Amish
- Grew from
- Mennonite
- From
- 1693 AD
- Origin
- Alsace
- Confession
- Schleitheim Confession 1527 AD
Formed when Jakob Ammann, holding that the Swiss Brethren had grown lax in discipline, pressed for stricter shunning of the excommunicated and a more separated life. The division of 1693 was never healed. Land shortage and persecution brought the Amish to Pennsylvania from 1737 and the migration continued for a century; no Amish congregations remain in Europe.
What marks it out
The Ordnung, the settled custom of a congregation, governs dress, technology and work — and is agreed locally, which is why one settlement uses tractors and the next does not. Meidung, the shunning of members under the ban, was the point Ammann divided over. Baptism is deferred until adulthood so that it is a choice, and Rumspringa precedes it. Schooling ends at fourteen, upheld for the Amish by the United States Supreme Court in 1972.
In the record
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1607–1750 AD Migration
Migration to the Americas
Puritans, Quakers, Catholics and Anabaptists carried their divisions across the Atlantic, where the absence of an established church let them multiply.
This body appears in the history but does not carry recorded doctrinal positions here, so it is absent from the comparison panels.