The Amish (Old Order)

Denomination·Founded 1693 CE·est. 410,955 in North America as of June 2025 — adults and children — in 3,114 church districts and 684 settlements across 32 states and three Canadian provinces. Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College. The population has roughly doubled since 2000 and doubles about every twenty years.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → Anabaptism → The Amish (Old Order)

Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown CollegeThe recordMennonite Abuse Prevention

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Overview Belief 3How to Live 1Practice 1Stories & Scripture 1Community 1 You × The Amish (Old Order) Discussion
Story of The Amish (Old Order)

Dirk Willems turns back across the ice.

Escaping Asperen prison in 1569 across a frozen pond, Willems heard his pursuer fall through behind him, went back and pulled him out. The man arrested him anyway. He was burned at Asperen on 16 May 1569, and the woodcut of him reaching down through the ice is the single most reproduced image in Anabaptism.

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Where it is toldMartyrs Mirror (1660), the book in more Amish houses than any other after the Bible
Who appearsDirk Willems; the thief-catcher who pursued him
What it teachesThat the enemy is a neighbour first
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The Martyrs Mirror, compiled by the Dutch Mennonite Thieleman J. van Braght in 1660 and illustrated by Jan Luyken in 1685, runs to well over a thousand pages of Anabaptists executed by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike. The Willems episode is the story every Amish and Mennonite child knows, and it is doing specific work: it does not say the enemy was converted or that the rescue was rewarded. Willems was burned anyway, and slowly, because the wind kept blowing the fire away from him. The lesson is that nonresistance is not a strategy that works but an obligation that holds when it does not work. The 1745 Ephrata Cloister edition was the largest book printed in colonial America.

From the sources — the passages this rests on; concise renderings, cited

He, then, considering that if he returned he would save the life of his enemy, went quickly back and aided him in getting out, and thus saved his life.

Thieleman J. van Braght, Martyrs Mirror (Dordrecht, 1660), on Dirk Willems, 1569 — English translation of 1886

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
Turn the other cheek — and the argument about war. Christianity · precept Go deeper →
Christians do not take up the sword — including for a just cause. The Mennonites · core tenet Go deeper →
Ahimsa — do no harm. Hinduism · precept Go deeper →
Compassion extends to all sentient beings. Buddhism · core tenet Go deeper →
Non-violence is the highest duty. Jainism · core tenet Go deeper →
The Shoah broke something, and no answer has held. Judaism · core tenet Go deeper →

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