Donald B. Kraybill - Renegade Amish: Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes, and the Trial of the Bergholz Barbers

RENEGADE AMISH

Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes, and the Trial of the Bergholz Barbers

DONALD B. KRAYBILL

2014 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2014

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kraybill, Donald B.

Renegade Amish : beard cutting, hate crimes, and the
trial of the Bergholz barbers / Donald B. Kraybill.
pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4214-1567-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4214-1568-0 (electronic)

ISBN 1-4214-1567-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 1-4214-1568-2 (electronic)
1. Hate crimesOhioCase studies. 2. Amish
Crimes againstOhioCase studies. 3. Amish
Customs and practices. 4. AmishDoctrines.
5. BeardsReligious aspects. 6. HairReligious
aspects. 7. Offenses against religionOhioCase
studies. I. Title.

HV6773.53.O3K73 2014

364.1555dc23 2014013198

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Frontispiece is by Linda Eberly.

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For the women who had the courage to say no,
the children who were trapped in a tragedy,
and all those who suffered in any way

Amish. Hate. Crimes. These three words suddenly linked arms in the fall of 2011 when a string of beard-cutting attacks startled the Amish community in eastern Ohio. The fact that the perpetrators were Amish generated an avalanche of news stories about Amish-on-Amish violence as the bizarre story played out until the defendants were sentenced in February 2013. Pundits and late-night talk shows alike poked fun at the Amishthese supposed saints who now had streaks of sin on their faces. Even a cartoonist joined in the humor by depicting a distraught Santa Claus with only stubbles on his chin, waiting in vain for children to sit on his lap. Apart from beards, bonnets, and buggies, nonviolence is a cardinal signature of Amish identity. That a band of supposedly pacifist Amish had assaulted their own people shattered all the Amish stereotypes in the popular imagination.

When this cultural brawl finally ended, ten men and six women from a maverick Amish community near Bergholz, Ohio, were behind bars. A federal jury found them guilty of multiple charges involving conspiracy, hate crimes, kidnapping, lying, and obstructing justice. Most shocking of all, the three Bergholz clergymenBishop Samuel Mullet and his two ministerswere among those charged and convicted. The jurors found evidence that the assailants had attacked the Amish victims because of their religion.

Apart from etching violence into the annals of Amish history, the case set a new legal precedentunder the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Actfor its first-time conviction of assailants for religion-driven hate crimes. Moreover, it was also the first one within the same faith community. In addition, because a hate crime conviction requires evidence of bodily injury, the jury had to judge whether cutting a beard qualified as disfigurement, which is one type of bodily injury. The verdicts stretched the definition of bodily injury for hate crimes and the nature of acceptable evidence for interstate commerceone requirement for federal jurisdiction and prosecution of hate crimes. Some legal experts considered the interstate commerce evidence tenuous in the Bergholz case, and others have even raised questions about some aspects of the constitutionality of the Shepard-Byrd Act.

The Bergholz defendants filed an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which will likely announce its decision in late 2014. The national import of the Bergholz verdict was underscored in March 2014 when forty prominent civil rights, human rights, religious, and law enforcement organizations, led by the Anti-Defamation League, urged the appeals court to uphold the constitutionality of the Shepard-Byrd Act and to affirm its application to violence within the same faith. The wide range of organizations included the American Association of People with Disabilities, Hindu American Foundation, Interfaith Alliance Foundation, National Center for Transgender Equality, National Urban League, Women of Reform Judaism, Police Executive Research Forum, and many others.

It is a sad irony that ostensibly peace-loving Amish people became the first to be convictedunder the Shepard-Byrd Actof religiously motivated violence. The legal issues of the case include not only bedrock constitutional ones but also the future application of the hate crimes statute in the United States. Indeed, several constitutional law scholars and the trial judge Daniel Aaron Polster have speculated that the case might eventually wind its way to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2006, the Amish were in the media spotlight for their quick and astonishing forgiveness after a non-Amish gunman shot ten girls in a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. That story, overflowing with Amish acts of goodness, kindness, and compassion, touched the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people around the globebut not the Bergholz story. This tragedy had few if any signs of goodnessonly sadness, revenge, and violence. While the good Amish in Nickel Mines readily forgave the shooter and his family, the bad Amish of Bergholz showered vengeance on their own people. How forced beard cuttings could ever cohere with Amish values was the perplexing riddle in hundreds of media stories.

The media coverage of the beard attacks was the most prominent Amish-themed reporting since the shooting at Nickel Mines. Journalists tracked the beard-cutting saga over eighteen months (September 2011 to February 2013), riveting it into the pages of Amish history and the public record. The story of the Bergholz barbers appeared in some 150 television programs and in more than seven hundred print and web stories worldwide. The New York Times, for example, reported four major stories in 2012two in September and two in Decemberin addition to its initial coverage of the attacks.

Although the three-week federal trial in Cleveland unpacked evidence about the assaults and presented witnesseswho did what to whom, when, and whereit did not probe the cultural fabric or social history of the Bergholz clan, nor did it address the questions of why and how some gentle, pacifist folks had turned violent against members of their own tribe.

This book tackles those questions by exploring the sociocultural factors that transformed a small clan of Amishnurtured in a religious tradition of nonviolence and forgivenessinto a culture of revenge and retaliation. What socioreligious conditions propelled this remarkable conversion within a few short years? What prompted the group to create cultlike practices and an ideology of malice aimed at its own people? This story is significant not only for its legal ramifications but also because it clarifies the factors that led to the moral collapse at Bergholz and the lessons it offers for all of us, Amish and non-Amish alike.