While traveling on Amtrak to Pittsburgh two months before the November election, I encountered an Amish family from Lancaster in the train’s café car. But this was no ordinary Amish family. The father also happened to be the leader of a large Lancaster Amish community. He was a loquacious fellow, chatting with one of the Amtrak engineers and another passenger who sat at a separate table with coffee and an open Bible. A young Amish couple — a ginger-haired farmer in a bowl haircut and his demure wife in wire-rimmed glasses — joined the group not long after I sat down.
The man with the Bible was talking about the deterioration of the Church of England and the rewriting of Scripture by woke Christian denominations so they could blend in with secular society. The topic very quickly switched to politics. I joined in the moment the leader mentioned his community had just registered to vote.
“I hope you didn’t go for the party promoting gender ideology and abortion,” I said.
I knew there was no chance that would be the case but I wanted to show solidarity. The leader said the Republican Party offered the only hope for America. For him and for all the Amish — as he explicitly stated — it came down to Biblical values and family. As he talked I could see he was thoroughly up to date on the multitudes of woke aberrations in the once-great party of John F. Kennedy.
Fast forward to Election Day when photos of the Amish in buggies with Trump flags going to vote went viral. Talk about a unified religious community. No such political unity exists in the world of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or evangelical Protestantism, although it should if one were to look at the specific doctrines of these Churches and how these doctrines organically align with Republican rather than Democrat policies.
And yet millions of deluded, faux “new age” Christians somehow talked themselves into voting for Harris and Walz, the crusader-team for abortion and ten-year-old girls who identify as butch stevedores.
The Amish trace their roots to the period following the Martin Luther-led Protestant Reformation in 1517. The pace of the 1517 Reformation, however, proved to be too slow for a group of believers in Zurich, Switzerland. This group of mainly young people found fault with the traditional practice of baptizing infants.
The new movement became known as the Radical Reformation and its adherents given the name Anabaptists. They were persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants.
William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, assured the Amish they were free to live their religion in Pennsylvania, which he called “the holy experiment of religious tolerance.” Many Amish then migrated to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the 1720s.
The Amish traditionally have been apolitical or at least it was said they never voted. Outside the system, their protected life in Pennsylvania meant they made their own rules. They built houses in a certain way; they farmed in a certain way. One can glimpse the Amish at work in places like Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, where they work their food stands of fresh produce, meats and various bakery items.
Then the 2020 election brought a new president (Joe Biden) and a new PA governor (Josh Shapiro). Like a bolt out of the blue, the groundwork was laid for the shattering of the apolitical life of the Amish.
The catalyst was Amish farmer Amos Miller, a Lancaster County resident who was hauled into court for violating Food and Drug Administration safety laws by selling raw milk without a permit after two E. coli cases in New York and Michigan had been linked to his farm. Essentially, the state of Pennsylvania was trying to put Miller out of business because the raw milk he produces also plays a part in the farm’s production of yogurt, kefir, butter and cream.
The state’s action was nothing less than wholesale financial decapitation, affecting Miller’s ability to distribute food products to customers, many of whom who are non-Amish.
The raw milk crackdown on farmer Miller was the last straw in a variety of embarrassments the Lancaster County Amish have had to deal with since Democrat Shapiro became governor. For decades the state said little or nothing about how the Amish handle their dogs or other animals, how they do carpentry work, how they handle workers compensation as well as a number of insurance issues.
Elmundo America reported that:
After an E. coli outbreak and news that Miller didn’t have a permit to sell milk in Pennsylvania, agents from Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture raided his farm, seizing much of his food and dairy products. In the ensuing case, Miller was banned from selling milk in Pennsylvania, with the case ongoing.
The case was seen by the Amish community as government tyranny and helped mobilize them against the party of Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA).
The Amish saw these charges as a gross exaggeration. A case of Democrats being Democrats wanting to over-regulate and reneging on William Penn’s promise to the Amish that they may self-regulate to a large degree without government interference.
Elon Musk, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, said,
The Democrats did make a mistake because there was government overreach with some of the Amish farmers. There was some government overreach that shut down some Amish farmers, which really made them pretty upset. And you just need to be able to channel that, the fact that they’re upset, like, well, there’s a thing you can do about it, which is called voting…
In the lead-up to the election, Steven Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, told PBS that the Amish voting population isn’t very big and that even if they all registered to vote he doubted whether they would vote in significant numbers.
So here we have a University guy (woke) talking to (woke) PBS about the insignificance of an Amish voting block.
“They haven’t voted, they’re not voting, and I think it’s safe to say in the near future we wouldn’t expect them to,” Nolt said. “Even if we would imagine, for example, that here in Lancaster, there would be a tremendous percentage in percentage terms … we’re looking at several hundred to maybe a thousand additional votes.”
In other words, the Amish will always be apathetic and apolitical and because they are not politically active, the government pretty much has its way with them.
Until, of course, Pennsylvania activist Scott Presler got into the act and with his team registered thousands of Amish across the state with the message: They won’t stop harassing you until you are politically active.
The message seems to have worked, although on Election Day when those images of Amish carriages all over parts of Pennsylvania went viral, Facebook flagged them as misinformation, a corrupt nod to Nolt and PBS perhaps and a slap in the face to hard working Presler who helped President Trump win Pennsylvania.
Yet reality told a different story.
The carriages with the Trump flags were real, and the Amish votes were significant. So significant in fact that the people of America-especially Republicans-owe the Amish a long heartfelt thank you that stretches far into the future, because not only did they buck a centuries old apolitical tradition, they also put their families on the line when they decided to vote.
By voting for Donald J. Trump, the Amish-all declared religious pacifists, by the way-opened the window to the Selective Service system. In effect, by voting for Trump they entered their names into the System.
As an article in Crisis Magazine put it:
The Amish’s decision to cast their votes ultimately came down to their own aversion to the prospect of the global war that the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket showed every sign of bringing about.
The countless deaths of men, women, and children already happening in the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine and the likelihood of escalations on all sides was enough to move even the contemplative, quietistic, nose-to-the-plow Amish to intervene.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-radicalization-of-pennsylvanias-amish/
