6 Times The Amish Took The LAW Into Their Own Hands

The Amish are not supposed to be dangerous. That is the entire premise of how the outside world understands them. They are peaceful. They are non-resistant. They turn the other cheek. They reject violence as a theological principle so foundational that it has shaped their entire relationship with the state for four centuries, going back to the Anabaptist martyrs of sixteenth-century Europe who chose death over picking up a sword. The image is of people who submit. Who absorb. Who accept suffering rather than inflict it. And that image, for most Amish people in most circumstances, reflects something genuinely real about the tradition they inhabit. But it is not the whole picture. Not even close. Because embedded within that same tradition is something that the peaceful image tends to obscure: a community that has always understood itself as operating under a higher law than the one enforced by the state. A community that has, in specific and documented circumstances across American history and into the present day, decided that the higher law required action. And that when it did, the fact that their action happened to violate the laws of the state was not a reason to stop. It was a detail.