When fringe, conservative religious groups whose members are allowed almost no contact with the outside world are mentioned in the media, it’s usually accompanied by the word “cult.” Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, or even Love Has Won are treated by American society as if they had almost no cultural or religious legitimacy. Why, then, are the Old-Order Amish communities prevalent in American society so widely accepted?

If you forget about your personal experience, it seems weird, right? Imagine driving around in Pennsylvania and suddenly coming across a random man driving a horse and buggy on country roads. His reason for doing that? His religion, of course! And why isn’t he allowed to leave? Well, I guess that’s just how they do it over there.

The Amish first arrived in America around the 17th century, settling in eastern Pennsylvania. They diverged from Anabaptists following the Protestant Reformation, and could, at one point, be found all across Europe. Later, Amish communities emigrated to America and continually merged with more progressive Mennonite communities until the last Old-Order Amish Community in Europe ceased to exist in 1937. 

It’s important to pause and make a distinction between two terms here: Old-Order Amish and New-Order Amish. When the average person imagines someone Amish, they generally imagine a member of the Old-Order Amish community. Those are the people you see in horses and buggies, either tilling the land with old-fashioned tools or using candles for light after the sun goes down. However, New-Order Amish are the people you’re more likely to meet. They’re the ones who own businesses, or the ones you’d see at an airport and gawk at. They’re not totally separated from modern society.

Old-Order communities, however, shun any kind of “new”  technological advancement. Their members are often sent on rumspringa, which is essentially a period of exploration into the outside world. For this period, they’re allowed to do anything they want, because they aren’t technically members of the church yet. If they decide they prefer the secular world, they’re shunned. 

People who leave Old-Order Amish communities are never allowed to speak to their friends or family again, and are given no support to navigate the world they’ve barely lived in for six months. New-Order communities don’t do this. They use electricity, accept modern life, and skip the pilgrimage altogether. Most importantly, they (generally) aren’t shunned if they eventually decide to leave.

Let’s imagine there’s a checklist of things that make a “cult.” Imagine what you would put on there. Isolation from the outside world? The Old-Order Amish make that one of their core values. Controlling most aspects of your life? Banning you from doing anything with modern technology definitely checks that box. 

Still, there must be a more definite criterion for what gives a cult its label. One that magically excludes the Amish, right?

Apparently, no one actually knows what a cult is. Depending on who’s using the word, a cult almost always refers to whatever religious group is not going along with whatever that person thinks a religion “should be doing.” The word itself originally just meant a group of people devoted to one specific person or thing. By that measure, every single religion on earth is a cult.

Because the Amish community is so deeply rooted in American history and is strongly Christian, they’ve escaped the cult pejorative. Even though the Amish may not be a cult in society’s eyes, they still fit a lot of its typical descriptions.

It’s important to be critical of religions, especially ones that try to control what you do and who you talk to. Even then, calling something a cult is warned against by a lot of experts today. Words like this usually only serve to alienate the community’s members from society, which is the exact thing that people calling them cultists are often trying to prevent. Telling someone that they’re crazy doesn’t usually help to convince them that they’re crazy – it convinces them that you’re a total jerk.

So, are Old-Order Amish communities often repressive and isolating? Absolutely. Is it extremely difficult to leave these communities if you’ve been born in them, even if you’re being mistreated? Yes. Do the Amish demonize pretty much anything from the outside, meaning that it’s more difficult for members to recognize abuse? True. Does this mean you should walk up to the next Amish person you see and start telling them they’re in a cult? Not in a million years.

Calling the Amish a cult, even if there was a real, defined meaning of the word “cult,” wouldn’t help at all. Telling anyone they’re in a cult wouldn’t help them, even if they were in the cultiest cult in the whole world. 

Knowing that these words don’t help anyone, the real solution to helping people in oppressive religious groups is to talk to them like they’re people. The real solution to helping everyone, Amish people included, is to remember that they’re just people who are trying to make sense of the world. The Amish aren’t in a cult because no one is in a cult; everyone is just trying to do what they believe is right.