Cruel world intrudes on Amish

There will be no high-profile funerals or church services for the Amish children killed Monday in Lancaster County, Pa. The Old Order Amish have no churches. They worship and dispatch the dead to God's care from their homes and barns.

The Amish have been in the United States for nearly 270 years, but, following the tenets of their faith, they have always lived apart, eschewing the conveniences of modern America, embracing pacifism and maintaining strong ties to the land.

Their homes have no electricity, their clothes no zippers. Women cover their heads with starched bonnets. Men cover their faces with beards when they marry. They avoid cameras because photos violate the biblical teaching against graven images.

So the video images Monday of Amish men and women standing outside the school where a gunman had just shot at least 10 of their own were particularly jarring.

"They're probably the least violent among any group in America," said Joe Wittmer, author of "The Gentle People: An Inside View of Amish Life."

The first Amish settlers came to Pennsylvania in the 1730s to escape brutal hostility they faced in Europe, said Stephen Scott, a research associate at the Young Center. They are Anabaptists — Protestant Christians who believe in adult baptism, nonviolence and the separation of church and state.

About 30,000 Amish children and adults live in Lancaster, "one of the oldest continuing Amish communities in North America," said Donald B. Kraybill, senior fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County. Kraybill described Lancaster as the "mother womb" of many Amish settlements, at least in the East.

Kraybill estimated there were about 150 Amish schools in Lancaster County. Amish children begin first grade in the private, church-run schools at ages 7 or 8 and stay in school until they are 14 or 15.

But Wittmer, who grew up in an Amish home in Indiana, said their education continues after they complete eighth grade. Boys join a formal apprentice program for a trade like farming or carpentry, and girls learn how to can food in the absence of refrigeration and how to smoke ham.

"They learn how to be Amish," Wittmer said.

Schools teach in English, although the Amish speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a form of German spoken by their German and Swiss German ancestors.

Although many school systems in the U.S. revamped security procedures after tragedies such as the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, Amish schools have followed the same procedures for years, Wittmer said.

Amish homes sprinkled across the county's rolling hills have horse-drawn buggies, not cars, in the yard and no phones or electrical appliances inside. In a nod to technology, work buildings may contain gas-powered tools and diesel engines. And while they do not watch TV or listen to the radio, many Amish read newspapers and may have been aware of last week's shooting in Colorado.

"They would have assumed that's something that happens far away, in urban areas," Kraybill said. "I don't think those cases would have stirred any fear."

Instead, it may have reinforced the basic tenet of the faith: "Remain apart from the world," Wittmer said.