Mennonite Weekly Review

“The plaining of the Mennonite world” is how Donald Kraybill describes the trend of Old Order Anabaptist groups growing while mainstream ones struggle.

“Gradually, the proportion of the Mennonite/Amish world that is traditional and Old Order is going to increase dramatically, while the assimilated groups continue to decline,” says the Elizabethtown (Pa.) College sociologist.

The Amish population has nearly doubled in 16 years. Old Order and Old Colony Mennonites, including communities in Latin America, are expanding at a similar pace.

The growth of plain groups is the product of larger families and better retention of youth compared to mainstream Mennonites. These differences are not likely to change.

But, just possibly, another kind of plaining might pass from Old Order communities to assimilated ones. After the financial shocks of the past month, debt-soaked Americans have awakened to the need for a plaining of lifestyles and priorities.

If “the borrower is servant to the lender” (Prov. 22:7), America is a nation indentured. Household debt now equals the U.S. gross domestic product, $13.8 trillion. The national debt has ballooned from $5.7 trillion to $10 trillion since 2001.

Americans have lived beyond our means on easy money and overextended credit. Now the bubble has burst and the bill is due. Thrifty and profligate alike watch with dismay as retirement accounts and college funds shrivel. Some, including those who were already poor before the financial meltdown started, are losing jobs and homes. All share the pain of the $700 billion cost of bailing out a sinking ship.

How would the nation’s finances look today if Americans had lived more plainly? To be plain is to reject the world’s vanities, such as houses that borrowers can’t afford (although in some cases, predatory lenders were to blame). To be plain is to reject the world’s greed, the root of shady financial practices and foolish risks.

How much more secure would Americans feel today if we had shown, as the Amish would say, less Hochmut (pride and arrogance) and more Demut (humility)?

Old Order Mennonites and Amish value work over consumption and sacrifice above pleasure, write Donald Kraybill and Carl Bowman in On the Backroad to Heaven (Johns Hopkins, 2001). They disdain consumerism and embrace thrift. For such virtues they’re admired, but sometimes also pitied as primitive traditionalists unwilling to accept progress and modern realities.

As it has turned out, the ones who lost touch with reality were “masters-of-the-universe” bankers and homeowners with subprime mortgages on McMansions.

Whose way of life looks more realistic now? Who is happier?

The Old Order example nudges us toward a plainer life, away from vanity and chasing after the wind.