Black Hats and Black Mirrors
Three Questions the Amish Taught Me to Ask About Technology
About a year ago, our family had the incredible opportunity of a sabbatical in the USA and Canada. Our kids were born in Toronto but we had returned to the motherland when they were quite small, so they had no memory of North America. This, my wife and I felt, was a gap in their education: it was time to introduce them to the National Parks, to amazing museums, and to meals so big they have their own postal code.
Among the many cultural highlights of our ten-week sojourn was a visit to Amish Country. I’d described to my kids the wonder of queuing in a drive-thru line behind a horse and buggy, but they’d assumed that was about as factual as my telling them that Tim Horton was a famous Canadian prime minister. So we loaded up the rental car (a vehicle so big that we lost my son for an hour down the back of the rear seat) and headed for the Amish Paradise of Lancaster County.
It was a fascinating day, probably the nearest thing to a “cross-cultural” experience my kids have ever had, and the guide at the Amish House museum captured their imaginations as she described how remarkably different Amish life is. I was also intrigued by some of the statistics: such as if the Amish population continues to double every twenty years (as it has been doing for the past few decades) they are eventually going to comprise a very sizeable chunk of the USA.1
I also confess to coming away very challenged. What had begun as a fun family day trip ended up raising many questions. For whilst it is easy to poke fun at the Amish—look at their funny habits, their dress code, their language, their three-hour-long, bottom-numbing church services—what if poking fun is lazy? It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel after having first stapled the fish to the sides of the barrel—the weird stuff is just too easy for us cool, culture-surfing contemporary evangelicals to laugh at. Don’t the Amish know that church isn’t church without a seeker-friendly wrapping, youth groups built on a foundation of pizza, and a sound system to make your ears bleed? Surely the Amish are utterly irrelevant, completely out-of-step with culture, and … well a bit cringe?
But what if that gut reaction is less considered reflection and more the result of the fact we’ve spent a good few decades in parts of the modern church accommodating ourselves a bit too neatly to the culture? After all, if we sand off our distinctives and blend in, maybe people will like us, the media won’t say nasty things about us, and it’ll all be a bit easier. Sure, Jesus said “take up your cross”, but does it matter if the cross is padded a bit, or even an inflatable one, filled with helium?
In case you think I’m throwing stones at others here, I wrote this piece partly to ask these questions of myself. I was struck by the fact that the Amish took their faith seriously, their culture seriously, discipleship seriously, and above all, they took community seriously. That last one really hit me: in my 30 years of working partly in outreach to Muslims, I have found that converts to Christianity from Islam often struggle with the cup-of-tea-after-the-service-then-goodbye-for-a-week approach to Christian community that sometimes characterises us.
I came away from Lancaster County not with a desire to buy a black hat and trade in the Volvo estate for a buggy; but I did come away wondering what it means to live my faith a bit more deeply, to swim harder against the cultural flow, to do community better, to contribute to building a church that goes deep as well as wide.
So what’s the key to the deep community that the Amish have built? In his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth argues that humans are designed to be deeply connected to what he calls the four Ps: people, place, prayer, and the past. However, the modern world has done its best to erode those and replace them with the four Ss: science, sex, self, and the screen.2 As a result, we are a rootless, restless people.
But what links the four Ps—that sense of belonging to a community of people, to a place, to a faith, and to a story? One answer is time: those things require an investment not of money nor of our skills so much as our time. Conversely our modern world says our time and attention should be fragmented, chopped and diced and, ideally, monetised. This is why technology, especially modern digital technology and the distraction engines it has built, has been so corrosive for community.
Hence why I found the Amish so challenging, because I was deeply impressed by their approach to technology. Contrary to popular myth, the Amish don’t reject technology; rather they think very carefully about what technologies to use and, when they adopt one, about how they use it. For example, they have telephones—just not in the house. They use electricity, but have chosen not to be on the grid and instead make use of solar power. Other technologies, especially those that have pride and narcissism at their centre (hello, social media, we’re looking at you), they reject outright.
Maybe the lesson from our Amish cousins is that when it comes to any technology, what matters are the questions you ask before you unthinkingly adopt it. Christians of all people should know that tools and technologies often come with a value system built into them. As the social critic Neil Postman wrote:
New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.3
So here are three questions I have been pondering, three questions I think I saw the Amish asking, that can at least cause us to slow down and reflect:
What does this technology add: what are the pluses, the bonuses, the wins?
What does this technology take away: what are the minuses, the losses, the costs?
How does this technology affect our relationships, our community?
That last question is the real zinger, isn’t it? Christians believe that our primary calling, what it means to be people made in the image of God, is that we are called to do two things: to love God and to love our neighbour. And we are nothing if not naïve if we are unwilling to admit that some of the technologies we have allowed into our lives may have given us lots of wins (all the world’s knowledge a click away) but the costs have also been heavy: distraction, busyness, and a permanent crick-in-the-neck from staring into the black mirror of our screens.
And mirror is the key word. Mirrors offer nothing new, but instead just reflect ourselves back at us and, like Narcissus of Greek legend, before we know it, we’re transfixed, rooted to the spot, yet at the same time root-less, because our mirrors have taken our eyes from God and from those around us.
But the underlying problem is not the technology, but rather a problem that C. S. Lewis identified years ago when he wrote:
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.4
Which is why some of the answers you hear to the challenges of technology, whether “delete all your social media accounts immediately” or “look forward to when humanity merges with AI” are too simplistic. When it comes to technology, we’re not called to become monks nor, heaven forbid, to become machines. But we are called to remember what humans were designed to be, to recall (if you want a posh word) our telos. If a technology helps us to love God and love others, then embrace it to that extent; if it doesn’t, then let it go, however costly that may be.
If the wilder predictions of the growth rate of the Amish turn out to be right, North America (and in time, the West as a whole) faces a fascinating future: two very different communities dominating the landscape, one that has become totally enthralled by technology—and remember that ‘thrall’ means to be in the power of something—and another community that has resisted the grasping claws of the Machine and laid down roots, built a thicker and deeper culture.
Perhaps the choice does not need to be quite that binary, but if the future is going to be anything other than technological tribalism, it is going to require Christians to think and think much harder about technology; to be willing to be truly counter-cultural; to build communities that aren’t just a glorified WhatsApp group; and to model, with blood, sweat, tears, and effort, what it means to be Church, not just show up at one.
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See: https://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/amish-population-profile-2025/. If this growth continues unabated, in 200 years’ time, the entire USA will be Amish. Whilst this is statistically pretty unlikely, my advice: open a hat shop now.
Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (London: Particular Books, 2025) pp. 131-33.
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007) p.20.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: Macmillan, 1949) p.2.