Fewer than one hundred outsiders have joined the Amish and stayed. Marlene C. Miller, author of Called to Be Amish: My Journey from Head Majorette to the Old Order, is one of them.
Marlene Miller grew up in a troubled and volatile home. Her parents argued frequently and were abusive by today's standards and at the very least overly heavy-handed with the physical discipline for the times (Ms. Miller was born in 1944; her parents beat her and her siblings with a dog leash). Her family was always poor, and her best friend died of polio at the age of eight. In high school, her hard work led her to become head majorette (something she never lets you forget), and she began dating the young Amish man (raised in the church but not yet baptized) who would become her husband at age 16. He proposed on the day she graduated high school.
They planned a small wedding, Johnny dragging his feet the whole way, but on the day of the ceremony, he called her up and told her he couldn't marry her on account of his wanting to join the Amish church one day. Not ideal, since she was more than a little bit pregnant at the time! After an angry meeting with Marlene's parents, he finally consented to going through with the wedding (the text doesn't make him seem terribly enthusiastic about this), and after she had the baby, she became a Christian when she was convinced she was going to hell while washing dishes one day. As one does. This conversion led her to tell her husband she wanted to become Amish.
What follows is a description of a life of relentless work, interspersed with childbirth on the regular. Amidst Ms. Miller's heavy learning curve of all the things an Amish farm wife needed to know, she gave birth to ten children in thirteen years- how this happened, I'm not exactly sure, because her husband almost never seemed to be home. Johnny farmed and worked several jobs in town in order to make ends meet; when they had the time or energy to create all those children baffled me.
While Ms. Miller is perpetually optimistic about their poverty and difficult circumstances, their Amish life comes off as fairly grim. She never fully learns to speak Pennsylvania Dutch. Accidents abound on their farm (two near drownings, one child was run over by a wagon, another cracked his skull trying to repair a gas well on the property), their firstborn dies in a car accident that's surrounded in mystery at age twenty-one, another son ended up in prison, and the majority of their surviving children left the Amish altogether. Marlene herself suffers what sounds like bouts of depression (egged on by, I'm sure, exhaustion and the never-ending hormonal fluctuations brought on by constant pregnancy and birth), and comes close to leaving at one point (but of course, she prayed, and that fixed everything right up).
I enjoyed the story of this, but the heavy-handed religiosity irritated me right from the beginning. I'm absolutely not opposed to reading the stories of people of faith; one of the most beautiful books I've ever read is I'm Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers by Tim Madigan, which analyzes the deep faith of both Madigan and Rogers. I loved that book for exploring its subjects' religion without promoting an agenda. 'Here's what we believe and think' is great, especially because it allows the reader to make their own decision on how they feel about those beliefs; 'You need to believe this or else' isn't conducive to further conversation, and Called to Be Amish is more towards the latter. In the first few pages, Ms. Miller proclaims that no one can be truly happy without Jesus, which irked me. I find that kind of attitude stifling; making absolute proclamations like that does no one any favors and is a good way to alienate readers of different backgrounds. This book was on my TBR list from a while back, and while I'm not sorry I read it, I suppose I was hoping for more detail on what it took for Ms. Miller to adapt to Amish life, with no electricity and having to give up all the trappings of her past life.
Do you read books about the Amish, whether fiction or nonfiction? I'm guilty of reading a few 'bonnet books,' as I've seen them called, in the distant past, but haven't for quite some time. Having learned about some of the dirtier underside of the Amish community (puppy mills, animal abuse, physical and sexual abuse of children), I've long since stopped being able to romanticize it as a way of life. That doesn't mean I won't read things about them in the future, but this book didn't necessarily inspire me to want to read more, either.
