A Holy Experiment and the Plain Sects That Outlasted It

William Penn had been imprisoned in England for his Quaker preaching before he ever received the royal charter that let him found Pennsylvania in 1681, and the colony he built was a direct answer to that experience, a holy experiment guaranteeing liberty of conscience to any settler who believed in one God, a bar low enough to draw far more than his fellow Quakers. Philadelphia grew rapidly into colonial America's most religiously mixed city as German Lutheran, German Reformed and Anabaptist families arrived alongside the founding Quakers, three traditions that shared a historic peace church commitment to nonviolence even where they differed sharply in worship and theology.

The Anabaptist strand of that settlement proved the most durable. Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in Lancaster County descend directly from Swiss and German settlers fleeing persecution in the eighteenth century, and their continued rejection of automobiles, public electrical grid connection and other technology, what the community calls its Ordnung, is a deliberate theological choice about maintaining separation from the world rather than a failure to modernize, renegotiated generation by generation rather than fixed once and left unchanged. Scholarship on the community stresses the choice is selective rather than blanket, since many Amish households use battery power, hire motorized transportation from non Amish neighbors and adopt specific technologies once a congregation judges them compatible with staying separate. Lancaster County today holds the largest and most visible concentration of plain sect life in the country, still farming within an hour of Philadelphia's suburbs three centuries after Penn's charter made room for the first of them.