ARE THE AMISH RACIST?
Type “Amish” into a search bar and the pictures that appear are almost
always the same: white faces, suspenders, bonnets, and buggies rolling past
Pennsylvania barns. That visual uniformity is what drives the question this
article answers in full. Are the Amish racist? The short, honest reply is that
Amish identity is religious and cultural, not racial. There is no Amish creed
that ranks people by skin color. There is, however, a way of life so tightly
bound to language, dress, technology limits, endogamous marriage, and adult
baptism that the community has remained one of the most demographically
homogeneous Christian groups in North America. Understanding the difference
between those two facts is the entire point of this piece.
This is not a defense brief and it is not an indictment. It is a close
look at how a sixteenth-century Anabaptist movement, transplanted from the
Swiss and German countryside, built a social world that looks racially
exclusive from the outside while operating on rules that apply equally to every
outsider. White tourists, Black converts, Latino farmhands, and adopted
children of any background all encounter the same Ordnung. The barriers are
steep for everyone. They are not written in the language of race.
Who the Amish Actually Are
The Amish began as a 1693 split inside the Swiss Anabaptist movement.
Jakob Ammann insisted on stricter church discipline, including the practice of
Meidung, or social avoidance of unrepentant members. Those who followed him
became known as Amish. They were farmers and craftspeople who rejected infant
baptism, the oath, and military service. Persecution in Europe pushed families
across the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They settled
first in Pennsylvania and later across the Midwest.
Today the horse-and-buggy Amish of North America number a little over
410,000 people, according to the 2025 population profile from the Young Center
for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. They live in more
than 3,100 church districts spread across 32 U.S. states and three Canadian
provinces. Roughly three-fifths of them are still concentrated in Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Growth comes almost entirely from large families and
high retention. Most Amish children join the church as young adults. Adult
converts from outside the community have always been rare.
Each district writes its own Ordnung, an unwritten but binding set of
rules about clothing, technology, transportation, and social contact with “the
English”—the Amish term for anyone who is not Amish. The Ordnung is not a
racial code. It is a religious fence. A White suburban engineer who wants to
join faces the same language requirement, the same ban on cars and higher
education, and the same expectation of baptism after a period of living the
life as a Black accountant or a Mexican farmworker would. The fence is high
because the community believes the world is spiritually dangerous, not because
it believes certain bloodlines are inferior.
Why the Community Looks So White
Three historical and social facts explain the visual homogeneity better
than any theory of racial ideology.
First, the founding population was European. The families who arrived in
the 1700s and 1800s came from Switzerland, Alsace, and the German Palatinate.
They spoke dialects that evolved into Pennsylvania Dutch. They married among
themselves. Two and a half centuries later, that ancestry is still visible in
surnames—Stoltzfus, Yoder, Miller, King, Beiler—that dominate settlement
directories.
Second, the Amish do not evangelize in the modern sense. They do not run
radio ministries or send short-term mission teams to recruit members. A person
who wants to become Amish must move into a settlement, learn the dialect, dress
the part, accept eighth-grade schooling as sufficient, give up most personal
technology, and eventually request baptism. Scholars who have counted
first-generation adult converts across nearly a century of North American Amish
history have found only a few hundred such people in total. The barrier is
cultural and practical, and it is the same barrier for every race.
Third, marriage is restricted to baptized church members. An Amish young
person who marries outside the church is almost always required to leave it.
Because almost all members are descendants of the original European stock,
almost all marriages stay inside that stock. Adopted children of other
backgrounds who grow up Amish and join the church are the main exception, and
even they remain a small fraction of the population.
None of those three facts requires a belief that other races are lesser.
They do produce a community that, to a visitor, looks racially closed. That
appearance is what fuels the question.
What Amish Teaching Actually Says About Human Beings
Amish sermons and household instruction are not published in the way
evangelical books are, but the theological core is not mysterious. Human beings
are created in the image of God. Pride is the root sin.
Gelassenheit—yieldedness, humility, submission to the church—is the highest
virtue. The New Testament command to love one’s neighbor is taken seriously, as
is the command to remain unspotted from the world.
There is no Amish catechism that assigns different spiritual worth to
different skin colors. Children are not taught that other races are mentally or
morally inferior. The language of racial hierarchy that appeared in some
nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Protestant circles does not appear
in Amish preaching as a formal doctrine. What does appear, constantly, is a
sharp distinction between the church and “the world.” That distinction is
religious. A White English neighbor who drives a pickup and sends his children to
public high school is as much “the world” as anyone else.
This matters because many people collapse two different kinds of
exclusion. Racial exclusion says: people who look like that cannot belong.
Religious-cultural exclusion says: people who will not live this way cannot
belong. The Amish practice the second kind. The first kind is not their
official teaching. Whether some individuals still carry ordinary human
prejudice is a separate question, and it is addressed later in this article.
Slavery, the Civil War, and the Anabaptist Pattern of Quiet Refusal
Anabaptists in colonial Pennsylvania were among the earliest European
Christians in North America to treat slaveholding as incompatible with the
gospel. They did not become famous abolitionist orators. Their ethic was
nonresistance and separation, not political campaigning. They generally refused
to own enslaved people. During the Civil War they refused to fight for either
side. That combination—opposition to slavery without joining the activist
movement that ended it—has been described by historians as a moral paradox, not
a racial program.
The same pattern continued after the war. While some related Mennonite
groups later issued formal statements on race relations, integrated certain
institutions, and wrestled publicly with segregation, Old Order Amish
communities stayed on the farm and inside the district. They did not march.
They did not write conference resolutions. They also did not build a theology
of White supremacy. Their silence on the civil-rights era is best read as the
same withdrawal they practice toward almost every other national controversy,
from elections to popular entertainment.
Some popular articles mention an African American man named Moses
Shirley, said to have been born into slavery in Virginia around 1791, converted
by an Amish bishop, and later ordained a minister in Ohio. The story circulates
in local histories and family accounts. It is not a widely documented academic
case, but it is consistent with the larger pattern: when a person of another
background entered the church and lived the life, membership was possible. The
later appearance, in a few late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century
districts, of informal or formal reluctance to receive Black members is also
reported in some community histories. Those practices were not universal, and
they receded. They are part of the record, not the definition of Amish faith.
How a Person of Any Background Becomes Amish
The steps are the same for everyone. A seeker typically moves near a settlement,
finds work, begins attending church (which meets in homes, not dedicated
buildings, in most Old Order groups), studies the language, and lives under the
Ordnung for months or years. Baptism is an adult decision. After baptism, the
person is a member and may marry another member.
Adopted children form the largest group of non-European-descended Amish.
Amish families do adopt, including children of African, Latino, and other
backgrounds, often through public foster-care systems or private arrangements.
A child raised from infancy in an Amish household speaks the dialect, wears the
clothing, and faces the same baptismal choice as every other Amish teenager.
Those who join the church are Amish in every religious and legal sense the
community recognizes.
Adult converts of any race remain uncommon because the lifestyle cost is
enormous. Giving up cars, higher education, most media, and independent career
paths is difficult for a person formed outside the culture. Adding a language
barrier and the social density of a small district makes it harder still.
Scholars who have written about conversion note that a non-White seeker may
also encounter individual suspicion or extra scrutiny in some settlements. That
is a human fact, not a clause in the Dordrecht Confession. The official rule
remains baptism after a demonstrated life, not a racial test.
Marriage rules do not list race. They list church membership. An Amish
member cannot marry an unbaptized person and remain in good standing. Because
almost all baptized members share the same ancestral background, almost all
marriages do too. Interracial Amish marriages exist mainly where an adopted or
converted member of another background has joined and then married within the
church. They are rare because such members are rare.
Work, Neighbors, and the People Amish Actually See Every Day
The idea that Amish communities never interact with people of color is
outdated. In Lancaster County and other large settlements, Amish farms,
construction crews, furniture shops, and markets routinely hire Latino workers.
Spanish-speaking employees drive Amish families to medical appointments, work
alongside Amish men on roofing and framing jobs, and staff some of the same
produce stands that tourists visit. Reporting from the region consistently
describes these relationships as work-centered: punctuality, physical
endurance, and reliability matter more than ancestry. Social mixing after hours
is limited because the Ordnung restricts many forms of recreation and because
the two groups do not share a church.
The Amish word “English” is useful here. It does not mean British or
White. It means not Amish. A Black nurse at the clinic, a Latino crew leader,
and a White insurance agent are all English. The social distance the Amish keep
from all three is the same kind of distance: they will do business, they will
be polite, they will not usually become intimate friends or dating partners.
That is religious nonconformity, not a racial ranking.
This is also why photographs of Amish life look so White. Photographers
are usually standing in church districts, schoolyards, and family auctions.
Those settings are populated by people who grew up inside the church. The hired
roofing crew or the produce-market cashier may be standing twenty feet away and
never appear in the tourist shot.
Do Individual Amish People Hold Prejudiced Views?
Any large human population contains individuals who absorb the prejudices
of the surrounding society. The Amish are not exempt. A person who grew up in a
rural county where racial stereotypes were common can carry those stereotypes
into an Amish household. Older accounts, including some referenced in studies
of Holmes County, Ohio, note that a would-be convert who is not White might
face extra informal resistance in certain districts. That is worth stating
plainly.
It is equally important to state what is not happening. There is no Amish
political party, no Amish racial science, no Amish equivalent of a “blood and
soil” ideology. Children are not catechized in racial hatred. The community’s
most powerful social technologies—shunning, the ban, the fear of pride—are
aimed at members who break the Ordnung, not at outsiders of a particular
complexion. When Amish people speak publicly about the question, as some former
members and a few current public-facing Amish have, they typically answer with
the language of Christian love and the image of God, not with sociological
talking points.
Comparing the Amish to other insular religious groups is instructive.
Tight endogamy plus a founding European population will produce a White-looking
community whether the group is Amish, certain Haredi Jewish communities, or
some conservative Mennonite fellowships. The mechanism is demography and
marriage rules, not a unique Amish theory of race.
The Amish as Targets of Prejudice
The conversation is incomplete if it only runs in one direction. Amish
people have long been the objects of ridicule, harassment, and occasional
violence from non-Amish neighbors. Rural adolescents have forced buggies off
the road, thrown objects, and treated Amish dress as a costume for mockery.
Researchers have studied these incidents under the local term “claping.” The
Amish response is usually nonresistance. They rarely press charges and almost
never organize public protest. That posture is consistent with their theology,
and it has sometimes left them more vulnerable than other minorities who use
law and media more readily.
Stereotypes cut both ways. Outsiders project backwardness, secrecy, or
moral superiority onto the Amish. The question “Are they racist?” sometimes
functions as another projection: a way to place a visible, old-fashioned White
community on the wrong side of a contemporary moral map without examining how
the community actually works.
What Has Changed and What Has Not
Amish society is not frozen. Affiliations range from extremely conservative
Swartzentruber groups to more flexible New Order and Beachy-related
fellowships. Some families have more contact with English institutions through
business, medical care, and the hiring of drivers. Adoption of children from
outside the ethnic core has increased the number of Amish faces that do not
match the tourist postcard. None of these changes has produced a racially
diverse church in the statistical sense, because conversion and intermarriage
rates remain tiny.
The internet has also changed the question. Search engines and social
video make the visual homogeneity of Amish life instantly visible to people who
have never visited a settlement. A commenter who sees only White faces in a
vlog can leap to a racial conclusion. The fuller picture—adopted children,
Latino coworkers, a religious fence that excludes White outsiders just as
firmly—does not fit in a caption.
A Direct Answer
Are the Amish racist? As a church, no. They do not teach racial
inferiority. They do not bar membership by ancestry. They do not maintain a
racial caste system. Their homogeneity is the predictable result of a European
founding population, extremely low adult conversion, and a marriage rule that
admits only baptized members.
Are some Amish individuals capable of ordinary prejudice? Yes, in the
same way some members of every other large group are. Does the community’s
isolation make such prejudice less likely to be challenged by daily contact
with a diverse public? Also yes. Those are human and sociological observations,
not proof of a racist religion.
The more precise description is this: the Amish maintain one of the
strongest religious-cultural boundaries still functioning in North America.
That boundary was built to keep the church from dissolving into the surrounding
society. It was not built to keep particular races out. Because the people
already inside the boundary share a common ancestry, the boundary and the
ancestry have become easy to confuse. They are not the same thing.
A White English person who refuses the Ordnung will never become Amish. A
Black or Latino person who accepts the Ordnung, learns the language, and
receives baptism will. The first case is common. The second is rare. Rarity is
not the same as a racial ban. Anyone who wants a truthful answer to the title question
has to keep those two facts in the same sentence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there Black Amish people?
Yes. Most are children adopted into Amish families who later join the
church. A smaller number are adult converts. Their total numbers are very small
compared with the overall population of more than 410,000.
Can a person of color join an Amish church?
In principle, yes. The requirements—adult baptism after living the life,
acceptance of the local Ordnung, and usually competence in the community’s
language—are the same for every seeker. In practice the lifestyle cost is high
for anyone raised outside the culture.
Do Amish people marry outside their race?
They marry inside the baptized church. Race is not a stated rule. Because
almost all members share European ancestry, most marriages do as well. Adopted
or converted members of other backgrounds who remain in the church may marry
other members.
Did the Amish support slavery?
As a group they generally refused to own enslaved people and treated the
practice as incompatible with Christian teaching. They also refused to join
political abolitionist movements or to fight in the Civil War. Their record is
one of quiet refusal rather than public activism.
Why do Amish communities look all-White in photographs?
Photographs usually show church, school, and family settings populated by
people born into the community. Hired workers and English neighbors of other
backgrounds are often present in workplaces but are not the subject of the
typical tourist or documentary image.
Closing Perspective
The Amish did not design their world to answer twenty-first-century
questions about race. They designed it to preserve a particular reading of the
New Testament under conditions of persecution and, later, under the pressure of
American modernity. The result is a community that is ethnically concentrated,
religiously demanding, and socially distant from almost everyone who is not
Amish. Distance can look like hostility. In this case it is better understood
as a fence built for faith, not for blood.
Anyone who still wants a one-word verdict can have it: no. The longer verdict is more useful. The Amish are a religious people whose history, marriage rules, and low conversion rate have produced a White-looking society without requiring a racist creed. Confusing those two things makes the community harder to understand, not easier. Clarity is the point of asking the question in the first place.