Going Plainfolk Native: The Amish, Mennonites and other traditionalists might teach us a lot
To save our culture, maybe we all need to go a bit native—Plain Folks Native.
As an adolescent, after attending a Camps Farthest Out (CFO) family Christian camp at Messiah College with my family, I stayed with family friends made at the evangelistic week-long Christian camp (yeah, you had to go to camp with your family and it was way holy roller at times), who were Mennonite dairy farmers.
I stayed a month and went full native, running around barefoot in the muck of mud and cow crap in the barn, doing all of the farmwork the Peachy family boys did, eating like a king, and riding horses bareback so fast (while racing a pickup truck down the road) my Mennonite hosts had to tell this dumb city boy to slow down because you can run a horse to death by accident.
There was a TV, but we could only, rarely, watch old episodes of Davey & Goliath (that’s a moralistic Christian cartoon for kids), which kinda made you not want to watch TV. By the end of it all I was mostly Native Plainfolk, sporting an Amish boy haircut which I wore back to Pittsburgh.
Those Mennonites were some of the nicest people I ever met; they gave me the haircut so I would fit in and especially so the Amish wouldn't give me the fisheye. I treasure the memory of my time with them.
I bring it all up because of the Brandenberger Family.
They’re young, inspired, make beautiful music, and they’re an internet phenomenon, with millions of views of their music videos. They haven’t cut a CD yet, and they’re… Amish?
Graphic: The Brandenberger Family, YouTube Screenshot
The singing and picking Brandenberger Family is Old Order Amish.
Being Amish, they’re inclined to modesty, so it’s possible they have mixed feelings about their fame. I reached out to the family by email, but it’s likely that the patriarch Victor Brandenberger has too much work, too many emails and too little time, because I didn’t hear back from him.
What’s important is the Gospel this family is sharing with the world, bringing the good news of Christ and bearing witness to their traditional lifestyle. It’s not just the songs they’re singing, either.
Regardless of the song they’re performing, an unsung message of every tune is the genuine love and affection they have for one another. You see it in the small, loving glances and modest smiles they share with each other while performing or the grins at the end of a song.
In these modest interactions and their beautiful harmonies, there’s an unmistakable, clear joy in the Lord. It’s a peace beyond understanding. That heartfelt joy and contentment may be why this family has caught on with believer and nonbeliever music fans alike.
It seems “trad,” tradition as we oldsters say, is trending. Maybe all we need to do is sit down, pipe down, listen more to the old-timey types and learn. The Amish may have a lot to teach people about how to preserve their own cultures.
In an age when “mainstream” churches celebrate sexual perversion as a sacrament, and those churches become increasingly aloof and irrelevant, more of those churches fail and become brew pubs, apartment buildings or office space. Yet despite their strict rules, the Old Order Amish are able to keep about 80% of their young people in their community, and they usually don’t even have church buildings, often worshipping in a home.
To put it in perspective, about 300 years ago about 500 Amish settled in the U.S. There were other migrations of Amish but not a huge amount. Now there are between 300,000 and 400,000 Old Order Amish in the U.S., and that doesn’t count other related sects like folks known as Plain People and the Mennonites. These are all modest, hardworking, God- fearing people who’ve managed to build prosperous communities that have rather strict, world-avoiding rules.
How’d they do that? How did they make it work when today’s Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and many other longtime established American churches are going down the tubes by the score?
They did it with the fundamentals: faith, family, hard work, believing in what is good, practicing it and helping others. When you have that in abundance in your community, you might find it hard to leave. No wonder so many Amish stay in the faith.
So, tune into the Brandenbergers for the sweet music, but also to bolster your faith. You might be surprised at what you learn.
Jonathan Barnes is a freelance journalist and corporate writer in Pittsburgh.