Rudy and Viola live in a white steel barn. Both are 32. Their six kids—the boys with bowl cuts, the girls in bonnets—play between the clotheslines. The youngest, covered in dust, a boy no older than two, ambles in an umber dress.
I met Rudy and Viola on a walk over the weekend of the Fourth in 2022. My girlfriend Emily and I had gone back to her home in Iowa to celebrate and mourn her mother, who died suddenly not long into the pandemic. The memorial—as with so much of our COVID-era healing—had been postponed. The weather was cool. The clever farmers had planted early this year, and their fields were already high. It was a weekend of consolation and potluck meatballs.
The Amish of my childhood in Missouri lived an hour or so away, and like those in Iowa, were met with a mixture of fascination and contempt. In our world but not of it.
The Amish, like the Mennonites, are a novelty. Americans are rarely more delighted than when they're among Prosperous White People Who Aren’t Like Me. (Rick Steves built a career on this fact.) The Pennsylvania Dutch have built a thriving tourist industry on handicrafts and the homespun. In Cantril, Iowa (pop. 267), just down the road from Emily's farm, the Mennonite-run Dutchman’s Store has swallowed an entire city block and, with shelf after shelf of homesteading goods and local produce, puts any suburban Whole Foods to shame.
But locals are wary. The Amish are no saints, they say: quick to use others’ technology when needed; loathe to pay their taxes (scurrilous urban legend has the IRS treating each of their houses as a church). Those who live in close proximity have none of the tourist's affection. But their work ethic is appreciated, and the rest gets tolerated.
All this would have passed my notice had it not been the weekend of the Fourth of July. Lately, the holiday invites lamentation. Friends on Facebook described how unfitting it felt to fête a country that continues to grind down its women, its immigrants, its gun victims. A cheeky Twitter post from the British Embassy reminded us that we could have been Canada.
What, then, can we say for American goodness? Perhaps only this: That amid all our decay, amid the violence and growing distrust, there exists among our neighbors a society within a society, one that meets with nearly universal toleration. The Amish flourish. Their population has doubled since 2000. In this we find the best of American liberalism: life as you choose it, with whomever you choose.
We will debate which freedoms to require of illiberal communities. We will ask whether a pastoral modus vivendi is any ideal at all.
But it is enough to appreciate its mere existence. Toleration requires laws and an ethos that rarely coincide. Our suspicion of the other sits deep. Even today, rural whites, with homes full of Amish kitsch, show far less friendliness to the Black Americans with whom they have more in common. The lifestyle that Rudy and Viola enjoy depends on neighbors feeling that they're just similar enough.
Still, that the right nomos and ethos have coincided at all; that they’ve coincided here, in a state so ugly to so many; that in America one can not only disagree but also withdraw; we do not appreciate these facts enough. Even on the Fourth of July.
Perhaps other nations have done this better, and perhaps we will do better still.
I wonder that we’ve done it at all.
First drafted June 2022
Last revised March 2026
