left his compound.

Mullet and 15 of his followers were found guilty of five religiously motivated assaults on other Amich church members.

In the Amish culture, beards and bonnets are considered sacred symbols of faith.

One minister who had his beard cut off by Mullet’s followers was so shamed he would not allow himself to be seen in public for two years.

Yet most of his victims refused to testify against Mullet. “Jesus didn’t protest his persecution and torture,” one told a judge, “why should we?”

Testifying was resistance to evil, said one of the victims, the opposite of what Jesus taught in his Sermon On The Mount.

There, he told his followers to pray for those who persecuted them (Matthew 5;39-44) and forgive those who betrayed them.

On October 2, 2006, a disturbed milk truck driver named Charles C. Roberts entered the West Nickel Mines Amish School, a simple one-room stucco building in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, vowing vengeance on Christians because God took the life of one of his children.

Police said he brought an assortment of weapons, ropes, and lubricants that suggested he was planning to assault the girls in the school sexually.

When the police arrived, and a state trooper crashed through a school window, Roberts began shooting the girls before killing himself. Ten were shot, five died.

The evening of the shooting, Amish elders went to Robert’s home, where his wife lived with three young daughters, and to the home of his parents to embrace each member of his family and say that they forgave him and held no grievances or grudges.

The Amish community met as a whole and immediately decided to forgive Roberts. Horrified outsiders had sent $4.3 million to the Nickel Mines Amish settlement.

Still, the Amish, who have no insurance, gave much of the money to local services that came to their aid and the widow and children of the man who murdered their daughters.

They talked of forgiveness and reconciliation. “We forgive first,” said one of the dead girls’ mothers.

Their gestures of forgiveness made headlines all over the world.

I grew up in a family where constant warfare, shouting, argument, and recrimination were the norm. Everyone in my family was aggrieved for most of the time.

I am always surprised by the calm and peacefulness in Miller’s home.

I have never seen an Amish person yell at one another, criticize them for something they did, yell at their children, argue with one another, or pout and whine.

They forgive mistakes and mishaps immediately, talk softly and often.

Nonresistance was one of the first things I noticed in the family when I became friends with Moise and his wife Barbara and their children. I was touched by the absence of fighting and argument.

Unconsciously and then consciously, I began to experiment with and absorb the Amish practice of nonresistance in my dealings with hostility and cruelty, increasingly polluting social media.

I am not a believer in the Amish God; I didn’t see nonresistance as the ultimate submission to their Christian God’s will and commitment to the truth of Jesus’s non-violent ways.

I so see it as transformative, as the ultimate submission of the self.

If I hated anger and rage, as I repeatedly claimed to, then I had to live non-resistance, not just talk it.

Anger is corrosive; as the Internet worsened and corporate-sponsored and sanctioned trolls moved onto every part of the public communications, I needed to cope with this anger and cruelty, or I  knew I would be corrupted and absorbed by it.

This anger was sometimes who I was, but never who I wished to be.

And arguing with and attacking strangers online is not how I wish to spend any measure of my time or life.

I didn’t care what they did; I watched what I did. They will have their own God to reckon with. And I do believe there will be a reckoning.

So I simply stopped reading hateful messages, posting them, or responding to them. I didn’t need to use these messages as props or lessons; I didn’t need them at all. And I was sick of enabling them by giving them attention.

I am always happy to talk to people who civilly disagree with me, that is both healthy and helpful. But anger had become my Wall of China. I wasn’t going to let it in, and I wasn’t going to send it back out into the world.

This idea of refusing anger took hold of me, and I worked hard at it. The impact on my life has amazed me. I simply don’t engage in anger. I don’t respond to it, dwell on it, internalize it, reprint it. It is, almost without exception, no longer in my life.

Instead of stewing, seething, and striking back, I just stopped responding. Nonresistance.

If the Amish can forgive a sick man who slaughtered their daughters, I can move away from strangers bringing their hostility and cruelty into my world and life. I don’t even need to get Jesus involved.

Here was my boundary: I will post and consider any civil message, no matter how critical, and argue politely and respectfully. If it’s not polite, I switch to nonresistance, my version of no- payback forgiveness.

I see that the haters are smaller than I am and deserve both forgiveness and nonresistance. I don’t need to feed them or legitimize them. Sometimes, I post them without any comment at all. That says more than most words.

As I suspected, this changed the energy around my blog and my work. And inside of me. I had more time to think, research and reason. I had more energy for what I really wanted to do, and I think my writing became lighter and clearer.

I used to get a half dozen or more hate messages a day.

Since embracing nonresistance, I’ve had two or three in a couple of months.  It’s almost as if the universe got the message. I suppose this is what they mean by positive energy.

I weakened in this resolve once or twice, arguing with people who cared nothing for truth, but then the idea took hold.

It reminded me of weaning myself off of sweets when I was diagnosed with diabetes. It took a while, but now it’s a reflex, not a temptation.

Nonresistance is seeping into my consciousness, linking up with my neural system. Like shedding panic and regret, it is becoming a habit.

I’ve learned from my Amish friends that nonresistance guides many aspects of daily life. Silence, rather than a heated retort or argument, is the Amish default and response to conflict.

I’ve watched Moise deal with lawyers, bureaucrats, inspectors, regulators, shop owners, truck delivery men,  or cursed or harassed by outsiders. The Amish response is the same. Silence. They don’t take it in. And they don’t get mad.

This makes me trust them in a way I have rarely experienced in my life.

I see this in my personal dealings with them. Disagreement is not frightening.

When we disagree or see something differently, we both now simply go quiet and return to it later, and later and later, if necessary.

But there are never any arguments, pouting, grievance, or rage. For all the talk of patriarchy, the Amish are the least dominating and combative men I have ever met. I know now that we’ll get to it, figure it out.

The Amish men do not compete with each other or try to conquer one another or take over situations, or run people out of business.

They just patiently wait. Vengeance is God’s work, not theirs.

I can’t embrace all their religious beliefs, as they are not mine. But they have a lot to teach me, and I am eager to learn.