Tornado Disaster Relief: Amish “won’t take no funds”
Now, those aren’t in fact the words of the Amish. But they are the words of a non-Amish neighbor who understands the Amish well – as a people who reject government aid.
This comes following severe weather damage in Wright County, Missouri – one of over a dozen Missouri counties impacted by storms in March and April. The county is home to two separate Amish communities totaling around 500 Amish people.
FEMA funding will be provided to help residents dealing with storm damage in this area of southern Missouri. But no one expects the Amish to be among those accepting aid money. From Ozarks First:
WRIGHT COUNTY, Mo. — The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced today that federal disaster assistance is coming to Missouri following severe weather that tore through multiple counties in March and April.
Here in Southwest Missouri, Wright County will be receiving some of those funds, after a tornado hit rural parts of the county on March 14th.
The Amish community was mostly impacted; due to religious reasons, the Amish would not speak on camera. Neighbors that live nearby tell Ozarks First they do not believe their Amish neighbors will accept any of the federal funding.
As one neighbor put it: “We appreciate FEMA and I just hope that the Amish does take some help. I doubt it, but I hope that they do.”
Or another, quoted in the post headline:
Rex Cole helped his Amish neighbors rebuild after the tornado. He tells Ozarks First they have their own ways of paying for supplies after disaster strikes.
“They won’t take no funds. No money. If they worked for me and they got hurt, they won’t come to me for funding to pay for any medical bills. They take care of all their own stuff,” says Cole.
So even without confirmation from the Amish, you can be pretty confident in the words of this man who knows his Amish neighbors well. And it fits exactly with the typical Amish stance when it comes to accepting aid from the government.
Note: while the article at Ozarks First refers to Wright County, the video report below also refers to, and reports from, Webster County, which is home to the state’s largest Amish community, at Seymour. The counties border one another and are both included in the FEMA relief area.
Why Amish refuse government aid
Another example of that came when Amish refused COVID relief funds provided to all Americans in response to the pandemic. As I wrote in that instance:
Accepting benefits in the form of stimulus money could compromise their arrangements in other important areas – like conscientious objector status, abstention from Social Security, and their eight-grade schooling program.
These are at least philosophically dependent on keeping some separation from the state. But that also means not partaking of the “good things” – like free money – when they conflict with this separation.
Besides the farsighted concern over compromising their general legal and political status, on a more core level, this approach also reflects classic Amish reliance on community. This “Amish ethos” is about doing for yourself and helping your neighbor as best you can.
Now please don’t get the wrong idea – I’m not knocking anyone who take government aid from FEMA and other bodies. We non-Amish people can’t really compare ourselves to the Amish in an apples-to-apples way.
For one, the Amish have a built-in community aid system to rely on. If, say, an Amish farmer’s barn burns down, he can count on his church providing free labor from dozens of fellow community members to get the barn back up within weeks or even days. The average non-Amish person does not have that, or at least not to the same degree.
Exceptions prove the rule
It’s worth noting that “the Amish” are not going to 100% refuse government assistance across the board. There have been examples of it happening before – as in the case of Amish accepting unemployment assistance during the recession of 2008-2009.
In this, it’s important to remember that the Amish are individuals, and while beliefs and principles stay generally consistent, there are a lot of different Amish communities out there.
In a similar manner, some Amish may initiate lawsuits (especially if put in a position of compromising core beliefs). But for the vast majority of Amish, legal action is not the same option for resolving problems that it might be for other Americans.
Exceptions noted, the fact is that the Amish are much more apt to be the ones providing disaster relief – in the form of donating their time and labor to clean up and rebuild – than they are to be the ones accepting it. And that is what we can probably expect in this story of disaster relief in Missouri.
The possible nature of principles, and neighbourly help
One of the things I often notice as a Christian scholar (not an anabaptist, but on the Catholic side of Protestant) is that people not used to the system tend to try to model our ethics in a legal manner when it is more typical of classical Christian ethics to apply principles.
So, for instance, once when I was trying to explain a principle to someone and gave a couple of typical examples, I got an absolutely furious response because I hadn’t specified a particular instance. Applying the principles would indeed have given exactly the same answer in that instance, and if I had been asked that is what I would have said. The person I was talking to instead assumed that anything not specified didn’t count, and was outraged that I had excluded the situation in question. I hadn’t. The underlying ethical model in that case involved, “reasons that meet these sorts of criteria” not, “items that are on this list.” Hearing the one as the other is very misleading.
While it does have to be allowed that people are not always consistent with their principles, it may be that the Amish are applying particular principles in particular cases to get answers that are not quite what would be expected: as a lot of the time their principles are different enough that it can be hard to guess their reasoning from outside, it’s hard to know in the absence of communication why they make one decision rather than another in a particular case.
Government funding is the secular version of community support; unfortunately it has a tendency to run to controlling and destroying human level communities; as an advocate of real subsidiary (things should be done at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary) and of MacIntyrian communitarianism (the modern nation state cannot be a real community on the human interpersonal level; therefore, it should make sure it is not trying to take that role and allow people the freedom to form and develop human-level communities. Starting perhaps, with allowing families to make their own decisions about education, medical treatment, and health and safety – though some of that is also human-rights territory, as the stolen generations attest). Of course, this is a major reason why I find the Amish interesting because despite the regular encroachment upon their ways (much of it some form of: “we’re entitled to control you because you’d be safer if you did things our way”) and some real interaction problems (road safety for OTHER road users), they do often seem to manage to preserve interpersonal level community even under modern conditions.
If people are worried about the Amish refusing funds and possibly being in need in consequence, I have the impression that they might be more willing to take neighbourly help from non-Amish people than money from government level funding? That is, if people who could offered to take those working to rebuild their houses a few hot meals, or offered the use of their caravan or tent to sleep in for a few weeks, and so on, might that be something they would feel more able to respond to? After all, many of them don’t hesitate to give that type of help to non-Amish neighbours.