It all comes down to whether you want to be Amish or not.
To be or not to be—that is the question.
These words of an Amish preacher's son from Indiana capture a
fundamental feature of life in the Amish church: voluntary membership.
Every Amish teen faces a formal decision of whether to enter or abandon
the Old Order Amish Church, and the Amish elders give every teenager the
opportunity to explore life outside the insular, separatist community
before making that decision. The church quietly permits behavior that is
otherwise strictly forbidden (including drinking, driving, dancing, and
dating) and imposes no limits on how long one may take in
deliberating.
The rite of rumspringa—this “running
around” period when the unbaptized Amish experience something of
life in the outside world—presents a number of questions and
challenges to liberal theorists. The Amish social contract is, on its
face, embarrassing to liberal states, for no polity is as liberal in its
membership policy. And rumspringa challenges liberal
theorists' assumptions about the insularity of groups like the Amish.
Contemporary liberals acquainted with the Amish via Wisconsin v.
Yoder, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case exempting the Amish from
state-mandated education past the eighth grade,1
Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 US 208 (1972).
may be surprised to learn of an aspect
of traditional Amish life that could have been cribbed from Locke's
Second Treatise (1690), if it hadn't predated that book by
several decades.
The Amish case provides grounds for reexamining two related quandaries
in liberalism: the old question of liberal political legitimacy and the
relatively new question of how liberal states ought to treat conservative
minority cultures. In this article, I sketch the classical liberal account
of voluntarist membership, provide an overview of contemporary liberal
thinking about illiberal cultures, introduce the Amish and their practice
of rumspringa, evaluate the effectiveness of rumspringa
as an exit option, and explore the attempts of some liberal theorists to
conceptualize exit costs with an eye to lowering the barriers for
individuals who contemplate leaving illiberal groups. I conclude with
reflections on the shortcomings of two liberal perspectives on the
question—the “toleration” and “autonomy”
approaches—and propose an exit from the quandary.
Liberalism's Choice
“Nobody is born a member of any Church
… No man by nature is bound unto any particular Church or Sect, but
every one joins himself voluntarily to that Society in which he believes
he has found that Profession and Worship which is truly acceptable to
God.”2
“[A] child is born a subject of no
country or government. He is under his father's tuition and
authority, till he come to age of discretion; and then he is a free-man,
at liberty what government he will put himself under; what body politick
he will unite himself to.”3
When Locke presented these voluntarist accounts of religious and
political membership in 1689 and 1690, they were—by all
accounts—false. And they are false today, if we take them as
empirical claims. Membership rules of most modern states include the
possibility of “naturalization” for foreign-born individuals,
but all link initial citizenship to blood, soil, or both. (You are born a
citizen of the United States, for example, if you are born in a U.S.
territory or if your one or both of your parents are U.S. citizens.)4
Religious groups have more
complicated and more diverse ways of designating their members, but most
ascribe religious affiliation either by birth (as in Hinduism, Judaism,
and Islam) or through infant baptism (as in most variations of
Christianity). So we would be too shallow readers of Locke if we were to
take his radical claims at face value. In fact, in his time and in ours,
we are born subject to religious and political authorities we do not
choose. Locke's contribution seems to be his claim that as a matter
of political morality and legitimate religious law, no one
ought
to be born obligated to any such society. His voluntarist theory of
membership provides the bedrock for one of the guiding tenets of many
accounts of liberalism today: consent as the root of legitimate
government.
Of the two types of consent Locke famously discusses in the Second
Treatise—express and tacit—only the latter pertains to
most of us. Other than naturalized citizens who take a prescribed oath and
declare their consent to join a given polity, most of us are citizens by
birthright. We do not choose to become Americans or Armenians or Costa
Ricans: this status is ascribed to us by virtue of where or to whom we are
born. Of course, it is sometimes possible to change our citizenship later
in life, or even (depending on the rules of particular states) to add a
second or a third civic identity to our collection. (And, similarly,
it's possible to convert to most religions.) But insofar as we remain
on the soil of a given country—in Locke's words, as long as we
have any “possession, or enjoyment, of any part of the dominion of
any government”5
—we
display our tacit approval of the laws and sovereign authorities and imply
our agreement to submit to them.
6 Locke
argues that tacit consent does not make one a full member of a
commonwealth but only a subject of it (see §122). But in practice,
most states then and today have no concept of native-born aliens in their
midst: Foreigners may be subject to the laws without becoming citizens,
but a child born in Little Rock has no option of remaining stateless. His
membership in the American polity is, for better or worse, automatic.
(Because Germany's citizenship rules are still based primarily on
blood, the same isn't true of the son of a Turk born in
Germany.)
The predominant standard that has evolved for measuring
political legitimacy, then, is not whether an individual has explicitly
consented to join a society—few of us have—but whether that
individual
could show a
lack of consent or a
withdrawal of consent. That is, we assume people are satisfied if
they have other options and nevertheless stay put.
A host of familiar objections arises to challenge this conclusion. Why
should we read consent into someone staying put? Maybe the person sticks
around out of fear, poverty, too little information, too much inertia,
poor health, or complacency. Maybe he just has no better options
available. Don't many of us, for various reasons, willingly submit to
situations we aren't thrilled with? Maybe there are grounds for
legitimacy that are substantively much more important than consent.
Shouldn't liberal states accord their citizens at least minimal
rights to religious autonomy, democratic participation, freedom of speech,
press, and assembly? Aren't these and similar guarantees better
standards for legitimacy than consent? (Or aren't they indispensable
complements thereto?) Relying too heavily on consent runs the risk of
justifying repressive regimes that happen to have largely obedient, quiet
citizens. Think of Hobbes's plans for settling the significations in
his Leviathan state,7
or of
contemporary Saudi Arabia or pre-9/11 Afghanistan under the Taliban.
We wouldn't want to make it easy for illiberal states—states
that prohibit criticism of the government, states that kill
dissidents—to justify their policies by pointing only to the
stillness and apparent unanimity of their people.
So what is the alternative? How do we know if a state is legitimate to
its individual members? Don Herzog suggests “responsiveness”:
as long as a state conscientiously considers its citizens' wishes
when making policy, it is legitimate. “Consent of the
governed,” he says, isn't the heart of the matter.8
Allen Buchanan ties legitimacy to the protection of
basic individual rights; he concludes that “perhaps it is time to
abandon consent theory once and for all.”
9
Christopher Heath Wellman eschews consent theory for its “historical
inaccuracy” and failure to provide “unlimited
secession”—what might be conceived as a particularly robust
exit option—and opts for a view based on imposed Samaritan
duties.
10 Despite its difficulties, many theorists continue to
rely on some version of the consent argument. Those who are committed to a
contractarian project typically develop theories allied with Kant's
notion of hypothetical consent (which asks whether one
would or
could rationally agree to live in a particular society, not
whether in fact one
does consent).
11 The liberalisms
of Rawls and Scanlon rely, through different mechanisms, on such a
strategy.
12
But many liberals today seem to agree that at least a minimal standard for
legitimacy is the exit option: an opportunity to leave a group you may not
want to be a part of.
13Liberal State, Illiberal Cultures: Two
Approaches
The question of consent faces liberal states not only vis-à-vis
their individual members, but in terms of the subnational groups in which
citizens live as well. In the debate over cultural rights that has
flourished among contemporary political theorists since the publication 16
years ago of Will Kymlicka's Liberalism, Community and
Culture,14
perhaps the most contentious topic has been how
illiberal minority cultures should be treated in a liberal state. Should
these groups be tolerated, protected, or forcibly reformed? Often these
questions have been thought to turn on the availability of an exit option:
does the group give its members sufficient opportunity to leave? Are
individuals within these groups (Hasidim, Native Americans, and the Amish
are often cited as examples) formally free to exit their communities? Are
they well equipped to make such a choice? Should we assume that members of
these groups have at least tacitly consented to their status? Although
participants in the debate often attempt to carve out a middle way, their
responses to these questions fall into two categories and represent two
contrasting visions of liberalism.
On one wing are the “autonomy” liberals such as Joseph Raz
(and, despite his disavowal of the term, Brian Barry, to whom I'll
return below) who are suspicious of illiberal influences in conservative
minority groups and regard the promotion of individual autonomy as the
raison d'être of the liberal state. According to these
theorists, the liberal state should not defer to minority groups when the
interests of the individual are at stake. It should, under certain
circumstances, act to defend individuals from the groups to which they
belong. On the other side are “toleration” or
“diversity” liberals—theorists who situate the principle
and practice of religious toleration as liberalism's core commitment.
Pointing to the Wars of Religion in post-Reformation Europe that gave rise
to liberalism's birth, or to a neutralist conception of the state, or
to the importance of freedom of association, these theorists (from William
Galston to Charles Larmore to Chandran Kukathas, respectively) worry that
the pursuit of a controversial conception of autonomy may lead liberal
states to a well-intentioned but still worrisome cultural imperialism, or
at least to unjust interference with diverse groups who deserve a secure
place in liberal society.
Autonomy liberals, typified by Raz, urge that liberalism promote the
ideal of autonomous living—a Kantian-cum-Millian mode of life in
which the individual is prepared for making a series of big and small
decisions over a lifetime and is free to make and revise those choices as
an autonomous rational chooser. As a good that is universally valid for
all individuals, autonomy knows and respects no cultural limits. It trumps
all claims to particularism because it transcends such claims: if a
particular way of life is held to be choiceworthy, it should be chosen. If
a practice is wrong, it is wrong in every culture. Nothing should be
assumed to have value merely because it has the weight of tradition,
history, family, or community behind it. These four influences, in fact,
often represent unfortunate roadblocks to the autonomous life and may be
the legitimate targets of the liberal state's public policy if and
when they restrict the individual. Where cultural groups are sites of
autonomy inculcation, they are welcome and useful. But where they fail to
offer members an adequate range of choices, fail to provide a proper
education, or—worst—withhold a formal exit option, the liberal
state ought to consider whether to induce reform.
Raz specifies three requisites for the exercise of personal autonomy:
“appropriate mental abilities, an adequate range of options, and
independence.”15
A group that restricts
personal autonomy by denying its members one or more of these conditions
is illiberal and may be subject to reform attempts by a liberal state.
Although Raz observes that “the pursuit of full-blooded
perfectionist policies, even of those which are entirely sound and
justified, is likely … to backfire by arousing popular resistance
leading to civil strife,” he insists that “the function of
governments is to promote morality,” not merely to prevent harm to
others.
16 He therefore advocates a fairly thick conception of a
liberal state, one that takes on illiberal enclaves through more or less
aggressive means.
In opposition to the autonomy liberals is the “toleration”
camp. Here we find a diverse array of theorists who distinguish their
liberalisms with several adjectives. Some, such as Rawls, Macedo, and
Larmore, label their project “political” (as opposed to
“comprehensive” or “metaphysical”); others, like
William Galston, distinguish between a Reformation liberalism, which
focuses on toleration of difference, and an Enlightenment liberalism,
which favors values found in the philosophies of Mill or Kant. But the
terms point in similar directions: most of these theorists believe that a
liberal state should be committed to a wide diversity of cultural and
religious practices by staying out of these groups' affairs and, in
certain cases (though this is more contentious), exempting them from laws
that may infringe on their sensibilities. Among the most tolerant of the
tolerationists are Chandran Kukathas and Jeff Spinner-Halev. Although they
base their arguments on somewhat different premises, both Kukathas and
Spinner-Halev find that a liberal state has little cause to interfere in
the workings of even the most illiberal religious or cultural groups.
Kukathas constructs his argument around what some have called a theory
of group libertarianism. According to this position, a liberal state
neither interferes with nor provides any positive recognition or support
for any cultural groups. These cultures—whether liberal or
illiberal—ought to control their own fates. The state should neither
make trouble for them by impinging on their internal practices
(intervention that would violate freedom of association) nor help them out
when they are threatened with extinction (intervention that would abrogate
liberal neutrality).17
Spinner-Halev takes Kukathas to task for the extremes to which he goes
in making this claim. His main complaint is that under Kukathas's
model, “no mainstream society” exists toward which members of
cultural communities may turn.18
For Spinner-Halev,
this lack of a mainstream society in which a Hasid or a Pueblo may find
room to live an alternative life makes Kukathas's argument
unworkable. For only with an exit option to an alternative life, he holds,
may we be satisfied that an individual has a way out of a culture she may
not want to be a part of. This exit option, for Spinner-Halev, requires
only the existence of a society outside the cultural boundaries. “I
see no reason why each community within a larger society must provide its
members with an adequate range of options from which to choose…. If
the state is more than a plurality of groups … and contains a
mainstream society with few restriction [sic] and provides its
members with a range of options, then a particular community within it
need not.”
19 As Spinner-Halev explains,
Most Hutterites, the Amish and Hasidic Jews all know that
they are surrounded by a society with different ways of life. Protestant
fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics know this as
well. Many Hasidic Jews live and work in New York City. How can one
possibly argue that they do not see a wide range of options of how they
might want to live their lives?20
This observation implies too much with too little argument. Yes, most
of these people “know” that ways of life other than their own
exist. Some of them know something about the options they reject or
ignore. But observing the fact of diversity is not the same as
appreciating the charms, opportunities, and challenges of particular ways
of life, and it is not equivalent to actually exploring one or more of
them. That said, the quarrel between Kukathas and Spinner-Halev is not a
high-stakes argument. It is hard to imagine what a liberal community
without a “wider society” could possibly look like. Is
Kukathas's model unrealistic enough to fail to account for one?
Kukathas suggests that a political society prohibiting citizens from
restricting their own freedom in substate associations (such as, say, in
an Amish community)—even if the state otherwise strongly protects
individual rights—is illiberal and that one featuring
nothing but severely restrictive “monastic
communities”—from which exit is nevertheless possible—is
liberal. This odd contrast (between liberal authoritarian
“Panoptica” and Ottoman-style “Mytopia”) is
designed to highlight what Kukathas takes to be the true basis of a
liberal state: freedom of association, consonant with a particular
interpretation of liberty of conscience.21
For Kukathas, domestic society is best conceived as
an international society, a “union of associations,” a
radically federal model with no unifying center.
22 (In the archipelago metaphor, there are
only
islands, no mainland. The only ties one group has to another in this
polity are the watery divisions between them, which the state is obliged
only to keep free of exit blockades. It need not take the additional step
of ensuring that the waters are navigable, and it certainly need not
subsidize the cost of travel by buying rowboats for individuals.)
Spinner-Halev has a point when he finds no “wider society”
in Kukathas's model. If none of the islands of the archipelago suits
your fancy, your only option is to dive into the sea. Kukathas's
“society” embraces only a collection of little societies. It
has little room for a public square, a mainstream majority, or a common
space where an individual is not primarily a member of a group but a
member of the larger polity.23
Kukathas does
envision a kind of public sphere in his liberal society: “a kind of
settlement” among the associations to “regulate their
interaction.” This public sphere (or public spheres, since any
particular group may not interact with certain other groups at all but
encounter others quite often) lacks the degree of “stability and
social unity” to which many liberals, including Rawls, aspire. In
fact, it lacks any institutions or symbols of polity-wide cohesiveness or
character. For Kukathas, this is not be regretted: “we should be
less concerned about social unity in the polity.” Kukathas 2003, 131–33, 164.
In actual
societies, however, it is always the case that some mainstream culture
will be available for disgruntled Hutterites or Hasidic Jews to enter. The
real question is whether the bare existence of such a wider society is
enough to establish that those living in separatist societies are
therefore to be construed as consenting members therein, and that this
consent should assuage liberals' worries about the effects of the
restricted life to which these individuals submit. Given the difficulties
involved in leaving an illiberal culture, it's not clear that
“peering into other communities and the mainstream society to see
what they have to offer” is enough.
24Amish Rumspringa
Among the minority religious sects for whom Locke urged toleration in
his Letter Concerning Toleration were the dissenting Anabaptists,
one of the many new sects of Christianity that emerged after the Lutheran
Reformation. The Anabaptists set themselves apart by rejecting infant
baptism and holding that only adults who had found faith in Christ could
consciously and legitimately choose to enter the church. The Anabaptists
(literally, “rebaptizers”) were severely persecuted by both
Protestants and Catholics in England and across much of the Continent.
They provided the foundation for several sects that would develop later,
including the Mennonites, the Hutterites, and the Amish. Each of these
traditional sects continues to practice adult baptism today, and each
maintains a studied skepticism of and separation from modern society.25
There are, however, gradations of insularity.
The Old Order Amish, the mainstream Amish sect, is less conservative than
the Andy Weaver and Swartzentruber groups but more traditional than the
New Order Amish. Wasaq and Donnermeyer 1996,
236.
Amish communities are found across the United States, with the highest
concentrations in Pennsylvania (particularly in Lancaster County, home to
25,000), Ohio, and Indiana.26
The Amish speak
Pennsylvania Dutch, a German dialect, as well as English; their worship is
conducted in High German.
27 The approximately 180,000 members of this community
hallow their Anabaptist Christian tradition and frown on innovation and
many technologies. Modern comforts are generally shunned to maintain the
simplicity of community and family life and emphasize the religious
importance of hard work. Cars are avoided in favor of the horse and buggy.
Clothes are modest and conservatively styled: women wear dresses and
bonnets (to cover the hair they never cut), men don wide-brimmed hats and
dark suits and grow beards upon marriage.
28 In line with their pacifism, however, men are obliged to
shave their upper lips to avoid resembling European military officers.
Kraybill 2001, 63–65.
Gas lamps
rather than electric lights illuminate the homes. No one holds insurance
out of respect for God's will. Communal aid and reciprocal good will
keep the communities tightly knit. Marriage comes early and babies arrive
often. After finishing Amish school at age 13 (too much education is
thought to lead to pride), children get jobs in factories or other Amish
businesses.
Everything changes at age 16, when young adults enter
rumspringa, and the church rules are suspended. Now the
world—or a portion of it—is available to the Amish youngster.
Once on rumspringa, children are no longer under the direct
authority of church and parents. The rite of passage emphasizes the
voluntary nature of Amish baptism: no one is baptized against her or his
will. One must approach baptism, if at all, with a full and honest heart.
And the decision may be made only after a period of “running
around,” in which candidates for baptism have the chance to taste
the worldly goods and opportunities they will eventually renounce. While
family and tradition exert at least a degree of influence on the
teens' behavior, individuals decide how to conduct themselves on
rumspringa and when and if to return to the fold and be baptized
in the Amish Church. So although the Amish are raised with the rules that
they are expected to obey later in life when they get down on their knees
and submit their will to God (renouncing “the devil, the world, and
[their] own flesh and blood” and committing themselves to
“be obedient and submissive” to the church and its
strictures),29
no one is born a member of the Amish Church.
Membership is strictly voluntary.
Rumspringa has recently attracted a fair amount of attention
and curiosity. In 1998 two Amish-raised youth in their early twenties,
Abner Stoltzfus and Abner King Stoltzfus (no relation), were arrested for
running a cocaine ring in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The men, both on
rumspringa at the time, had joined forces with the Pagans, a
motorcycle gang, and had been using cocaine and selling it to fellow
unbaptized Amish youth for five years. The story's coverage in the
national and international press brought negative publicity to an
embarrassed and shaken community.30
But the shocking
event opened the public's eyes to a little-known feature of Amish
life—a “timeout” period (not yet popularly known by the
term
rumspringa). Onlookers were puzzled by the defense offered
by some church representatives suddenly thrust into the media spotlight:
these men, the Amish elders claimed, were “really not Amish”
because they had not joined the church.
31 In the summer of 2004, the UPN network aired a nine-episode series,
“Amish in the City,” which extracted five unbaptized Amish
from their settlements and deposited them in a Los Angeles apartment with
an array of six non-Amish youth. Throwing Midwestern Amish kids in with a
vegan, a business major, a gay club promoter, a young woman from the
“inner city” and another who has “a variety of piercings
and tattoos,”32
These quotes are taken
from the participants' biographies on the show's Web site, which
has since been removed from www.upn.com.
the producers wanted to
see what would happen when five rumspringers encountered their
“modern” counterparts and were introduced to the real world
(via shopping malls, sushi, bikinis, and bumper cars). Would they return
to the Amish farm and give all this up? As it happens, none of the five
Amish cast members has yet decided to be baptized. This was hardly a
controlled experiment; the fact that these teens were willing to
participate in the show—and to thumb their noses at church rules
more assertively than most of their peers—suggests that their
attachment to their roots was at least somewhat tenuous before UPN opened
their eyes.
In the late 1990s, before “Amish in the City,” filmmaker
Lucy Walker took a different tack. Rather than remove the Amish from their
home environment, she found a few Amish settlements in rural Indiana
willing to open up the virtually unknown practice of rumspringa
to the outside world. In “Devil's
Playground,”33
The film
garnered several accolades, including an Independent Spirit Award
nomination for Best Documentary in 2002.
Walker conducted several
interviews with church leaders and adult members, but spent most of her
time with the
rumspringa kids.
34 Walker notes the difficulty of finding good subjects for her
film: Amish children have “been trained to keep their heads down,
humble and invisible, in the middle of the crowd. Amish teenagers are also
drastically less articulate than their ‘English’
[non-Amish] counterparts. English is their second language,
there's no time for introspection, personal opinions are avoided, and
analytical reasoning is suppressed. Of the few kids who would talk to us,
very few wanted to be filmed, and fewer still could discuss themselves or
their religion.” Once articulate children were found, establishing a
relationship was another challenge: “Each one of those introductions
took days of visits and discussions. We had to earn trust every step of
the way. Even with the teenagers it was crucial that I knew and respected
Christian principles. It helped to refer to parables to explain our work.
I spent a lot of time reading the Bible.” 21C
Magazine 2002.
Walker tracked, in particular, four Amish
youths whose running around periods led them in four different directions.
Common to each is a desire to try out behaviors that Amish life precludes:
drinking beer, driving in cars, going bowling, watching TV, shopping for
CDs at Wal-Mart, coed swimming, dressing “English” (the girls
usually keep their bonnets on, while the boys go a bit wilder). And then
there are the parties—the mega fetes in the cornfields drawing
hundreds or even thousands of Amish teens from states near and far for
drinking, dancing, loud music, and often drugs.
35 The “running around” periods of most of the youth
in the film fall on the wilder end of the spectrum. As Donald Kraybill
notes, while some teens “openly mock” church rules during
rumspringa and “sow their wild oats” by engaging in
rebellious activity, “the majority of them enjoy their freedom in
fairly traditional and quiet ways.” Kraybill
2001, 185. Still, the characters in Lucy Walker's documentary
are not outliers: there are many Amish who engage in quite a lot of
mischief during their periods of freedom.
Here is a quick account of how each of the four characters in
Walker's film—Gerald, Joann, Velda, and Faron—spent their
time free of church strictures and (to use Spinner-Halev's language)
“peer[ed] into other communities and the mainstream
society.”
When we meet Gerald, we find a 16-year-old kid who looks and sounds
like a typical suburban slacker. He wears T-shirts and jeans (often just
the jeans), has a modified buzz cut, a cigarette in his mouth and a choker
necklace at his throat. Gerald decides to move out of his parents'
house during his rumspringa in order to revel in everything that
isn't Amish without suffering the inconveniences of his family's
frowns. So Gerald rents a trailer in a bare lot and plays host to other
rumspringers who are looking for a good time. The scene suggests something
of a devil's playground indeed: big-screen TV with video games, loud
rock music, dancing, beer, drugs, pornography, sex, and terrible
hangovers. At first, Gerald is an Amish kid in an English candy store:
“If I was living at home,” he tells Walker, “I
couldn't have 200 channels of DirecTV, a stereo and Nintendo and a
fridge full of beer!” After a few months, however, Gerald begins to
tire of this party-animal existence and decides to move back in with his
parents. As we see him bag his last load of garbage and lock up the
trailer, he insists he hasn't decided to “join church,”
just to go home. In a London Sunday Times feature in 2005, we
learn that he eventually moves back out, unable to commit to Amish life,
yet unsure what kind of life to pursue. Eight years after Gerald began his
rumspringa, he is still in limbo. Now age 24, Gerald is shiftless
and gloomy. “Nothing excites me,” he says, “I have no
ambitions.”36
Ariel Leve, “Back
to the Future,” Sunday Times (London). January 30,
2005.
We never get to see Joann's rumspringa, only her own
account of her time when she was away. “Whenever there was a party,
I was there and I was drunk,” she says. Joann
wishes, reflecting on her time out of the church's clutches, that she
had never opened a beer can, never cavorted illicitly with the boys, never
cut her hair or tried out alternative church services, never strayed so
far from her family and the traditional Amish lifestyle. But it may have
been this (what in her eyes was) extreme behavior that snapped her back
into the fold. Joann makes the decision to be baptized in a few months.
She understands that her life plans of marriage, child-bearing and
motherhood might sound “boring” to others; but she insists
that she's excited about the prospect of becoming a full-fledged
Amish woman, and her honest smile bears that out. After Joann's
baptism, she refuses to be filmed further (as most Amish do, out of
concern that being photographed compromises one's humility) but
reports off-camera that life inside the church “is all she hoped it
would be.”
Velda's story is more complicated than those of Gerald or Joann.
Velda has suffered from depression since childhood and uses
rumspringa to try to drown her sorrows. Like some of her peers,
she begins drinking and partying and using drugs when she turns 16. But
instead of extracting at least some initial joy from this liberation from
church dogma, Velda sinks deeper into depression, becomes suicidal and
checks herself into a psychiatric hospital. Before long, her family coaxes
her home and encourages her to join the church. She decides to be
baptized, along with her boyfriend. But a month before her wedding, Velda
realizes her mistake. She isn't cut out for an Amish woman's
life of child-bearing and “tea breaks with the ladies” after
all. She wants to be independent, to have a job, to lead a lifestyle of
her own devising. So she decides to leave her community, her family and
her fiancé. She rents an apartment and gets a job as a
receptionist. Velda suffers greatly for her decision to leave, for the
community and family shun those who change their mind after agreeing to
join the church. As in Locke's social contract, express consent is
seen as irrevocable in the Amish Church. Velda explains, “If
you've joined the church and then leave, they will shun you. The
shunning for them is their last way of showing you that they love you.
They think that you're breaking a promise that you made to the Amish
Church. They're afraid for your soul.” Velda's last scene
is a hopeful one, though: she has just been admitted to a college, despite
her lack of a high school education, and when she calls home to tell her
family, they seem happy for her. She's heading off to Dallas to
enroll at the Christ for the Nations Institute. Today, Velda has her
degree and is married to a fellow graduate; she works in a secretarial
position.37
Author e-mail correspondence
with Lucy Walker.
More articulate and reflective than his counterparts, Faron is in line
to become a preacher, like his father. But he makes a number of mistakes
along the way. First he develops an addiction to cocaine and crystal
methamphetamine. Then he begins dealing drugs and is caught by the Indiana
police. Next he turns in another Amish drug dealer to stay out of prison,
but this only brings death threats from the Amish drug underworld. So
Faron goes off and onto drugs, disappoints his family, moves home, works
in the family furniture business, follows his beautiful Amish girlfriend
Emma to Florida, and gets into more trouble. Days after moving to Florida
and securing a lawn-care job, Faron crashes his car and—making the
best of it—takes a position as a valet parker at the hospital that
treated the wounds he suffered in the accident. This doesn't last
either, however. When Faron's valet job evaporates and he tries and
fails to sell $1,500 vacuums door to door, he moves back in with his
family in Indiana. Once Faron returns home, his parents discover his
loaded gun and drug paraphernalia and turn him in to the police; he serves
a two-year prison sentence.38
Now living in Los Angeles
and considering a career in real estate, Faron is still in limbo, neither
Amish nor non-Amish.
39 Author e-mail
correspondence with Lucy Walker.
As he says at the end of the
film, “I might be baptized, and I might not. Jesus wasn't
baptized until he was 32!”
Imperfect Choices
So what should liberals make of these rumspringa stories?
Does rumspringa represent an effective exit option that supplies
liberal legitimacy to the otherwise ultra-conservative Amish community?
Does it show that all Amish are happy Amish, because they have expressly
chosen the Amish way of life after a period of months or years in which
they were free to explore alternatives? Or should the features that have
worried some liberals about Amish communities—sharply limited
education, inculcation of traditional and unequal gender roles, disdain
for individuality and autonomy—still be worrisome? How does this
practice affect our assessment of the role of the liberal state
vis-à-vis conservative, insular minorities? Does it recommend
either the “autonomy” or the “toleration” approach
above its rival?
We should begin by noting just how extraordinary the practice of
rumpsringa is. No other fundamentalist religious group permits
its youth such a wholesale renunciation of the rules as young
adults—or at any other time, for that matter. No other religion
offers its members a pass out of its structure as a preliminary to
welcoming them back in. For many such groups, late adolescence is
precisely the time to protect the youth from the poisonous influences of
the outside world. As Donald Kraybill asks, “Why do the Amish, who
fought so hard for the right to teach their children, permit rebellious
teens to flirt with the world?”40
For ultra-orthodox Jews living in Israel, known as Haredim, the
concept of rumspringa would be unthinkable. For the Haredim, a
tightly knit, intensely religious community for whom Judaism “is
like life itself,”41
proper rearing and education of
the children is fundamental. Exposure to the secular world beckoning
across the street from their neighborhoods—movies, secular
bookstores, rock music, immodestly dressed men and women, discotheques,
non-kosher restaurants—is to be kept to a minimum. When riding on
public buses, eyes are averted. When encountering non-Haredi visitors to
their neighborhoods—those who are not kept away by signs beseeching
outsiders, in bold red Hebrew and English letters, to dress and behave
modestly
42 One large yellow poster on Mea
She'arim St., signed by “Residents of the Neighborhood,”
reads, in Hebrew and English: “DO NOT ENTER OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN
GROUPS. The residents of our neighborhood are committed to
preserving—for themselves and their children—high religious
standards in matters of dress and modest behavior. The fact is that visits
by groups of any kind, even if they were to conform to our
standards and even if they were to be made up exclusively of people from
our neighborhood, would be difficult for us to tolerate.” Another
sign, at the eastern entrance to the neighborhood, bellows in large Hebrew
letters: “You are entering a Haredi neighborhood. PASSAGE FOR WOMEN
IN MODEST CLOTHING ONLY! Long sleeves * Long skirts * No bare
skin.”
—alternate routes are taken. Televisions and
Internet connections are rarely found, for they bring “all the
world's filth”
43 into the sanctity of the Jewish
home. And joining the army at the age of 18 is the ultimate risk for a
young Haredi. There, mixing with all types of Israelis, including secular
Jews, traditional Jews and those who call themselves
“religious” Zionists, the young Haredi will hear perspectives
on the world and on Judaism he has never heard before and meet temptations
he hasn't dreamt of. The risk of assimilation is one of the Haredi
sector's greatest fears. A Haredi father of four explains the
worry:
The worst thing that could be for the People of Israel is for
us to send our youth at the age of 18, at the age of “stupid
teens” [tipeshesray],44
This slang term, a playful combination of the Hebrew words
for “stupid” (tipesh) and “teenager”
(esrei), connotes a frivolous, impressionable
adolescent.
and you can't understand this, because you
aren't capable of understanding how we educate our children. We raise
them in a kind of spiritual greenhouse [
hammema
ruhanit]. I cannot describe it to you because you aren't
capable of understanding it. You have to get to know it from up-close. And
to take the youth when he's growing up in a greenhouse and expose him
to the atmosphere of the army is, quite simply, certain to damage his
spiritual health. And so to send this youth at that age to this
army—it's not just that it won't contribute anything to
the People of Israel, but that it will damage it, God forbid. Some people
say that there is no kosher food in the army, but there is no kosher
atmosphere in the army!
45 The Haredim of Israel and the Amish of Indiana share many views about
how to preserve and protect their respective religious communities. Though
the Amish are more mistrustful of technology and maintain a more isolated
existence (the Haredim have no compunction about driving cars or using
electricity, and they freely ride public buses), both communities seek to
shelter themselves from threatening influences of the outside world. They
construct demonizing conceptions of the Other—for the Amish, the
non-Amish world is the “devil's playground.”
They seal off cultural conduits: both communities avoid TV, the Internet,
movies and newspapers, although Haredim are much less strict with these
media than are the Amish. And they keep a close eye on their kids.
Although the aims of Amish and Haredi education represent opposing ends of
the spectrum—an Amish child finishes school at age 13 to remain
humble and begin a life of work, a Haredi man studies Torah as his
life's mission with the goal of becoming a talmid hacham
(exemplary student)—the point of both schooling systems is the same:
to reproduce the ideals and traditions of the community.
So why are the Haredim so protective of their youth, while the Amish
set them free during their most vulnerable and impressionable years?
Doesn't rumspringa poke a dangerous hole in the Amish-style
spiritual greenhouse? Doesn't it risk losing Amish youth to the
temptations of the Devil?
As it turns out, no. Lucy Walker's film closes with a statistic
showing retention rates for the Amish Church higher than ever in over 300
years of its existence. Around 90 percent of Amish-raised children return
from their rumspringas ready to dedicate their lives to the Amish
Church.46
They renounce partying, give up their
driver's licenses, sell their CD collections and trade in jogging
shorts for modest dresses or suits. They assume a role in a society that
gives little weight to the pleasures and individualism of the teen
rumspringa. “Running around” is indeed the correct
image: the youth run in circles, but few run away from their fundamental
(yet unformalized) commitment to Amish life. They return, in impressive
numbers, for baptism.
Why don't more Amish find the outside world a place to explore
and live in? Why don't they take the option to exit in greater
numbers? There seem to be four connected reasons that should give
tolerationist liberals pause. First, the “English” world to
which the Amish kids are introduced is a sharply limited one. Faron,
Velda, Joann, and Gerald—along with thousands of other Amish
teens—become acquainted with non-Amish life in a very particular
setting: the materialist, consumerist culture of middle America, spiced
with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Rumspringas do not seem to include
trips to museums, reading great novels, or backpacking trips through
Europe. Instead, the months (or sometimes years) of running around often
seem to be spent horsing around in bowling alleys, getting drunk in
cornfields or—for the milder explorers—sipping “sodas or
hot chocolate” with parental supervision.47
Second, and related, the Amish upbringing does not include much
exposure to alternative ways of life. It does not educate youngsters in
other religious beliefs or cultures. Amish elders instill church values
and beliefs—and teach vocational skills as well as reading, writing,
and arithmetic—but do not foster independence of mind or critical
thinking. In short, Amish students receive little formal education beyond
the basics. So when they embark on their rumspringas,
16-year-olds have few reference points to lead them to creative
explorations of the outside world. They haven't been tempted to
explore the excitement of New York City through Catcher in the
Rye; they have had no opportunity to develop curiosity about Buddhism
from reading Hesse's Siddhartha; they haven't been
exposed to the ironic affinity between their church's practices and
Locke's conceptions of the church and political society, or been
asked to explore that connection; they haven't considered what the
theory of evolution has to say about the origin of life, or how Darwinian
thought may or may not square with creationist theology. Their childhood,
in short, is carefully sheltered.48
It might
be objected here that the Amish aren't the only ones to blame, as too
few mainstream American high schools do a terrific job of
teaching critical thinking or exposing students to a diverse array of
options and interests. That's certainly (and lamentably) true. But
there is a qualitative difference between Amish and most other educational
philosophies—a difference between teaching for a separate way of
life and teaching for life in a complex world.
In Mill's
terms, they lack adequate knowledge of the possibilities of modern life
available to them and therefore are ill equipped to distinguish the
“higher” and “lower” pleasures of life outside the
farm.
49 When they are one day set free, the lowest common
denominator of crude American culture presents itself as
the
alternative to Amish life.
Third, the choice to leave the Amish community is very costly.
(I'll return to exit costs in the next section.) Beyond the shallow
“English” society they dip into on rumspringa, Amish
kids know little of what life would really be like if they chose to walk
out on the Amish way of life. It becomes clear rather quickly that you
cannot simply play videogames, get high, and go bowling every day for the
rest of your life. Such a life is unhealthy and financially unsustainable,
not to mention lonely. Inside the Amish Church, a secure and well-paying
job in a factory or on a farm awaits most young people. Life is wholesome,
communities are ready-made, worldly complexity is reduced to the simple
values of church, hard work, and family. Leaving the church brings
uncertainty at best, a solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short life at
worst. For most Amish youngsters, it's not surprising that a
cost-benefit analysis leads to only one sensible answer: baptism.50
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the costs of choosing a life
outside the church extend well beyond this life for the Amish
teens. The children quoted in Walker's film seem to hold on tightly
to one fundamental idea even as they raise the barn with raucous parties
and pass joints around a circle: “I know for sure that if I decide
to become Amish, I'll get to heaven,” one inebriated
rumspringer says. Abandoning the church, according to Amish belief, is an
all-but-sure path to eternal damnation. It's not that there is no
salvation outside the Old Order Amish Church—as Catholics believed
about their own church until the Second Vatican Council in 1962—but
that life in the mainstream world is likely to lead one to immorality, sin
and an unchristian life. So the worry is this: leave us in this world, and
you risk wandering into a trap that will leave you out of the kingdom of
God in the next. The choice, as Faron puts it, is “to be” or
“not to be.” The latter option may be regarded not only as
abandonment of a particular way of life, but as social and spiritual
death. To elect to leave the Amish Church is, in a sense, to elect not to
be.
All four reasons for the 80–90 percent retention rate feed into
a coherent explanation. Without the intellectual tools or substantive
knowledge about potentially valuable lives that exist on the other side,
and without the encouragement to seek out truly distinctive experiences
and ways of living, Amish teens are at a loss as to how to sit in the real
world. They are virtually ineligible for higher education, having left
school after the eighth grade. They are, for the same reason, unqualified
for many good jobs. Socially, they are accustomed to their tight family
and community lives, hold diminished prospects for deep relationships on
the outside, and never shake the idea that success in the world to come
depends on becoming Amish. These problems turn
rumspringa—despite its impressive underlying
concept—into a less-than-perfect exit option. Amish life may be, as
it is for Joann, an eminently choiceworthy path. But it is a mistake to
regard rumspringa as yielding a fair exploration of alternative
choices in the “English” world.
Another basic problem with the Amish exit option underlies the
challenges mentioned above: the choice is black or white, and it is
forever. Although anyone is free in the eyes of the state to leave the
Amish Church at any time—as Velda's story illustrates—the
church imposes great social and emotional penalties for abrogating a
commitment. And it demands a full, unqualified, unmodified commitment upon
baptism. One must choose door number one or door number two.
There are very limited options available to those seeking to be a moderate
Amish person, or a liberal Amish person. You cannot be modern and Amish at
the same time. You cannot hope to reconcile your interests in the outside
world with your Amish roots. Unlike contemporary Jews, Muslims, or
Protestants, for example, you cannot choose among various gradations or
varieties of tradition in finding just the Amish community that suits you.
(There are various Amish orders, but they are self-contained; members
don't tend to float between them at will.51
And even the most liberal of the Amish churches is based on the tenet of
separation from the world.)
Reducing Exit Costs: The Paradox
The message for toleration liberals in the previous section is
sobering. Even when the exit option is formalized, and even when exit is
the default condition (an Amish youth must decide whether to
enter the church, not whether to leave it), staying put is not a
reliable marker of consent. But while the exit option seems insufficient
as a sign of voluntary membership in illiberal cultural groups, it does
seem to be a necessary feature for legitimacy. Locking people into groups,
by any account, is incompatible with liberty. Susan Moller Okin agrees:
“Not to be able to leave the group in which one has been raised for
an alternative mode of life is a serious violation of the kind of freedom
that is basic to liberalism.”52
But Okin suggests that the
bare exit option should not be thought to serve as a
sufficient
sign of consent, particularly for women, who in many cultures are
“effectively far less able to exit their respective groups of origin
than are men.”
53 Tolerationist liberals, for whom free
exit is the litmus test—who assume that anyone unhappy in a
separatist community can peer into the outside world and, with effort,
choose to leave—are far too sanguine. Even when the exit option
provided is as dramatic as the Amish
rumspringa—a chance
not only to peer outside the gates, but to jump over them and run around
with impunity—grave doubts remain that the eventual decision
represents what the child would choose if she were better informed, more
broadly educated and exposed to a fuller palette of alternatives. So
despite the surprisingly liberal Amish membership policy, a policy that on
the surface makes most liberal states (and liberal religions) look stodgy
in comparison, it is a mistake to regard the exit option as indicative of
consent. How much
less meaningful, then, are the exit options
from insular groups affording
no such free rein to their youth.
If the institutionalized right of exit from the Amish world is found
wanting, then how much
less satisfactory are practices in other
cultural communities in which choice is neither formal nor free. The
tolerationist's move to read consent into an individual's
staying put looks less plausible and increasingly blind to reality.
But do autonomy liberals suggest a plausible alternative? These
theorists, in fact, offer very little in the way of constructive solutions
to the limitations of life in a separatist community such as the Amish. In
some cases, they underestimate the depth of intervention that would be
necessary to truly realize the goals they have for individuals inside
conservative cultural groups. In other cases, they argue that while
intervention would sometimes be justifiable, the state should eschew
forcible measures because they would only antagonize members of the group
and increase their extremism. In either case, the autonomy liberal seeking
to smooth the path of exit for individuals in conservative cultures faces
ineluctable conflicts. Providing truly free exit, it seems, is achievable
only at the cost of abandoning fundamental liberal principles.
Brian Barry's writings on liberalism and on the Amish perfectly
illustrate this quandary. On one hand, Barry denies that toleration
liberalism (represented by theorists such as Chandran Kukathas and Will
Kymlicka) is a legitimate form of liberalism at all (he derides it as a
nihilistic “cultural relativism”). On the other hand, he
dismisses autonomy liberalism as incoherent. Liberalism is committed to
allowing people to live their own lives in a society governed by fair
institutions, he argues, not to forcibly inculcating personal autonomy.
Barry's account of liberalism's core is universalist and
egalitarian; it is defined by “the principles of equal freedom that
underwrite basic liberal institutions: civic equality, freedom of speech
and religion, non-discrimination, equal opportunity and so on.”54
Barry recognizes the value of freedom of association as
well—he does not believe that a liberal state can legitimately
prevent people from joining autocratically led or otherwise anti-liberal
religious or cultural groups
55—but in
practice he is deeply suspicious that individuals who are members of such
groups can be said to remain in them voluntarily. This predominant concern
with voluntariness leads me to categorize Barry as an autonomy liberal,
despite his dislike of the term.
Barry's initial caveats to his support for freedom of association
are familiar. We can trust that individuals affiliating with particular
groups do so legitimately when they (1) are “adults of sound
mind,” (2) engage in activities “as a result of their
voluntary decision,” and (3) are free to “cease to take part
whenever they want to.”56
These provisos, following
Barry's stinging criticisms of diversity liberals, are surprising in
how closely they match these theorists' most basic formula:
competence (measured by sanity and age) plus consent (ensured by an exit
option) equals the bounds of freedom of association. There is no more
familiar tolerationist liberal proposal. But as his own theory of group
rights proceeds, Barry's demands become more robust. First, he
insists that “children be brought up in a way that will eventually
enable them to leave behind the groups into which they were born, if they
so choose.”
57 As with Okin's formulation
cited above, everything turns on what “enable” means (or, put
differently, what amounts to a “realistic” right of exit). The
most tolerant of toleration liberals understand this requirement in the
barest sense: as long as the group does not use physical coercion to
compel a member to remain, it is blameless.
But Barry and the autonomy liberals with whom he shares a common
perspective (if not a label) insist on more. They want to lower the
barriers to exit where those barriers unduly reduce the chances that an
open door would be viewed as a viable portal to a different life. The
question is how much the state ought to do to attempt to lower the
barriers, a query that turns on assessing how high the barriers actually
are. As a first pass, Barry notes that exit costs might be measured by
weighing the benefits of staying in a group against the benefits of the
next-best alternative choice. But this is in fact the wrong test, Barry
persuasively argues, because by putting the benefits of option A (staying
put) on a scale next to option B (leaving), the costs of exiting may be
very significant despite the fact that the benefits of option B are
appealing. (The cost of leaving the Amish Church might be very high, as we
saw in the last section, but if a life on the outside is reasonably
appealing—as it was for Velda—it could be voluntarily chosen.)
What is needed is an assessment of the types of costs involved,
rather than a crude approximation of their quantity.
Barry tries to provide some guidance with his ensuing discussion of
exit costs, which distinguishes among three varieties.58
First
are “intrinsic” costs of exit, such as the lost chance at
eternal salvation for an excommunicated Catholic (who still believes the
central tenets of his former religion). These costs are fundamental and
unavoidable; the state can and should do nothing about them. (The U.S.
Congress, for example, should not try to rewrite Catholic dogma.)
“Associative” costs too are difficult to reduce with the use
of political tools: these are entirely legal actions, such as breaking off
social relations, undertaken by group members against those leaving the
fold. “External” costs, however, Barry thinks the state has a
duty to reduce. These costs, such as being fired from your job because you
are no longer a Catholic, amount to illegal discrimination against former
members of a church or other group.
Despite Barry's laudable attempt to clarify when the state may
and may not intervene to ease the path of exit, there is a good deal of
slack in this conceptual framework. First, the distinction between
“intrinsic” and “associative” costs is unclear:
the practice of shunning in the Amish community qualifies both as an
intrinsic cost (as a fundamental tenet of the Amish Ordnung) and
as an associative cost (as a social and familial reaction to expulsion
from the church). Second, the distinction between
“associative” and “external” costs, as Jacob Levy
observes in his review of Barry's book,59
is merely between legitimate and illegitimate costs—put simply,
between legal and illegal discrimination. Barry offers no meaningful
account of the difference between these categories other than the fact
that the former are acceptable, while the latter are not. And even this
distinction fails to guide Barry's central argument as he (haltingly)
veers down the interventionist path. He speculates that “a case
might arise” in which associative costs of exiting are so high that
they render membership in a certain group non-voluntary. This means that
although no action can be taken against the individuals who impose these
costs (because they do so legitimately, and legally, if narrow mindedly),
“they open the group to public intervention.”
60 Barry then equivocates: “[E]ven if … we are
inclined to say that the pressure exerted by the group is oppressive, we
may conclude that there is nothing for it [sic] but to permit it
to continue.”61
Shunning cannot be criminalized;
parents may not be disciplined for never speaking to their children again;
church members may not be imprisoned for refusing to do business with
ex-parishioners. So what kind of public intervention does Barry have in
mind? Two types. First, he argues that the liberal state could justly
require groups to pay compensation to ex-members suffering the economic
costs of a boycott. A little too ingeniously, Barry maintains that this
solution protects the rights of individuals belonging to the group to
boycott whomever they like while protecting the departing member from
economic costs of the boycott—and thus making his position in the
group more voluntary. Second, Barry bizarrely suggests that the state
could “insist that a church's procedural rules should conform
to the canons of natural justice, by allowing the accused to hear the case
against, respond to it, call witnesses, and so on.”
62 When Barry turns to consider the implications of this theory of group
rights for Amish communities, he does little with the latter, thoroughly
interventionist, suggestion. (Insisting that cultural groups honor the
demands of “natural justice” would be incompatible with even a
greatly weakened right of free association and flatly contradicts
Barry's stated support thereof; he devotes only a single sentence to
the proposal.) Barry draws on the reasoning in the first recommendation,
however, to argue against the Amish exemption from required participation
in the federal Social Security system. Citing their beliefs in communal
social welfare, faith in God's providence and separation from the
world, the Amish insist that being forced to pay Social Security taxes and
receive benefits is a violation of their free religious exercise. They won
a legislative exemption from the program in 1965.63
Barry
argues that this opt-out provision imposes illegitimate external costs to
exiting the Amish Church: a member of the church who decides to leave or
is forced out late in life will be bereft of both Amish social welfare
and federal transfer payments in his old age. This leads Barry to
ask whether Amish people enjoy a “‘freedom to leave’ in
a strong enough sense to make it plausible to say that remaining within
the community is really the exercise of free choice.”
64 He concludes that they do not and recommends rescinding the
voluntary opt-out.
This idea has some merit, but the stakes are hardly as high as Barry
suggests. First, the Amish have a system of private property and place
high value on savings; individual Amish who save a percentage of their
income roughly equivalent to what they would have paid in Social Security
taxes may end up with as much or more money for their retirement than
would individuals who do take part in the system. More importantly, since
most Amish choosing to leave the church will do so during their
rumspringas or soon thereafter, these individuals have plenty of
time to contribute to and eventually receive benefits from Social
Security. Relatively few would be tempted to leave in their 50s or 60s, by
which time benefits would indeed be difficult to secure.65
The decision to leave the church after baptism
is usually related to economic challenges and “occurs after marriage
and at the beginning of the child-bearing stage.” Hostetler 1993, 104.
The more consequential question for the Amish case—the question
to which I now return—is the status of the 16-year-old's
decision to be baptized or leave the fold. I suggested above that despite
the apparently robust exit option provided through rumspinga,
most Amish youth are poorly equipped to choose anything but baptism. They
have a right of exit, to be sure, and they may exercise it without being
ostracized by their families (only excommunication or leaving after
baptism triggers shunning), but their limited understanding of the outside
world and knowledge of the social and spiritual costs leaves them with a
choice heavily weighted toward Amish life.
Conclusion: Beyond Exit, Beyond
Consent
Should the state attempt to reduce the costs of exiting the Amish
Church, so that the choice is fairer? What would make for a
rumspringa endorsable by John Locke or John Stuart Mill or Brian
Barry? What, in other words, would promote the autonomy of Amish youth to
a greater extent than the booze-and-drug dominated rumspringas so
typical today?
Alleviating the limitations of rumspringa would require
fundamental changes. At a minimum, the reforms would include modifying a
number of Amish educational and social practices: rescinding the exemption
from schooling after age 14, teaching gender equality, exposing youth to
multiple non-Amish ways of living, encouraging critical thought about
ideas previously accepted as unquestioned dogma (including the idea that
being Amish is the surest bet for a happy afterlife), and allowing a much
greater range of individual choice about whether to use modern technology
and how to worship. In other words, the reforms meant to provide the Amish
with a “realistic” exit option would decimate Amish life as we
know it. They would turn the Amish settlement into a state-run
institution. This then is the quandary: true voluntariness for individuals
within conservative cultures requires the liberal state to colonize and
reshape these cultures in its own image; but to infiltrate cultural groups
in these ways is to pursue profoundly illiberal policies.
Not even a muscular universalist like Brian Barry countenances
intervention of this magnitude. He opposes the Wisconsin v. Yoder
decision that provided the Amish high school exemption, but goes no
further. We can imagine what would happen if Wisconsin v. Yoder
were to be overturned and the Amish were required to educate their
children until age 16. Assuming no legislative exemption were forthcoming,
the Amish would likely adapt to the new legal reality in ways that
preserved their communities' values and norms. Rather than send their
children to public schools in the “English” world, the Amish
would expand their own parochial schools and offer two additional years of
instruction. Basic reading, writing, arithmetic and religion would remain
the subjects of study; the content and methods of instruction would not
edge any closer to those of a liberal education. To go beyond rescinding
the exemption and to dictate the terms (rather than merely the length) of
children's education, however, is to abrogate a principle of American
constitutionalism that has endured for 80 years, namely, the right of
parents to educate their children in private schools, whether religious or
secular.66
In Pierce v. Society of
Sisters (1925), the Court ruled that
“the fundamental theory upon which all governments in this Union
repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children
by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child
is not the mere creature of the state …”
Barry never
contests this principle, presumably because he still finds some value in
parental rights and freedom of association. But he does not entirely face
up to the consequences of this position—the continued effects on the
voluntariness of life in an Amish community. Instead, he, like the
tolerationist liberals he derides, limits the state's role to
policing an exit option. Barry admits that the exit option is “of
only limited value as a safeguard against abuse,” but concludes that
“it is something that a liberal state can insist on, and …
should do so.”
67 Neither the toleration nor the autonomy camp provides much traction in
developing a compelling account of the stance a liberal state should
assume vis-à-vis illiberal groups; both are misled by their
singular focus on exit options. Toleration liberals tend to assume that
the simple “availability of a wider society” renders
membership in substate minorities voluntary, while autonomy liberals tend
to underestimate both the value of diverse forms of life and the extent of
reform that would be necessary to ensure a meaningful opportunity for
exit. Both sides of this debate end up with a common policy
recommendation, despite more hand wringing on the autonomy side: the state
should ensure an exit option.
An exit option is indeed necessary: locking people into groups is
inconsistent with basic liberty. However, leaving the gate open does not
supply proof of voluntariness. The Amish, the Hasidim, various other
fundamentalist religious sects and Native peoples build their communities
around illiberal ideals and conceptions of the good or right life. To read
meaningful consent into any particular person's membership in such a
group is irresponsible to the point of ridicule. But to deny individuals
the right to remain inside their communities is dangerously paternalistic.
The escape from this quandary involves drawing from the main insights of
each side while decentering the exit option as the conceptual tool of
choice. As the diversity liberals claim, the liberal state ought to
respect these individuals' rights to affiliate with their culture and
allow them to set their own internal rules. But as the autonomy liberals
observe, none of us should be complacent in assuming that members of these
groups may easily and reflectively decide to leave their conservative
religious communities. What we need is a more honest appraisal of the
costs of liberalism and a chastened perspective on how much a liberal
state can do to reduce the intrinsic costs of leaving one's
community. Liberalism, in short, should tolerate wide diversity without
always expecting to find signs that individual members have chosen their
lives freely from a range of options.
As Barbara Fried argues in another context, the liberal state is not
obliged to alleviate the “social costs of exit,” many of which
“inhere in the nature of human beings” and their social
arrangements.68
This is not to say that the costs of
exit are negligible; indeed, they can be prohibitive. In hoping to move
away from “Demos” (an imaginary heterogeneous polity), to
Nozick's “Lucky Island” (where the most talented would
build their own utopian society), Fried notes that the wealthy
“Luckies” face four main obstacles: travel expenses,
negotiation burdens in setting up the new society, unrecoupable sunk
investments in Demos, and the political bond forged by their promise to
live in Demos.
69 Despite these near-insurmountable
burdens—and thus, on some level, the untenability of saying
“if you don't like it, leave it”—Fried argues that
each cost stems “from circumstances that appear … morally
neutral.”
70 The state cannot be held
responsible for the difficulties individuals face in seeking out
alternative political arrangements. Likewise, it should not take
responsibility for ensuring an easy transition for individuals who might
want to leave their substate communities. The contours of
rumspringa are solely the business of the Amish Church, not the
liberal state.
Pointing to the futility of the exit option as a reliable marker of
consent should not, then, lead to grand attempts to reduce the costs of
exit. Such a strategy—like that of Brian Barry—promises to be
fruitless, paternalistic, or both. But neither should this recognition
lead to complacency about the actual conditions of life in some of these
groups. While Kukathas would agree that exit options alone provide little
proof that an individual chooses her community, he clings to the idea that
one's status in an illiberal group—despite a lack of
choice—is best conceived as “free” if she has a right of
exit. In lieu of choice or voluntariness, all Kukathas hopes to find is
“acquiescence”—a kind of resignation to the
circumstances in which one finds herself.71
The
line between tacit consent and acquiescence is faint, if it is even
possible to draw. But if there were such a line, construing members of
intolerably oppressive groups as “free” as long as they are
not prohibited from leaving is to reduce the concept of freedom to a
Hobbesian “absence of opposition.”
72 On Kukathas's interpretation of human freedom, groups
guaranteeing exit rights can do no wrong—or, more precisely, no
wrong that the state should seek to correct. The state, in his view,
should refrain from protecting individuals from even the most oppressive
treatment by the communities they inhabit. Kukathas admits that female
genital mutilation and the denial of blood transfusions to children are
“clearly cases of oppression,” but he opposes using the power
of the state to correct these ills. Pointing to Iran's suppression of
the Baha'i and Australia's mistreatment of Aboriginals, Kukathas
worries more about oppression of minorities by the state than
oppression by minorities of its members. But this
“decentralization of tyranny,”73
founded on a fundamental mistrust of the state,
leaves political theorists with little to talk about. With a less
skeptical perspective on the capacity of the state to distinguish the
tolerable (for example, sectarian education) from the intolerable (for
example, genital mutilation) and to use its power judiciously, and with
more honesty about the often unfree status of individuals in illiberal
groups, we can gain critical purchase on these groups' practices.
Many illiberal groups, after all, are committed to far more worrisome
activities than those of the Amish. However the polity decides to
distinguish between minority practices that should and should not be
tolerated, all sides should steer clear of the canard of consent.
The often formidable difficulties associated with leaving one's
home society or substate community are a fact of life that the liberal
state is and ought to be powerless to correct. Just as the costs borne by
wealthy people seceding from a welfare state are no cause for legitimate
complaint (as Fried argues), the forces attracting Amish youth to baptism
and away from modern forms of life should not vex liberals. Yes,
rumspringa is no panacea; the choices it enables are imperfect,
to put it mildly. But no choice is perfect. Few of us make fundamental
life decisions only after a full and fair consideration of the available
alternatives. (How many readers of this journal have seriously
contemplated the possibility of living an Amish life?) The liberal state
lacks both the authority and the capacity to perfect our choices.
