As high school was recently resuming in rural Wisconsin, nine football players spent an evening harassing Amish near LaValle (Old Order Amish-mainstream affiliation, see Table 1 in Petrovich 2017). The football players blew air horns, knocked on doors and windows, and caused minor damage. Amish residents, responding as many of us would, contacted local deputies who subsequently caught up with the youth.
This incident, while disturbing, isn’t unique. Reckless adolescent harassment and vandalism targeting Amish—or indeed most any group—occurs with unfortunate regularity. Even peer groups of some Amish and plain Mennonite youth engage in similar behavior in their own neighborhoods.
What set this incident apart was its potent mix of stereotypes: “football players” versus “Amish.” This juxtaposition elevated a local disturbance to national news, catching the attention of outlets such as Newsweek. In response, the police released a report, the school district issued a statement, and the Amish community penned an unsigned public letter.
News coverage of the unsigned public letter picked up on the theme “forgiveness,” with headlines such as “Amish church members thank public for support, share message of forgiveness after report of alleged harassment.” This “forgiveness” narrative aligns with popular portrayals of Amish responses to adversity and brings to mind a warm, selfless reply that inspires. But does it accurately reflect Amish cultural thinking? Let’s examine the letter’s “message of forgiveness”:
Notice Notice Notice
We, as members of the Amish Church of La Valle would like to thank the public for their concerns about what happened in our community the first part of August. We would like to take this way to inform you that all is taken care of. We all are well satisfied with the way it was done. We feel the case is closed, forgiven, dead and buried. Amen.
We also want to thank everyone who in anyway supported the Ben[e]fit Fish Fry for Little Emma who is doing well. The support and turnout was beyond our expectations.
May God Bless Each And Everyone!
Thanks For All Concerns!
Then follows a closing with different handwriting.
We are hoping the Reedsburg High School Foot Ball Team has a [successful] and enjoyable time for the rest of the[ir] season.
The Amish Church of La Valle.
Is this “forgiveness”? I would hesitate to call this response—and many Amish responses—by this term. I have several observations of the letter, informed in part by my own years of immersion among Amish and closely related groups. Here’s what I’m seeing:
Ending the fuss: The letter’s phrase “closed, forgiven, dead and buried” appears aimed at stopping ongoing talk and unwanted attention. This suggests the Amish may regret involving authorities due to the resulting commotion. The letter serves as a polite but firm request to let the matter rest.
Pragmatism vs. emotion: The letter emphasizes practical and good-spirited—but also peremptory—resolution rather than emotional catharsis. “All is taken care of” suggests a matter-of-fact approach to conflict resolution, not an emphasis on forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, or a transformative process.
Understating to minimize: The incident itself is barely mentioned, with no elaboration on feelings, damages, or police involvement. New readers would know nothing about what actually happened. This understated rhetorical approach contrasts sharply with emotionally charged mainstream narratives of forgiveness that may require revisiting what happened.
Refocusing on routine: By wishing the football team well in a return to future games and mentioning a recent community benefit, the authors redirect attention to normal activities. Routine helps bury upsetting and embarrassing events. For Amish, resolving a Chiss (a fuss) frequently involves parties “laying low” until everything “blows over” and people have moved on to something else, that is, focused on routine or another Chiss. Nothing should remain reminding people of this incident. Forgotten.
Emotional detachment: While expressing well-wishes for the football team, the letter shows no intent to build closer relationships with the offenders. It maintains a clear emotional distance. Even the acknowledgement of community support for a recent Amish benefit auction is non-emotional, albeit grateful, e.g. support being “beyond our expectations” rather than “made us feel extremely grateful.”
Silencing and distracting as avoiding potential systemic problems: After closing the matter, a significant portion of the letter draws attention to positive community interactions. This pivot potentially deflects attention from systemic issues triggering “what happened.” Perhaps it was a random act of violence. But if this case of harassment reflects deeper one- or two-way resentments and grievances, those systemic problems remain unaddressed and, perhaps, even more deeply buried since this case must be closed without further conversation.
Religious framing: Despite a brief religious reference that signals religious identity, the letter doesn’t frame the response as religiously motivated. This contrasts with how Amish forgiveness is often portrayed, as deeply religious. Possibly, the writers may not want the public to dissect their religious beliefs on forgiveness so didn’t disclose, but we have no material to examine.
Reluctant public engagement: Amish individuals often handle problems in as small a group as possible, avoiding wider attention, whether for a Chiss within the group or beyond. Yet, individuals routinely talk about happenings in these thick social networks. The fact that some Amish individuals issued a written statement speaks to the unusual level of intervention in this case. For many Amish, writing something creates a sense of official acknowledgement that the issue exists beyond mere talk, representing an escalation beyond what other cultures may feel.
Community forgiveness? Or individual anonymity? Do unsigned letters represent “The Amish” as a community collectively forgiving? Actually, it probably serves other purposes, namely, to keep from further formalizing/escalating the situation, which happens when individuals are named, and blunt any focus on individuals (including from potential misquotes from rumors), so all impacts of the letter are diffused across the population. You can’t pin down one person.
Audience: Us and Them: The letter seems carefully crafted to speak to two parties with two goals: Amish (this letter represents “our” consensus) and non-Amish (thanks for being kind, now please stop talking about this). The authors may be suggesting a unified community consensus not because consensus exists but as a way to end variations in attitudes. Only certain individuals have the internal rapport to write this letter, and community members likely know who they are: the final consensus forgers.
In sum, the Amish letter is aimed at deflecting added attention to the Amish people and individuals, and it strategizes ways to end the buzz. While I do not fully know if this is what the letter’s writers were thinking, I find my interpretation falling within a range of reasonable possibilities among the Amish. The popular “forgiveness” narrative, though, is not supported.
While the Amish letter is certainly more conciliatory than legal action, labeling it as “forgiveness” fits their response into a poorly mismatched framework. The “Amish forgiveness” narrative gained significant traction after the 2006 Nickel Mines massacre in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. This tragic event—where a gunman killed and wounded several Amish schoolchildren before taking his own life—captured global attention and sparked widespread interest in Amish responses to violence.
In the wake of Nickel Mines, several mainstream Mennonite scholars published influential works on Amish forgiveness. These included John Ruth’s Forgiveness: A Legacy of the West Nickel Mines Amish School, Julia Kasdorf’s “To Pasture: ‘Amish Forgiveness,’ Silence, and the West Nickel Mines School Shooting,” and Donald Kraybill, Steven Nolt, and David Weaver-Zercher’s Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. Forgiveness: the linking theme. These works, among others, were all authored by mainstream (i.e. non-plain) Mennonites and significantly shaped public perception of Amish responses to adversity, e.g. Paul’s (2012) assumption of “Amish forgiveness” in his detailed communications analysis of Nickel Mines.
More recently, Kraybill (2018) distilled his interpretation of Amish forgiveness. His points include (1) forgiveness is in the Amish religious and cultural DNA, based on the Sermon on the Mount teaching (Matthew 5-7) and martyr history; (2) forgiving others is necessary for Amish to receive forgiveness from God; and (3) retaliation and anger are dysfunctional for a communitarian group so forgiveness is necessary. He argues that Amish forgiveness—the Amish “tribe” toward the non-Amish offending “tribe”—is swift because it’s habitual and communal.
The “Amish forgiveness” narratives, though compelling to many readers, risks overemphasizing communal level (“reified”) religiously motivated action at the expense of what are actually more pragmatic, immediate, and tangible goals. What is memorable about “Amish forgiveness” narratives is the caricature of Amish as a hybrid of innocent naivety and superhuman virtue. Anthropologist Michael Billig (Franklin & Marshall College), with Elam Zook (2017), aptly coined it the Amish “Smurf Village“ complex, a characterization that seems particularly relevant here.
Amish individuals are unlikely to detail their rationale for their actions in cases such as in La Valle. As such, non-Amish writings on “Amish forgiveness” have inadvertently become a vehicle for publicly teaching about forgiveness, but this “forgiveness” is quite something different from actual Amish actions we see in situations such as La Valle. Public expositions about Amish forgiveness are often aligned with pacifist and conflict mediation thinking, which some mainstream Mennonite authors embrace. However, these accounts can feel like a challenge to reconcile when observed Amish behavior—which doesn’t always align with this narrative. I think accurate representation of many facts about Amish life serve then to shield some slippage when imperfectly aligning Amish action with authors’ preferred forgiveness paradigms. The mismatch requires glossing over subtle behaviors—ultimately core motivations and social patterns—and creating questionable dichotomies, such as what “forgiveness” means inside the Amish church—where shunning could exist—versus outside the church.
Ultimately, while religion undoubtedly informs a range of Amish actions (albeit unevenly), what we’re labeling as “forgiveness” in situations such as La Valle may be more about a culturally familiar, pragmatic response to social disruption than about specific religious doctrine, socialization, or strategic interchange between offender and offended. By fixating on “forgiveness”, we may be misinterpreting fundamental aspects of Amish cultural thinking and community dynamics. But by understanding Amish responses to difficulties in ways following insider thinking, we are prepared to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of Amish cultural responses to adversities.
Anderson, Cory. 2024. “Beyond ‘Amish Forgiveness’: Unpacking the Amish Response to a Wisconsin Football Team’s Harassment.” As Well As: Addendums That Redefine (blog), September 10. https://coryanderson.org/as-well-as/beyond-amish-forgiveness
Billig, Michael, and Elam Zook. 2017. “The Functionalist Problem in Kraybill’s Riddle of Amish Culture.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 5(1):82-95. https://doi.org/10.18061/1811/81074
Kasdorf, Julia Spicher. 2007. “To Pasture: ‘Amish Forgiveness,’ Silence, and the West Nickel Mines School Shooting.” Crosscurrents (Fall):328-47.
Kraybill, Donald, Steven Nolt, and David Weaver-Zercher. 2007. Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Kraybill, Donald. 2018. “Anabaptist Forgiveness in Cultural Context: An Amish Example.” Pp. 33-46 in The Philosophy of Forgiveness: Vol III: Forgiveness in World Religions, edited by Gregory Bock. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.
Paul, Gregory. 2012. “‘We Must Not Think Evil of This Man’: A Case Study of Amish and English Forgiveness.” Communication Quarterly 60(3):424-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463373.2012.688722
Petrovich, Christopher. 2017. “More than Forty Amish Affiliations? Charting the Fault Lines.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 5(1):120-42. https://doi.org/10.18061/1811/81072
Ruth, John. 2007. Forgiveness: A Legacy of the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.
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