RELIGION IN THE NEWS
Fall 2006, Vol. 9, No. 2

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Articles in this issue

Muslims in America

As We Forgive Those...

Polygamy Returns

At Cross Purposes in San Diego

The Passion of the DUI

Maybe the Center Holds After All

Contributors

As We Forgive Those...
by Mark Silk

The horrific killings of five Old Order Amish girls in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse October 2 afforded the news media an opportunity to portray the famously old-fashioned religious sect as the living embodiment of the Christian message.

In a first-day story, “Seclusion shattered by school slayings,” USA Today focused on a motif of disruption. “Cruel world intrudes on Amish,” announced the Baltimore Sun. “No refuge in Paradise,” said the Irish Times.

In the week-long whirlwind of worldwide media attention, there were stories to be done on the killer, Charles Carl Roberts IV, who turned his gun on himself as the police were closing in; on the recent spate of school shootings; on school killers in general, on school safety and gun control.

But at such moments, attention also must be paid to questions of theological significance. These days, mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy have a tendency to gesture at the inexplicability of evil in the world, perhaps citing the Book of Job. Evangelicals seek out reasons to turn the tragedy into an occasion for spreading the Good News.

But because this was the Amish, the lesson was all about forgiveness.

On October 3, USA Today reporters Thomas Frank and Alan Levin turned to David Weaver-Zercher, a professor at nearby Messiah College, who predicted that the Amish would “‘reach out’ to the gunman’s widow. ‘They’ll try to express their forgiveness,’ he said, ‘and sense that in some ways, this woman is a victim.’”

On October 4, Pittsburgh Post Gazette reporter Caitlin Cleary found a local informant to expatiate on the theme.

“‘It is terrible that somebody did this, and my heart aches for anyone involved, for the children,” said Andrew Troyer, who lives in an Amish settlement near Conneautville, Crawford County, and runs a family rope-making business. “But I feel the most sorry for the person who did it, and I’ll tell you the reason why—because he can’t get forgiveness no more, what’s done is done. After death, there is no more change.”

“Mr. Troyer quoted a verse from the Book of Matthew, Chapter 6, which says if a man does not forgive another’s trespasses against him, his own trespasses will not be forgiven by God.

“Our blood-red sins He will wash white as snow,” said Mr. Troyer. “Forgiveness is a choice, but it is not an option if we want to be saved.”

In her October 6 report on the funeral of four of the girls, Post Gazette reporter Ann Rodgers found Rita Rhoads, a Mennonite nurse-midwife, to fill her in.

“The stoic faces the Amish present to the outside world gave way to open grief in their homes, she said. ‘They are human, they are crying, they are devastated.’

“Yet they profess certainty of a hope greater than their grief. ‘They have peace because their daughters are in heaven and they have forgiven the shooter,’ she said.

“According to Ms. Rhoads, on Monday evening a grandfather of one of the girls called on Marie Roberts, the widow of the killer, to express the forgiveness that is at the heart of Amish spirituality. Mrs. Roberts later sent a message to the local Amish bishop, asking permission to visit the community after the funerals.

“‘He was overjoyed,’ Ms. Rhoads said, adding that the bishop is a grandfather to some of the shooting victims. He said he had hoped that the Roberts family would come to visit, she said.”

In a web exclusive story, Newsweek’s Lisa Miller compared the Amish to the heroic desert fathers of early Christianity, whose “ideal was, through discipline and restraint, to be like angels and to live as closely as possible to God.”

“[T]he Amish will gather their community around them, they will forgive those who have trespassed against them, and they will trust their faith in God to carry them,” the Toronto Sun editorialized October 9.

On October 16, Post Gazette columnist Ruth Ann Dailey noted that it had been “a roller coaster month for the commodity of forgiveness on the American pop-cultural stock exchange.” After a week when it was at a premium, pre-election politics-as-usual had “sent the value of forgiveness tumbling back to its pre-Amish levels.”

What to do but imagine an interview with the world’s great expert on the subject. Among God’s pronouncements, Dailey postulated:

“[M]y greatest work was through the Amish. They make themselves so available to me. Their forgiveness, the way they reached out to the killer’s family, the scholarships they’ve established for his children—that’s where I am.