The Village, the Amish, and the Utopian/Dystopian Balance

Oglesbee 1

April Oglesbee

ENGL 6110

Dr. Erben

Final Research Paper

11-30-07

The Village, the Amish, and the Utopian/Dystopian Balance

“Rumspringa is a Pennsylvania Dutch term, usually translated as ‘running around’ and derived in part from the German word Raum, which means ‘space’ in the sense of outside or outdoors space, room to roam. ‘Running around outside the bounds’ is a more complete translation.”

Tom Shachtman, Rumspringa (10-11)

“Not just forms of entertainment, films also convey myths and values; not just products of mass culture, they also project fundamental needs, beliefs, and desires, including utopian desires.”

Peter Ruppert, “Tracing Utopia: Film, Spectatorship, and Desire” (140)

“I wanted to write about innocence…it felt like people [in the 19th Century] were still innocent with truth in their voice and said what they felt”

M. Night Shyamalan, “Deconstructing The Village”

The compelling urge to understand that which is not self has launched many psychological voyages for academics and pop culture acolytes alike. Stranger still is the endeavor to understand the self. The stretch to prescribe an identity for a society other than your own is much easier than to prescribe the outcome of your own future. The anxieties that appear when considering the relinquishment of some practices and the acceptance of others often inspires contemplation of this very thing. In the case of religious values and ethics, the world can often offer problematic roadblocks to the goals of the devoted. But are these roadblocks always problematic or are they sometimes beneficial? By providing a focused opposition, does the world “outside” of a particular community give them definition and a path to follow? Can the perfect community be formed by defining what it is not? Utopian literature is an exploration of these fears, concerns, and curiosities. Utopian texts demand that the familiar be raised and re-envisioned through a lens of awe and new possibilities. The history of utopian experiments and literature, however, has left a trail of evidence that says otherwise. In order to present a successful vision of a utopian society, dystopic visions increasingly appear in the dialogue. Since the history of utopian experiments is majoratively religious in nature, it is only appropriate to look to such experiments for answers. One particular utopian society, the Amish, have succeeded in maintaining their society far beyond the original existence of many others. The Amish have sustained their community in its relatively original form far longer than many other Anabaptist or even protestant groups. The methods by which this community continues to exist as originally intended are also a great deal different than any other protestant community in America. This maintenance is particularly interesting in context of a unique practice, rumspringa, which exposes the young adults of the community to the outside world. A utopian example that has been thus far successful walking the dangerous path between inside/outside society, the Amish seem an anomaly. How can rumspringa possibly work in a community so opposed to the methods and morals of the outside world? A great deal of the success of this practice actually has to do with what James Juhnke calls the “martyr complex” and the ability of the Amish to utilize the outside world as a present foe that perpetuates persecution. By acknowledging and utilizing the outside world as this foe, the Amish have the ability to physically represent a symbolic foe, the devil and evil. Paradoxically, the community is thus ensured by providing evidence and even fear of what exists outside. M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Village asks many of the same questions that those who encounter the Amish do: How and why does a society sustain and perpetuate itself in such an environment? The Village invokes a practice similar to rumspringa through the character of a young blind woman on the verge of entering the adult society of her 19th century community. The young woman, Ivy, is forced to confront and battle with the monstrous creatures that exist symbolically within and without of her isolated village. Ivy must discover the truth about the monsters on the borders of her world and then decide, in a very real sense, whether or not to keep them there. In order to discuss the play between the need for dystopian influences in a utopian world to maintain an equilibrium between social goods and evils, Shyamalan creates an isolated place of myth and fear that the viewer must navigate to become a part of the community that exists within the film and begin to understand the true nature of the utopian impulse.

This paper will first look at the Amish origins and traditions that set the historical background for dealing with the outsider/insider question. Through a discussion of the traditions and methods of the Amish, the practice of rumspringa will then be introduced. I will then move on to discuss and relate the film The Village to both the theoretical/historical discussion of the Amish as Utopian community and the documentary on Amish rumspringa, The Devil’s Playground (with the subsequent study and support of Tom Shachtman’s Rumspringa). The dialogue that is created between the two films will be explored in depth in order to relay the basic nature of the outsider/insider paradox and its ultimate roll in preserving the community. I will end with a discussion of the possibilities regarding the implications of these two films and their dystopic explorations. I ask whether or not we might consider the directors to be purposefully inciting metafilmic questions about the nature of utopias and their furtherance.

The Amish: Orthopraxical Traditions

The Amish are one of many religious groups that emigrated to the United States during the 18th and 19th century to pursue religious freedom. The entirety of the Amish society emigrated to the US from Europe (mainly Germany) and settled across the Northeast and Midwest. The “Amish differ from the majority, namely, in practicing an intense Christian religiosity that suffuses their daily lives, in deliberately attempting to live separately from the larger society, and in refusing to adopt precisely those practices and products of our mainstream society that have come to define and represent America and Americans to the rest of the world—our cars, our entertainment, our consumerism” (Shachtman11). This practice has continued into the present with a few minor exceptions that vary from region to region. The point is to avoid the practices and products that separate families and social groups from each other. This means plenty of hard work which functions well with the philosophy of the group: hard work produces satisfaction and righteous purpose. In his book, Rumspringa, Tom Shachtman specifies that “Anabaptism is concerned with orthopraxis, how to live rightly, rather than with orthodoxy, how to live within doctrine” (30). Instead of a doctrine to detail the ordinances of daily life, the Amish have the ordnung. Shachtman discusses how “the ordnung is flexible and organic…frequently revised in reaction to the challenges presented by the outside world” (47). The ordnung is not something that is written down but the unspoken law of the Amish. It is taught implicitly and explicitly to children in order guide the community on a separate path from the rest of the world in pursuit of purity and simple obedience to God.

The ordnung serves a multi-component purpose. Joseph F. Beiler, an historian and a cofounder of “one of the only libraries established by the sect,” wrote that “ordnung had three ‘meanings:’ 1) To arrange or draw up a rule of degree to induce equality. 2) It creates a vision of contentment. 3) God’s example of the universe—nobody doubts the time of sunrise or sunset, nobody argues the timing of the moon, etc.” (Qtd. Shachtman78-79). Essentially, the purpose of the ordnung in the threefold Beiler model is to provide order through the apparently natural and Godly creation of a common “vision of contentment” perpetuated by the Amish church. Rather than simply being a means of social order the ordnung is a means of social control on multiple levels. The appeal to the natural knowledge of God and his world implies that the laws of the ordnung fall under the same designation. The common “vision” of those rules and conceptions provides a common and distinct path for the distribution of these same things. It is a self perpetuating system. It also provides little room for individual interpretation. Shachtman acknowledges the inherent problems in such a configuration of faith and politics as what that which the Amish call “absonderung, a sacrificing of some of the pleasures of this world, the better to maintain separateness from the world’s sinful, irreligious, and immoral practices” (125). The satisfaction of the individual is less than the satisfaction of the whole and this is hard to maintain in the view of individual conceptions of faith and law. In order to restrict the exposure to individual and problematic thoughts on the nature of the ordnung and the Amish social structure “the Amish…have voluntarily segregated themselves …to keep it pure…” (Smith 227). The outside world is not at all an ideal influence for the community because it contains ideas and practices that are dangerous to the existing theology and order of the Amish. To encourage the use of outside technologies and ideas would take away from those practices and thoughts uniquely Amish. To take away from the Amish ideals would be to take away from the family and the soul. However, this is a limited view of the reasons for the self imposed segregation of the Amish. A great deal of the Anabaptist and, specifically, the Amish theology is the institution of martyr theology or what Juhnke calls the “martyr complex.” The martyr, by nature, shows a defiance of community rules yet, by doing so, often sustains the community (546). The Mennonites, a fellow Anabaptist church, “are growing in countries where they are persecuted, but numbers are stagnant in North America where they are tolerated and affluent” (547). Persecution, then, plays a large part in the growth and maintenance of these like communities. At the most basic definition, martyrdom is a way to define the self and the community against those unlike them and their purpose. It further proves that there are those that will persecute the members of the community. Juhnke quotes Ethelbert Stauffer’s conclusion that “the believers conflict with the ‘world’ is the surest indication that the disciple is true to the master” (520). Suffering is a path to surety of purpose. If there is persecution, then there is an opposition. The Mennonite Encyclopedia places the martyr’s suffering as a sign of election (520) and goes on further to define martyrdom as a function of “theology of the kingdom” which juxtapositions two “aeons:” the “City of God” and the City of “the prince of this world”--which can be construed to mean Lucifer or the Devil as they are in opposition to God and therefore the Amish (520). The martyr, who should nonviolently resist, is fulfilling the “seal of the Covenant” made with God. The baptized member of the persecuted community is fulfilling the will of God by existing and maintaining a world separate from “the prince of this world.” Persecution is just a further sign that the community is the right place to be and the right path to take. Essentially, it is an eschatological battle that is waged every day by every member in communion.

Rumspringa

The practice of rumspringa, then, is particularly problematic in that its entire purpose is to expose the adolescents of the community to the outside world and then ask them to choose to commit themselves back to the Amish world. It seems illogical for this community to take the chance that their children will find the outside world more appealing, or worse, that the community will damage their souls in some way through sinful practices and products. The Amish, however, reasons “that that gamble must be chanced by the community because its members sense that the threat of not permitting the children a rumspringa is even greater” (Shachtman 14). This is a tremendously progressive movement from protestant utopian communities of the past. One was expected to commit to the community and maintain it solely for the purpose of its righteousness and the need to eliminate sin in one’s own soul. But for the Amish, “the rumspringa process [is meant] to inoculate youth against the strong pull of the forbidden by dosing them with the vaccine of a little worldly experience” (Shachtman 14). Again, this is a tremendous idea. How can a society so opposed and blockaded against the influence of the outside world on the community as a whole but also their children until the age of sixteen possibly find the idea of exposing those same children to everything they have been forbidden to do beforehand? It seems a recipe for disaster. Amish teenagers, like average American teenagers, are not (in theory) immune to the need to rebel or conform to their peers.[1] They are equally exposed to the commercial appeal of material objects, drugs, alcohol, and sex. It would seem rumspringa is a very bad idea. Yet, as the Amish claim, it is meant to act as an inoculation to the outside world. I would argue that the situation is more complicated than this. Rather than just an inoculation to the needs and wants of what the outside world has to offer, rumspringa serves as a sort of modern day martyr resolution.

In America, there is virtually no persecution of the Amish in terms of religion and this consequentially creates a block in the pressure valve of the Amish system of segregation. The community has for quite some time focused on the continued and varied persecution of its members. One particular book, the Ausbund, functions quite efficiently to inculcate the theology of martyrdom into Amish children. It is a collection of hymns and chorals depicting and praising historically documented martyrs of the Christian, and especially Anabaptist, faith. The Amish faith relies on a sense of persecution to maintain its sense of community but also its doctrine that dictates that the devil works in the world and the world will therefore seek to make you suffer. If you are not suffering, then you are not faithful. In America, if there is no persecution, then there is no real profession of faith. The pressure is immense within the community because the pressure without is not. Rumspringa, then, may act as a way to recreate the martyr effect.