The Amish in the American Imagination

Christian Century, June 14, 2003 by Daniel Born

In Plain and Fancy shunning comes across as an unreflective practice needing to be reformed. The violent behavior of the shunned man, Peter Reber, turns out to have been warranted because he was protecting a woman from an Amish sexual predator. Witness respects the nonviolent culture of the Amish but makes it altogether clear that justice can be done only when detective John Book gets hold of a shotgun and dispatches the evildoers who have invaded the Edenic Amish paradise.

Weaver-Zercher's book renews wonder on two counts: at the resilience of the Amish in resisting conformity to their surrounding culture, and at the insatiable American appetite to find, and then assimilate for its own purposes, religious and cultural exoticism in every form.

Daniel Born, editor of the Common Review, the magazine of the Great Books Foundation, and author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H. G. Wells.