A Bremen Amish family’s immediate gesture of forgiveness toward the girl who crashed into their children last week is not unusual, according to an expert on the Amish.
If you’ve followed this story, you may have been amazed that the children’s parents quickly invited the teen driver to their home and the children’s funeral on Sunday, saying they hold no anger toward her.
Steve Nolt is not so surprised. He’s a former Goshen College professor who now teaches at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Nolt has authored seven books on the Amish, including one that studied their ability to befriend the family of a man who shot up an Amish school in Pennsylvania in 2006, killing five Amish girls.
Nolt says to begin to understand this Amish trait, it helps to distinguish between emotional and decisional forgiveness.
“Emotional forgiveness involves a lot of interior work, it takes a lot of time,” Nolt says. “Decisional forgiveness is public, it is usually verbal, and it is making statements about, ‘I forgive,’ or taking actions that demonstrate that.”
Nolt says most in the mainstream culture think we must emotionally forgive before we can express forgiveness. But the Amish often view decisional forgiveness as a way to create space later to forgive emotionally.
“So the response sometimes is, well the Amish must just be amazing at forgiveness because they can do emotional forgiveness that should take years in just a few hours, and then conclude that with decisional forgiveness. Or the analysis from outside is, oh the Amish must be terrible at forgiveness because they don’t understand the importance of emotional forgiveness. They just jump right to decisional forgiveness and stuff their feelngs in a box.
“And neither of those appraisals is really what’s happening. Rather, the things that the rest of us are observing are just happening in a different order, a different sequence than we may assume.”
So why do the Amish often reverse the order of these components of forgiveness? Nolt says it stems partly from their Biblically-driven focus on sacrifice and giving things up, like their right to dress how they want or enjoy modern conveniences. That also means giving up their right to revenge or bitter feelings.
“Amish people may think about forgiveness as difficult but they don’t view it as something that’s unnatural,” Nolt says. “Middle-class North Americans, we are taught, we are encouraged, to never give anything up. To insist on our rights, to insist on getting what we want. So forgiveness may be valorized, it may be something that we think is a good thing that we should do, but on another level it seems hard because it seems so unlike anything else we ever do.”
