Meidung

The Amish exist because of an argument about shunning. The Anabaptists of the Reformation had recovered the ban as the discipline of a voluntary church, and their 1632 Dordrecht Confession included avoidance of the expelled. But practice diverged: the Swiss Brethren congregations in the Emmental applied the ban at the communion table and left ordinary social life intact.

Jakob Ammann, an elder in Alsace, insisted from 1693 on the strict reading: the expelled must be avoided in eating and daily dealings, Meidung in full, alongside other rigors, more frequent communion, foot washing, plainness of dress and the untrimmed beard. His confrontation with the senior Swiss elder Hans Reist split the Brethren; Ammann, in the heat of it, excommunicated his opponents wholesale, and though he later, remarkably, excommunicated himself in penance for his harshness and sought reconciliation, the division held. Ammann's party became the Amish; the Reist party's descendants merged into the Mennonite stream. The genealogy explains the practice's weight. Strict Meidung is not an incidental severity; it is the founding conviction, the point on which the community judged that a church unwilling to make exclusion cost something could not keep its baptismal promises meaningful. Every subsequent Amish schism, and there have been many, has tended to run along the same seam, stricter and milder applications of the ban, the eighteenth-century quarrel replaying in each generation's terms.

Hostetler's account of Meidung, written from inside knowledge of the community, is careful about mechanics, because the mechanics carry the meaning. Shunning applies only to baptized members, never to outsiders or to the unbaptized young, which is why youth who leave before baptism are typically not shunned; the vow must exist before it can be broken. It follows excommunication, which itself follows a graduated process of admonition modeled on Matthew 18, and it is enacted in specifics: members do not eat at the same table with the shunned, do not transact business with them, do not accept rides or favors from them, though conversation, courtesy and help in emergency remain.

Within a family it cuts deepest, a shunned adult child eats at a separate table under the parental roof. The community's own account of the practice is uniformly that it is a grief performed in hope: the letters and testimonies Hostetler collects speak of tough love avant la lettre, the maintained distance being a continuous, wordless summons to return. And return works: the shunned member who comes back, confesses before the congregation and is restored, is received fully, the avoidance ending at once. Litigation and pastoral controversy have attended the practice, most famously a 1947 Pennsylvania lawsuit by a shunned convert, and the moderate Amish affiliations apply it more gently than the strictest. But the design is stable: a church without coercive power, refusing both violence and the state, disciplines by the only means left, the company it keeps, and keeps the door open by definition.