The current is accepted and the connection refused: batteries and solar panels yes, the meter no — the Ordnung’s distinction between a tool and a tie, in its sharpest form.
Tagged: Energy Anabaptist
Connection to the public grid is the Amish Ordnung’s other famous line — and the more instructive one, because what is refused is not electricity (batteries, inverters, solar panels, and diesel generators are common) but the connection: the metered, billed, inspectable tie to the world’s infrastructure and its dependencies. ‘Off-grid’ in the literal, ecclesial sense predates the phrase’s fashion by a century.
The Stance Register
Each stance is recorded with its rationale in the tradition's own terms and its sources. Where a tradition argues with itself, the register says so.
Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish Resisted
Grid connection is refused because the tie, not the current, is the technology: connection brings the world’s schedule, bills, media, and inspections into the home and dissolves the boundary Gelassenheit requires. Electricity itself is admitted in bounded forms — battery, inverter, generator, solar — which loosen dependence rather than tighten it, the exact opposite of the connection’s social effect.
- Donald B. Kraybill et al., The Amish (2013)
See this register as a side-by-side comparison
References
- Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (rev. ed., 2001)
Related Across the Site
- Digital technology and community Flashpoint — Attention as the substance of community: streaming congregations and phone fasts, the industry’s own defectors making the ascetic argument, and the placement rules of the Amish applied to the pocket screen.
- Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online Library — Reliable information on Anabaptist congregations, people, and historical and theological topics, with the full texts of Mennonite confessions.
- Menno Simons.net Library — The life, complete writings, doctrine, and images of Menno Simons, including English translations of his works.
- Industrial agriculture Technology — The yield is not in dispute; the terms are: horsepower governed by scale among the Amish, waste forbidden by bal tashchit, the technocratic paradigm indicted by Laudato si’ — and the Green Revolution’s billions fed, recorded in the same ledger.
- Nuclear power Technology — The reactor judged apart from the bomb: prudence, waste, and descendants on one side of the ledger, decarbonization arithmetic on the other — and no magisterium with a binding word.
- The automobile Technology — Refused as property, used as a service: the car is the cleanest demonstration that the Ordnung judges ownership and social effect, not machinery.
- Vaccination Technology — From Jenner’s parish campaigns to polio fatwas: mostly embraced, sometimes governed, and fought over in our century along lines that cross every tradition.
- Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish Tradition & Science — The Ordnung and Gelassenheit: technology judged in congregation by what it does to the yielded, communal life — the car refused and the battery accepted, the telephone governed by its placement, and Hutterite communal farms among the most mechanized on the continent.