Bart Township, USA — They shun electricity, telephones and the court system to try to stay disconnected from a world they consider polluted by modern convention and comfort.
But the rural seclusion the Amish have here in central Pennsylvania's rolling hills was shattered Monday by the execution-style slayings of five Amish girls in a one-room schoolhouse.
"You read about it, you hear about it. But you don't expect it to happen this close to home," said John Fisher, 33, an Amish man who lives a half-mile from the school.
The killings — the girls were bound together and had to be cut apart by rescue workers according to the Pennsylvania State Police — devastated the ordinarily composed Amish. Many were "crying and weeping and hugging, and the Amish people don't usually show too much emotion," said Annie Beiler, 66, whose farm abuts the school property. "They are quiet, private people."
Lancaster County District Attorney Don Totaro said, "It's beyond comprehension that anyone would slaughter children in this manner."
"It's like a dream. It's something you hear of in a city," said Naomi Fisher, whose runs an auction house nearby. "You read it in the paper. But not in a quiet little country school."
David Bernard, 66, of Parkesburg works as a driver for some Amish neighbors and accompanied them to the school Monday night. Bernard said the Amish viewed the violence as a demonstration of the problems posed by the modern world.
"This is a place of blood," he said of the school. "People died here, so they'll probably tear it down."
The violence seemed unlikely to change the tight religious sect that is rooted in non-violence and resistance to change.
"I don't see it as having a large effect on their lifestyle," said David Weaver-Zercher, a professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. "In a certain way, it confirms a general orientation about the world not being a very good place."
Radically non-violent
Since the Amish emerged as a small Protestant sect in late-17th-century Switzerland, its adherents have strived to maintain religious purity. Non-violence — or "non-resistance" — was an early tenet that arose from a literal reading of the New Testament.
"They take the words of Jesus seriously: to love your enemies and not to do evil to fellow people," said Donald Kraybill, an Amish expert at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. "There is very little violence in the Amish community."
Crime by the Amish is so rare that only one adherent is thought to have been convicted of murder: an Amish man from western Pennsylvania who killed his wife in 1993 saying he wanted to excise the devil.
The gunman Monday, Charles Carl Roberts IV, was not Amish and was not targeting the Amish but apparently picked the school because it was near his home and had little security, said Col. Jeffrey Miller of the Pennsylvania State Police. Roberts killed himself in the school building.
Amish schools — typically one-room schoolhouses with 25-30 students and a young, female teacher — reflect the community's efforts to protect itself against the dangers of worldliness. The Amish went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 to preserve their right to end classroom education after eighth grade.
They won a decision in 1972 that said the Amish weren't against education itself but oppose "conventional formal education" in high school years "because it comes at the child's crucial adolescent period of religious development."
"The Amish view is that they should provide the basic education for children to live productively in the Amish community," said Herman Bontrager of the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, which brought the Supreme Court case. "Additional things really aren't necessary for living productively in their community. They distract and maybe lead you into another world."
The Amish have negotiated a tricky path between accepting and rejecting convention since the rise of technology in the mid-19th century. They number about 200,000. The largest communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana.
Many have moved away from farming, particularly in Lancaster County, Pa., the site of Monday's shooting and the setting for the acclaimed 1985 film Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a Philadelphia police officer who takes refuge in an Amish farm.
About 60% of Lancaster's Amish run businesses such as greenhouses, woodworking shops and farmer's markets, said Kraybill.
Matters of technology
That has challenged the Amish's effort to "separate from the world," said Weaver-Zercher, the Messiah College professor. "They look at various technology and how that would connect them."
The Amish eschew electricity that would literally connect them to society through power lines, but they use self-contained power sources such as batteries and gas to run refrigerators and stoves.
They pay federal income taxes and local property taxes, but they won an act of Congress to exempt them from paying and receiving Social Security benefits. "They feel the church should provide support for its own members," Kraybill said.
Amish avoid phones in their homes, where they would enable intrusions that interrupt family life. Phones are in some Amish businesses and at roadside booths where families share them.
After the gunman took students hostage in the school, a teacher ran to a farmhouse where someone called 911.
Although Amish enjoy police protection, many of them are reluctant to cooperate with criminal investigations, viewing prosecution as a form of force.
Steven Nolt, a historian at Goshen College in Indiana who's written several books about the Amish, recalled cases in which Amish people were murdered but relatives refused to help win convictions "because they weren't going to engage in that kind of retributive violence."
Weaver-Zercher of Messiah College said he expects the Amish to "reach out" to gunman's widow.
"They'll try to express their forgiveness," he said, "and sense that in some ways, this woman is a victim."