The Amish: A Control Group for Technofeudalism
By Tracy Thurman: The Brownstone Institute
Life in the United States has changed drastically in the last several decades. Technology, pharmaceutical and medical interventions, dietary shifts, educational policies, and social trends have radically altered our way of life. Over the same time period, Americans have become fatter, sicker, and less happy. Chronic disease has skyrocketed, and our children suffer ill health at unprecedented levels.
Yet there is one group that has not experienced many of these same changes: The Amish and other Plain Sect churches. By opting out of a host of our modern social ills, they have avoided many of the negative outcomes impacting the rest of America, particularly our children.
When I speak of the Amish, I am primarily referring to the Older Order Amish but much applies to Old Order Mennonites and other plain sect communities as well.
The Amish entered the American Experiment in the Colonial era after fleeing violent religious persecution in Europe. Their community customs are dictated by the Ordnung, a set of church rules designed to encourage a simple, modest life, prevent social decay, and bind the community together. Members are pacifists who eschew cars for horses and buggies and reject current fashions for modest homemade dresses and bonnets or black pants, shirts, and hats. They forgo screen-based entertainment of all kinds.
The faithful live in tight-knit but decentralized church districts, with each district making most of its own decisions. Liberal churches allow battery-operated lights, indoor plumbing, and phones or computers in the workshop, while conservative congregations use gas lamps, build outhouses, and require members to walk to public payphone booths scattered throughout the neighborhood. Even if it’s allowed in a business setting, technology is forbidden in the home.
Because the Amish have rejected modern life, they have unwittingly become a control group for many of the social ills that began to plague the rest of us over the past few decades – particularly the trends associated with Big Tech, Big Education, dissolution of the family, Big Food, Big Pharma, and corporatised medicine.
Big Education
The Amish decision to opt out of public education changed schooling in America forever and gave Americans a right that many other countries’ citizens do not have: the right to home school. From early childhood on, plain sect children learn to work alongside their parents and siblings. Chores are standard, and every member of the household contributes.
The Amish believe in formal education in their own one-room schoolhouses through the eighth grade, after which their children become adults and take on full-time work responsibilities. Beginning in 1921 with Ohio’s Bing Act which mandated school attendance through the age of 18, the Amish became a target of government officials looking to force church members into compliance. Over the next thirty years, hundreds of Amish fathers faced fines and imprisonment for refusing to subject their children to compulsory education.
Eventually, outsiders, recognizing the grave threat to religious liberty in America, founded The National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom and did what the Amish were not allowed to do for themselves: they fought back. In the landmark Supreme Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court held that the state cannot force individuals to attend school when it infringes on their First Amendment rights.
American families can home school their children to this day because of the stand taken by the Amish and the Americans who fought to protect them. Today, Amish children still attend one-room schoolhouses through eighth grade and continue with apprenticeships thereafter, and by opting out of Big Education, they show other Americans that one can become a fully functional, prosperous, contributing member of society without the burden of hundreds of thousands in college debt.
The Welfare State
The Amish believe that God and the church community should provide for members who are in need. As a result, they opt out of the welfare system and prove that a tight-knit community can form an adequate safety net. They refuse government handouts of any kind. The Amish I know used their Covid stimulus checks as fire starters rather than taking them to the bank. Most are exempted from paying into Social Security and all refuse to accept the program’s benefits. Some of them refuse to get Social Security numbers and birth certificates.
Churches and midwives keep handwritten records instead which are never entered into government databases. The Amish do not put their elderly family members or the disabled into nursing facilities – rather, the extended family provides care in the home, showing Americans that life without a welfare state is still possible.
Big Pharma, Corporatised Medicine, and the Health Insurance Cartel
One in five American children suffers from a chronic illness that has continued for more than a year. One in 36 of our youth have autism. One of every nine kids is diagnosed with ADHD. Americans take pills at a higher rate than almost any other country in the world – two-thirds of adults are taking prescription drugs. More than one in four American teenagers is on at least one prescription drug – often to treat anxiety and depression.
By contrast, among the Amish, use of prescription drugs is the exception rather than the rule, and few children take one at all. Most Amish are suspicious of modern medicine. Because they reject the idea of insurance and pay cash for all services, they are not bound into a system where care is limited to modalities an insurance carrier approves. Herbal remedies, midwives, chiropractors, and functional medicine practitioners come first, with hospitals reserved for emergency scenarios.
The community maintains a charitable fund to assist members facing large hospital bills related to surgery or accident. Charitable auctions are often held to raise the needed funds. Most children are born at home with the assistance of lay midwives. The Amish community has protected this option for other Americans: whenever states with a strong Amish presence have tried to mandate hospital births or doctor oversight, they face tens of thousands of Amish who refuse to comply. Larger Amish communities have their own private clinics staffed by trusted functional medicine doctors, chiropractors, herbalists, and physical therapists who respect their way of life.
The rejection of Big Pharma is particularly striking: Twenty years ago, a small percentage of Amish parents gave their children a few vaccines such as MMR and TdaP, but today that rate is likely in the single digits. Of course, there are no vaccine mandates for attending Amish schools. Autism, ADHD, and autoimmune diseases are almost unheard of in this population.
I was speaking recently at an Amish festival and asked the 400 Amish folk in the audience if any of them knew any unvaccinated Amish children with these diseases. The attendees easily knew 5,000 children in total, probably many more. Not one person knew an Amish child diagnosed with ADHD. Three audience members responded that they knew of an Amish child with autism, but upon further questioning, one of the children in question had received the MMR vaccine, and the two others were unsure of the vaccine status of the children.
Given the prevalence of these afflictions in wider society, it is startling to encounter a community that has been almost completely spared. Many Americans are starting to notice and are asking questions about this phenomenon – questions that pharmaceutical companies would rather we did not ask.
The Covid Control Group
The Amish response to Covid also served as a useful data point in the madness of 2020. When Pennsylvania issued stay-at-home orders and strongly encouraged churches to end in-person services in late March, some Amish congregations initially complied. However, their semi-annual communion service, scheduled in early May, brought the issue to a head. Each church district made its own decision, but nearly all chose to gather and mark this sacred occasion, fully aware that they might experience an outbreak.
Because their Ordnung forbids the consumption of alcohol, grape juice is used instead, passed down the rows in a pitcher out of which each adult drinks. Over the following two weeks, many did become ill with flu-like symptoms. Most opted for home-based care. The few who were hospitalised did poorly, suffering the remdesivir-and-ventilator fate. Those who stayed home used herbal remedies or ivermectin and most recovered fully and quickly.
By the end of June, the nearly 50,000 Amish in central Pennsylvania had achieved herd immunity with little excess death and continued life as normal. Next to none of them took the Covid shot – I have not heard of a single person who did. I have also heard of no myocarditis, increased infertility, increases in sudden deaths, or disability as we have seen throughout the rest of this country. Pfizer may have eliminated the control group in their clinical trials, but this one continues to show us what could have been if Americans had not lined up for an experimental injection.
Big Tech
When it comes to the effects of Big Tech, American children and teens are in crisis. As documented in numerous studies and in the book The Anxious Generation by Professor Jonathan Haidt, screen time rewires children’s brains in very harmful ways, yet most parents of four-year-olds report that their child already has their own tablet, with early childhood screen time increasing tenfold from 2020 to 2022. American teenagers spend more than 8 hours per day staring at screens. Major depression has increased by 150% among teenagers since 2010, and emergency room visits for self-harm and suicide attempts by girls aged 10-14 have increased by 188%. Suicide rates for boys aged 10-14 have almost doubled, and for girls have almost tripled.
For the Amish, meanwhile, life continues much as it did a century ago: Phones are stationary objects that might be shared by multiple families. There are no televisions, no tablets, no radios, and no internet except for work computers among the most progressive groups. The effect on their children compared to the current generation of American offspring is stark: Amish youngsters go to a one-room schoolhouse, walk home, and help their parents with chores until dinner rather than communing with the digital world in their rooms.
Teenagers work full-time, apprenticed to Amish craftsmen, farmers, or homemakers, and master valuable life skills while their secular peers are still high school freshmen. Most kids walk barefoot, healthily grubby, to care for the horses or the other household animals. They get plenty of sun, socialisation, and family time. Teens join youth groups where they sing, play volleyball, and meet their potential spouses. Depression and anxiety are rare. Medications are even rarer. Self-harm is nearly unheard of. Mentioning gender dysphoria will bring you blank looks – there’s no transgender epidemic among the Amish. Clearly, the Big Tech gulag is another cultural ill that the Amish have largely avoided, at least until now.
But that may change if the US government has its way. Already, Amish are being excluded from basic activities because of their religious objection to photo IDs. The ATF now insists that Amish cannot buy or sell hunting rifles to each other without a federal firearms license, which requires a photo ID – something the Amish cannot acquire for religious reasons. The ATF has set up undercover operations to catch and prosecute Amish farmers for doing just that.
If society’s managers get their way and succeed in introducing central bank digital currencies and phasing out cash, it will cause significant issues for the Amish, most of whom will not use a credit card and many of whom even object to debit cards. Smartphones, digital IDs, and digital wallets would be entirely forbidden for most Amish congregations, so this church stands as a roadblock to mandating these policies. To make these tools of totalitarianism universal, the Amish way of life would have to be destroyed.
The Agricultural Cartel and Raw Milk
Finally, the Amish provide many Americans with the ability to opt out of Big Food with direct-to-consumer sales at their local farms.
Not all Amish eat a healthy diet by any means. Many have fallen for the processed junk food diet embraced by the rest of America. However, a growing number of them are turning to nutrient-dense, farm-fresh foods to improve their health.
In the 1600s, religious persecution in Europe forced the Amish and Mennonites into areas of inhospitable land where few crops would grow. They became renowned for devising methods of enriching soil and growing nutritious crops from challenging terrain. Today, on a per capita basis, they hold more farming knowledge than any other United States ethnic group and are among the few who still know how to grow crops without fossil fuels, as they continue to use mules rather than tractors for farm work.
For those who want to opt out of the Big Food paradigm, the best option is buying direct from a farmer – known as the direct-to-consumer market. Amish and Mennonite farmers provide regeneratively grown produce, meats, and dairy to more than a million Americans who choose to buy directly from these farmers and feed many millions more through middlemen. Notably, a large percentage of the raw milk products sold in this country come from Amish and Mennonite farms. Raw milk is hated by public health bureaucrats and loved by freedom-minded health health-conscious people everywhere. It’s not a coincidence that many of the producers targeted for raw milk harassment over the last decade have been Amish farms.
While working on the case of Amos Miller – an Amish farmer targeted for selling raw milk products in Pennsylvania – I had the privilege of reviewing hundreds of sworn affidavits from his customers detailing how his products have healed or managed chronic autoimmune conditions. The most common ailments were Crohn’s Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, and other digestive disabilities. Many succeeded in weaning off their prescription medications thanks to consuming raw butter, cream, and fermented products like kefir – all of which are banned in Miller’s home state even with a raw milk permit. He refuses to get a permit because doing so would obligate him to stop making the very products on which his customers depend.
The federal government framed Miller for a listeria illness and a listeria death, both of which his legal team has now fully debunked using the CDC’s own data. Miller is far from alone – there are many Amish farms facing harassment by bureaucrats based on dubious test results. Meat farmers are experiencing similar fates if they dare to process their own meat and provide it to their neighbors. These policies threaten to bankrupt the small farms who supply the best real, nutritious, toxin-free food our nation has to offer.
Eliminating the Control Group
Fifty years ago, most Amish men were farmers. Twenty-five years ago, it was down to about half. Today, only a small minority continue to farm, and that number continues to shrink. The rest become carpenters or tradesmen, and some are forced to adopt technology in order to survive. Inevitably, their young men bring home influences from the modern world which impact their families. The culture also depends on sons working alongside their fathers, learning work ethic and mastering manhood. Because of child labor laws, carpenters and tradesmen cannot bring their sons to work with them the way farmers can – and it’s having a significant impact on the next generation.
I’ve discussed this issue with hundreds of members of the Amish community, and there is a grave consensus: If they keep losing their farms, they will lose their way of life forever. Their churches may still meet, the people will still exist, and the name may not change, but Amish culture as we know it will be a thing of the past, and the control group for Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, and Big Education and the welfare state will be gone, along with one of the best sources of real food in our nation.
I believe there are powerful interests that would love such an outcome, because the Amish way of life is drawing far more attention now than it ever has, and is inspiring others to look for ways to escape the control grid. Many Americans have begun to notice that by opting out of the Great Reset policies, the Amish are healthier, happier, and have stronger communities. This social control group shows us that you don’t need 16 or 20 years of educational indoctrination from government schools in order to be a productive member of society.
They demonstrate the benefits of choosing not to be slaves to our technology. We see that children thrive without screen time, have superior mental health as a result, and fare better when they roam outdoors, get sun exposure, get dirty, and learn to work alongside their family. Amish health outcomes indicate that kids who are not subjected to dozens of injections have far lower levels of ADHD and autism, and few allergies or autoimmune diseases either. We can observe that nutrient-dense, farm-fresh foods can help prevent obesity, heal disease, and cut dependence on Big Pharma.
The Amish show us all these truths, and the would-be controllers of our society don’t like this. When one runs a society-wide experiment of technological addiction, of social fragmentation, of scaring people out of having children, of government school indoctrination, of universal vaccination, digital ID, digital wallets, and vaccine passports, it’s a problem if the human lab rats in the experiment can look outside the cage and see that another life is possible.
Join the Control Group
Americans are not just noticing, they are following suit. At Amish homesteading festivals a decade ago, one would only see a handful of outsiders, but now thousands flock to such events to learn how to return to a simpler, freer way of life.
No culture is perfect, the Amish included, but we would be fools not to protect this control group.
Join our Amish friends in opting out. Take action now to protect yourself and your family and exit the control pen before the gate closes. Resist mandatory vaccination, digital IDs, digital currency, smartphone dependency, and media addiction. Get outdoors, and get your kids outdoors working with you. Exit government schools if at all possible, and explore the homeschooling rights that the Amish have protected for you. Build a local community of like-minded people, and create new pockets of resistance. Grow your own food if you can, and if not, find yourself a farmer, develop a close relationship with them, and support them as if your life depends on it – because ultimately, it does.
As our governments rush headlong towards technocracy, it can feel like time is running out to halt their agenda. But if we act now and follow the example of the Amish, we can reclaim the wisdom of prior generations and find that a life outside dystopia is still possible.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Author
Tracy Thurman is an advocate for regenerative farming, food sovereignty, decentralized food systems, and medical freedom. She works with the Barnes Law Firm's public interest division to safeguard the right to purchase food directly from farmers without government interference.
