While driving through Mt. Vernon, OH, we passed a teenage boy with his boxer-clad-butt hanging out of his pants. The teenage Amish girls in the back of the van started giggling and making jokes about it. We all laughed. Then, Hank commented that we shouldn't laugh at that boy because maybe that's all he had to wear; maybe he couldn't afford a belt to hold his pants up. "No" I chuckled, "He probably paid a lot of money for those pants. It's the current style."
"What's a style?" Hank asked. I tried to explain to Hank that people dress in a certain manner because that is what is popular, or because they want to identify with a certain image. "Oh!" he said. "Like the Amish have a style?" I think he understood.
Another day, Hank and I were returning from a trip to Holmesville, OH when we happened upon an Amish woman push-mowing a lawn. Hank shook his head and muttered something unintelligible. I asked what the matter was. He said there was a time when Amish women wore dresses to their ankles. They fought to be allowed to wear their hemlines at mid-calf. Now, you see them wearing dresses to their ankles, with a walking vent up the side of their calf. (The Amish woman we had passed was wearing such a dress.) He couldn't understand what the big deal was. Why couldn't they be happy with leaving things the way they were? I commented that they apparently wanted to have a new style.
I posted the chart prior to this post to show that there are many types of Amish or Anabaptist. This shouldn't be hard to imagine--look how many Baptists or Pentecostal or Methodist churches are out there. One of the single most identifiable features of the Amish is their dress code: the head coverings, long skirts and aprons for women; the unique men's hair cuts and their beards with no mustaches. The differences in style among the congregations can be a matter of how many inches the brim of a man's hat is, or what colors are accepted in women's apparel.
I have heard Pentecostal Christians refer to the Amish as "holiness" Christians. The Amish I know would scoff at such a moniker. They don't see themselves as dressing holy. They are dressing in a plain, albeit modest manner. They do want to be visualized as separate from the rest of the world. But to claim oneself to be "holy" based on a dress code would be the height of arrogance. And pride is a sin. Unlike many denominational churches in America, they would never say you have to dress like them to go to heaven. Yet, the Amish dress code is more than a matter of dressing modestly: it is a way of preserving their cultural identity
Very interesting!
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