Amish In The News: Technology

Excellent article today in the Lancaster paper about the Amish and technology.  From cell phones to computers to cars the Amish are under constant assault from the outside and deciding which technologies to allow and which ones not to is a complicated process.    It's made more complicated by the changing technology itself.

One Old Order Mennonite minister in Virginia told me that his church grudgingly allowed cell phones in the beginning, "but that was before they had cameras and the internet."  And the problem is once a technology is permitted, it is very difficult to take it away.  Ultimately, though, this is not an issue for snickering outsiders to decide, but for the Amish themselves.

I do know Amish people who use the internet, some even monitor this website, but those are technological and theological decisions that they and their own church can come to terms with.  Outsiders often oversimplify the Amish relationship with technology and this article does a super job of explaining it.

I do think this will continue to be a divisive issue within the Amish church in the years ahead and I can see the gulf widening the greatest between rural, small isolated Amish settlements and big bulwark communities like northern Indiana and Lancaster County, PA where the pressure to use technology is enormous.  Personally - my opinion only - I wouldn't be surprised to see another huge conservative/progressive Amish church split in my life time. Such splits are already occurring because the church is so autonomous and each district is different, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something more organized occur, similar to what happened in the Brethren church.