Over the past six months, I’ve spent a lot of time with Amish men, some from my community, some from far away.

I’ve been friends with my neighbor Moise, but also, through driving, shopping, visiting, and walking with other Amish men, I’ve gotten a more precise sense of the Amish Man and what the Patriarchy does to them.

I’ve shopped online for Amish men, driven them to and from bus and train stations, visited them in their homes, talked with them,  looked on while they plowed and built and hammered and sawed, brought them Mountain Dew and lollipops to keep their energy up.

I admire the faith; the Amish, men and women and children, are hard workers and honest people. They are also kind and gentle.

They mostly want to be left alone to live their lives in their way and stay true to their faith.

We’ve had several conversations about the Amish culture and the church and about the idea of the Patriarchy, which is the real secret to how they govern their communities.

This is a fascinating subject for me during a time of explosive conflict in the outside world about women and their relationship to men and their long fight for equality.

I have to say that none of these men have become close friends of mine; the Amish rarely do that with outsiders. But I have made several good and strong connections.

I think we all know what patriarchy as we know it does to women, but I’d like to write about what it does to men, to the Amish Man.

It is a complex issue for me.

I couldn’t handle being a patriarch myself; I would find it far too pressured and even suffocating. It is, after all, a narrowly defined role. But it has worked to keep the Amish community thriving for centuries.

Amish patriarchs are, by definition, bosses, leaders, architects, carpenters, planners, powers, farriers, slaughters, farmers, and teachers.

There is no equivalent of this entrenched system in our world, the “English” world.

Many American feminists have targeted the Amish Patriarchy as a thing of unrelenting evil.

From what I’ve seen, it isn’t that simple. The Amish Man does not live in a black-and-white world as we outsiders tend to do. It is almost impossible for me to judge them from the outside.

When I think of the Amish Man, I think about all the Presidents and Kings who talk about how lonely real power is, primarily when responsible for almost everything around you.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous lines is: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Shakespeare was writing about Henry IV. In his play, Henry IV, Part 2, the king is tired, sick, sad, and alone.

Throughout history, there is this persistent idea that leaders and kings (and even Gods) tend to be isolated and lonely.

The Amish man is not alone. But absolute power is lonely. And his life is never easy.

We tend to associate good and fortunate things with power, many people yearn for power,  but power is a double-edged sword to the Amish Man, as to the powerful.

I’ve never seen people who work as hard and continuously as Amish men, literally until they sicken or drop.

The Amish man is a small reflection of God on a much smaller scale, even though no Amish Man would describe himself in that way.

The Patriarch of the Amish family has absolute authority over the family. It isn’t politics; it’s faith.

This Patriarchy can only be understood in a community context, dictated and legitimized by tradition and religion, and reinforced in almost every kind of daily interaction – with family or community.

Patriarchy accurately describes gender relations in Amish society in anthropological and sociological terms: the male is the head of the family, and men occupy every leadership role.

I don’t quote Amish men in the piece; speaking out makes them uncomfortable and is discouraged as vain and self-serving. But most were happy to talk with me if I kept them anonymous while we took our long rides together.

Amish writer Joseph Stoll argues that “Scripture very clearly places the man in a position of responsibility as the head of the household, and his wife in a position of subjection.”

And the Amish live by scripture. Not figuratively as in the case of most American Christians.

The label patriarch does not nearly capture the fullness and nuance of gender and family roles in Amish communities.

For Amish people, subordination does not mean inequality or lack of importance. It is seen as reinforcing tranquility, order, fulfillment, and faith.

Donald Kraybill, the leading Amish scholar in America, writes that outsiders’ assumptions about rigid patriarchal frameworks obscure the many ways in which Amish women’s agency is respected, affirmed, and very much operative.

Gender relations in Amish life, says Kraybill, reflects what he calls “soft” Patriarchy, whose sinews stiffen and relax in different situations.”

In the Amish world, Patriarchy does not mean women have no power. Their power to shape Amish lives and keep the community thriving is enormous, if indirect.

No Amish family could survive without them, and family is at the core of Amish survival.

The idea of the Patriarch is a Biblical one. “The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God (1 Cor.11:3).”

The church is everything. Next is family.

The family is the church in microcosm.

The father is the head of the family in the same way ministers leads the congregation.

The mother is to support the father in every way she can. Together they raise their children in the church, which is more important than other work or leisure.

The Patriarchy, says the Amish Man, is what keeps the Amish communities alive and comparatively free of the conflict and paralysis – and cruelty – that we see in American life.

The Amish take much better care of one another than the rest of us do in our allegedly more equal world.

The term patriarchy, observes Kraybill, obscures a more complicated gender reality.

I’ve seen this.

The Amish marriages I’ve witnessed are marked by mutual support and equality based on scripture.

After all, one preacher told Kraybill, “Doesn’t it say in Galatians, ‘There is no such thing as…male and female, for you are all one person in Christ Jesus?”

In its softer side – and there is a softer side in many Amish families – marriage is seen as a holy thing, as a”partnership in the Lord and the basis of a family whose function is to produce willing, responsible members of the believing family.”

The Amish see both parents as performing critical roles – the wife watches over the children and runs the house.

At the same time, the husband takes responsibility for earning an income, dealing with all significant issues,  making decisions,  and working outside the home.

Put differently, as one Amish man put it, “the husband is the King and his wife, the Queen.” Outsiders rarely witness this partnership, who see the men laboring outside and the women primarily working inside the house.

Women and men commonly step out of their gender roles to help one another.

But the surprising thing for me is that I’ve come to feel considerable sympathy for the patriarchs that I see. I was expecting rigid authoritarians; that is not what I found.

They work themselves to death and bear almost sole responsibility for feeding and housing large numbers of children and grandchildren.

The father is expected to build his own house and the houses and barns of his children.

This is an enormous undertaking. The work is relentless and never-ending.

These “kings” don’t live in luxurious castles with enslaved people. They work every minute of every day but Sunday. There are no trappings of luxury.

I came to feel that the Patriarchy marginalizes the Amish Man to a lifetime of endless responsibility, physical labor, grueling hours, and sacrifice.

There is a narrowness that looks like shrinking, living in one world while withdrawing from the other.

When speaking to Amish men, mainly talking about their lives and work is necessary, as they confine subjects to work and family. They talk freely with the people in their church, but no one outside of it.

I bought a lot of boots for Amish men with holes in their shoes in the sun, rain, snow, and ice. They all told me that suffering is sacred for them. They will accept help in some ways but never ask for it.

They don’t know about most other things beyond their family and community, and they aren’t interested. They consider too much news or information to be dangerous to their faith.

The world of the Amish man is small and intensely bounded. There is all-encompassing devotion to Jesus.

There is very little time to work, supervise, and plan for the next task. Their friends are almost always other Amish people. Their socializing is done with other Amish families.

Much of the time, they are either building their barns and houses or traveling to build the homes and places of other Amish people.

They do this with considerable joy and minor complaints.

But they are often exhausted. They always keep going. I saw one young man working on a barn raising fall off a ladder 10 or 15 feet above the ground.

Everyone else kept working; three young women came running out to rub the man’s wounds and make sure he was all right.

A few minutes later, he was hobbling around up on the third floor. Nobody said a word about it.

I noticed from the first that there are not a lot of older Amish men. The younger men work so hard they don’t live a long time. I rarely see Amish women much older either; some have as many as 15 children.

There are no statistics that I can find, but the work that Amish men like my friend Moise do is not possible too far beyond late middle age. The same is true of their wives, who have as many children as possible.

They wear out. And they rarely see doctors unless there is no alternative or the pain is too great.

Amish men are subject to all kinds of injuries – both natural and from the antiquated equipment they use since electric power is forbidden to them.

Back trouble, broken limps, hernias, rotted teeth, and torn rotator cuffs and tendons are epidemic.

Every Amish man I know often goes to see a chiropractor regularly, usually with his wife.

We are primed to focus on the genuine suffering and persecution of women, which is real, but I can’t help but see the real suffering of the Amish man as well as I got closer to them.

There are no days off for them.

Recently, the temperatures here dropped to well below zero, yet I saw Amish buggies out every day, some with sleds, others with fishing tents placed in the carts to keep their faces from freezing.

They were working on an Amish house under construction nearby. It was too cold for me even to step outside, yet they were out and working every day all winter, climbing up on icy roofs and hauling lumber in sub-zero temperatures.

The Patriarch is powerful in Amish life. The father’s decisions are final and can be questioned but never challenged. Obedience is immediate, from what I have seen, and nearly absolute.

The idea of a “soft” kind of authoritarianism seems accurate. I rarely see anger or cruelty.

The men are not frightening or threatening so much as powerful.  Such authority makes argument difficult, even pointless.

When I see them sitting in their chairs being waited on hand and foot by the women in their family, I can’t help but think of the kings in medieval times.

If I asked or expected my wife to do that, I would not be married for very long.

Yet their children seem much more respectful of their fathers than frightened of them.

The Amish culture discourages and even forbids violence of any kind – pacifists –  and while there are reports of abuse by Amish men, they are rare.

Women have authority over the care for tending many crops, raising and canning food, and anything relating to the domestic life of their homes. They also work to gloss over conflict and heal bad feelings and misunderstandings in the community.

They speak up when something bothers them or disagree with their husbands. Church doctrine is more powerful even than Amish men.

But the husband has the last word. Conflict, challenge, or disobedience is not permitted in the Amish family.

The Amish men do often have a regal air about them. Being a patriarch is transformative. They expect to be taken care of and obeyed; the work of the household ceases the minute they arrive and are brought tea, coffee, food, or mail.

They set the family agenda.

I see Amish men coming into their homes after burdensome work building houses or plowing fields. They come in, sit down, take off their boots, and the room quiets. They are the focus of attention.

They ask for what they want – tea, coffee, something to eat, and one of the daughters bring it instantly, and usually quietly. When an Amish Man enters the family kitchen, the conversation stops.

When I watch the Amish men, I don’t see cruelty to horses or animals. I see men who are, in a very literal way, working machines who work every bit as hard as their horses and in all kinds of weather.

I asked Moise once if he saw a lot of difference between how he works and how the horses work. He just smiled. The Amish are often accused of animal abuse, but no horse could work harder than Moise’s.

Amish men take Sundays off and sometimes visit other families on Saturday, but primarily they all work six days a week, from dawn to dusk.

It’s dangerous to generalize about the Amish Man; they are not by any means all alike. But there are some traits I see again and again.

One of them is what I would call the narrowing of life.

The Amish Man is either working, helping other Amish men work, or planning to buy supplies, readying soil, digging foundations.

I am too curious about the world to live in that way, but I recognize there is less hatred, violence, and cruelty for the Amish Men to absorb.

It takes an enormous amount of hard work to maintain an Amish family or farm – to grow food, slaughter animals, feel animals, do laundry with no electricity.

To bake donuts and cookies and pies to sell, tend to vegetables, fruit, and other crops, clean the house, do the dishes, stock food for an entire winter, and make sure everyone had clean clothes.

Then there is the repairing, building, plowing, and planting.

The Amish man doesn’t do all of these things; his grown sons often help, and his wives and daughters are responsible for his domain.

He pays attention to everything; no detail is too small for him to notice or comment on. He is consulted about everything.

The Amish man is too busy to do much reading, and although they are open to local gossip and some headline news of the world, they usually only read Christian texts, and then, only at night or on Sundays.

He is not interested in national news like the pandemic, political bickering, or presidential politics. Most Amish men are conservative by nature and tradition, but mostly in religious and personal ways, not national political terms.

They are especially fearful of new technology weakening and corrupting their children. Fighting change makes sense to them, but it also limits and shrinks them.

They can only grow externally and experiment in a narrow field. The outside world roars past them as they wave and walk away.

Ask an Amish man about American politics, and I have always gotten the same answer: “that has nothing to do with us.”

Sometimes, Amish men will admit to being bewildered by the “English,” as they call us. Although they are taught humility, I sense a kind of superiority. They are sorry for us, proud of themselves.

There is much about us they don’t like or want: the lax ways we bring up children, the wanton use of drugs, the chaos of health care, homelessness, poverty,  the lack of intelligent or supervised technology, the political quarreling, the massive amounts of money spent on things nobody needs, the failure of religion to shape or govern personal morality, the decline of faith.

I respect the Amish man in the same way I have to respect Amish women. They are unbelievably hard-working; they are honest and plain people. They have kept their world together.

To me, the Amish man deserves much credit for helping to preserve their communities for more than 500 years in a changing and often hostile world.

I respect them, but I feel empathy for them as well. I guess I can’t help it.

If I were forced into that kind of life and work, I would think of the enslaved people I’ve read about in history who were worked to death. I would hate it.

I wouldn’t want to be a patriarch or live under one. I am grateful that my wife and I share the power and responsibility of our lives.

None of the Amish men I know would understand what I am talking about; they would quietly pity me – but not judge me –  for the life I lead, sharing my authority with a strong woman who finds the very idea of Patriarchy abhorrent.

I find the Amish Man compelling and iconic.

Part of the reason is that their lives are so complicated and nuanced, even if they are continuously painted in black and white.

Within the life of the Amish Man are all the wonders, virtues, complexities, and flaws of the man. We are, after all, all human.