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Do Amish and Mennonite girls get to pick their husbands?

 I grew up in a plain hybrid Amish/Mennonite community in Michigan that was part of a larger church in Pennsylvania called Charity Christian Fellowship. People did not date in these plain religious communities. Instead, they did something called courtship or courting.   My first personal interaction with this process was when my favorite big brother decided to marry when I was seven years old. The first thing he did was go to our Father and ask what he thought about the young lady from the church he’d been praying about getting to know better.  Our father gave his blessing and went to go visit the young lady’s father to inquire if he was open to marrying his daughter to my brother. Her father gave his blessing and said he’d ask her if she was open to entering a courtship with my brother with the goal of marriage within 6 months.  She said YES when her father asked and their courtship officially began.  My brother and now dear sister-in-law were made fo...
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Why can't Amish dolls have faces?

 Yes, it is true. Amish children can’t have toys with faces. This is because they think it is idolatry. Now, this is easy to hear and go “wow that is crazy” and then slip through the other ear. Yet, what is the more profound psychological impact of growing up with faceless dolls? A world where when you “make believe” to care for another human, that human was faceless?  

A lack of identity is fundamental to the Amish and plain communities. A person in these communities is never an individual. They are a human that has been patterned through corporal punishment (starting in infanthood - 6 months) to be uniform and reflect who they were told to be to avoid enteral damnation.   

My family was Charity which is a cross between Amish and Mennonite churches. We were allowed to have dolls with faces. However, numerous families within our network of plain churches were either still Amish or formally Amish and still maintained it was idolatry for dolls to have faces. 

One of my homemade childhood dolls made by the family midwife 

I still ever so clearly recall going over to dinner with another family and the prevailing feeling of sadness that came over to find they ate raisins in their apple pies, which more often than not also meant their dolls would have no faces. Perhaps that is just an antidotal personal observation. Yet, as a major food lover, it is something that has always stuck in my mind (and yes… I do greatly detest raisins in apple pies). 

Do you think I read too far into the symbolism of faceless dolls when connecting to the societal values of uniformitarianism and group thinking in the Amish and plain communities?  

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