The Amish Ordnung: A Shared Double Consciousness

Abstract

This study takes a critical anthropological approach to examining and critiquing the notion of religious reform from culturally diverse perspectives. It compares Evangelical Lutheran, Mennonite Brethren, and Old Order Amish farming communities undergoing social, cultural, and economic threats to their survival during the 1990s to the present in Northeast Iowa to identify the degree to which resistance to the reform of local religious community traditions and practices allows these groups to survive eroding processes of social, cultural, and economic change in American agriculture. The comparative and longitudinal study argues that the Old Order Amish religious resistance to existential threats is the most effective because it views change from the perspective of an ontological double-consciousness of both living “in the world” and not being “of the world” compared to the “worldliness” of the other groups in this study.

Keywords: kingdom of God, resistance, family farmers, rural churches, critical ethnography