Review: Reflections and Memories of an Amish Misfit by Mary Byler
Mary Byler’s new memoir (available here on Amazon) is the story of a survivor. It isn’t a story that’s often told. It’s not the story on glossy tourism adverts or in the ubiquitous romance novels, but the story of what it is like to be alone, to be a “nobody”, to be dismissed and unseen and unheard.
Today, Mary is heard.
In this memoir, Mary’s voice shines through as they tell pieces of their life as they recall.
When Mary asked me to read the new book and write a review, I felt like someone who’s the least qualified to know what they are talking about and what kind of world in which they lived. They bring us into a little glimpse of life as they experienced, with not only recollections but with poems and stories and vivid textures and patterns and colors.
Everyone who reads this book, however, is a foreigner to Mary’s world, even if you grew up in a similar culture. Yet, there are threads to this story that many will be able to connect to: being teased and bullied by other children, being unheard, being silenced for having born a woman and told you’re secondary to men because Adam was created first, having religion wielded as a rod of iron against you, witnessing the complicity and moral corruption in church communities that view themselves as true and holy and upright, experiencing violence for expressing a queer or non-conforming identity, and more.
It is a painful read. The stories stay with you. Interspersed with bright memories of things a lonely, traumatized child found comfort and joy in are raw and vivid accounts of not only of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse but of callousness and cruelty, deprivation and distress.
My Mem replied, “To forgive means he’s sorry and you can never talk about it. If you do, your sin may be as big, if not bigger, than his sin.”… My Mem encouraged me to forgive him and endorsed me sitting on his lap even after I told her of his abuse. I didn’t have the words then to describe that I was terrified of my dat and even when I talked about it no one would hear me.”
No one has a right to tell Mary Byler that they shouldn’t tell their story. They are telling us how it was, indeed only a little part of what it was. Yes, there are other stories that absolutely deserve to be told, but healthy Plain community experiences do not get to censor and drown out the growing voices of survivors.
As a Christian reading about what was done to Mary in the name of Jesus, this thought kept coming to mind, “Whatever you did to Mary Byler, you did to Jesus.” I wish I could say this to the face of the busloads of those who called themselves Christians and showed up at the trial to condemn them and support their abusers.
You may be confronted with the question, “Why?”. Why does such evil happen to children? Why did no one help when many had the opportunity to? Mary asked, time and time again, “why” — why did God allow this to happen when she tried and tried, prayed and prayed, cried and cried, obeyed and obeyed?
He directed my other brothers to hurt me in specific ways as he watched. I screamed, I begged, I prayed, I wore my kapp forward, I tried to obey always, I believed, I was submissive, I tried to always keep my dress down as my mem instructed and the preachers preached. Nothing worked. I was still at the mercy of this brother.
One thing that I’ve seen Mary passionately advocate for is changing that glossy picturesque narrative of idyllic Amish life. Why? Because there are real children who are the victims of this false narrative: they are dehumanized, made invisible, and silenced again and again by misconceptions, advertising and propaganda. Real cases, real victims, real court rooms, are directly affected.
This book isn’t trying to make us hate the Amish or believe them to be universally backward, unintelligent, or evil — quite the opposite. The point is that the Amish are humans, not objects, not specimens to be gawked at. There are real world implications to misrepresentation, especially to the most vulnerable. Mary is a passionate advocate for education and best practices.
As a scholar of literature and communication, I can identify what Mary describes in media and literary portrayals of the Amish as well as larger American stereotypes as parallel to “Orientalism”. That is, a group considered “Other” are stereotyped as intriguing, mysterious, childlike, and more. Individuals are not allowed to define for themselves who they are and what their culture and way of life means especially if it contradicts the dominant narrative. Outsiders have a curious fascination in the made-up caricature, to demonize and demean on one hand and simultaneously to be infatuated with the fantasy on the other. Wider America, especially in Lancaster county, profits from this narrative. Why grapple sexual abuse and let it come into the spotlight when the “big bucks” are at stake, when the “Amish” have become an extremely profitable brand?
If you watched “The Sins of the Amish”, this book is still very much a worthwhile read because the events recounted are concurrent yet different.
She was beautiful, and I decided I was going to grow up and marry her, or at least a woman like her. My dat then took me into the living quarters where I told dat and mem that I was going to marry a woman, then got hit with a belt.
This book does not stay within a neat box of what some consider “acceptable” — It will likely step on many toes. I hate that people inevitably ask if the portrayal was “balanced” or “just as positive as it described the negatives”, as if Mary Byler owes it to us to make us hungry for home-baked pie and wedding fried chicken and woo us with a bit of Amish romance. No, they do not owe that to anybody, not to the culture and not to the public. A story like this deserves to be heard for what it is.
I have heard various stories of friends who grew up in different Plain Anabaptist communities — friends who are queer, friends who are survivors of abuse, friends with positive memories, friends who find meaning in their Anabaptist heritage and friends who don’t. Each and every story is truly unique, and they only serve to illustrate the need to listen rather than to paint with broad brushes. I have learned and thought about incredibly important issues because of this book and I hope that you would read it too.
It is important to me to listen to Mary and other survivors as an “outsider Anabaptist” who has benefited and learned from many Anabaptist values and teachings. This book made me consider more deeply things that I appreciate and hold to be important, especially forgiveness and non-violence. If Jesus said that we should know things by their fruit, then we should be very serious about examining and reflecting on the implications of what we believe and if we are complicit in harming victims of abuse in any way. This is our moral and ethical responsibility based on our spiritual responsibility as Christians.
Echoing lessons Mary has taught me, I call on other members of the Anabaptist scholarly community to amplify the voices of abuse survivors. I call on the scholarly community, as Mary consistently has, to treat the Amish not as anthropological subjects but as people well capable of speaking for themselves. So much of Amish scholarship in particular is not only inaccurate, but actively harmful and unethical. At the end of the day, research must not be something we do to advance our own careers at the expense of people. I hope this book will be taken seriously by the scholarly community and that there will be fewer access barriers and greater representation of Amish and ex-Amish individuals in the future.
I believe there are wider implications for the Christian community at large. Perhaps it helps to bring an outsider voice to this conversation in that I recognize the same problems with abuse in so many religious forms around the world. Please do not think that this is some niche cultural or religious abnormality, and that the lessons we learn from Mary do not apply anywhere else. They are serious warnings we must absolute heed, change that we must bring about because if we do not, I truly believe that it would be better and do greater good for every church to shut down than for the sexual abuse of children to be enabled and hidden by these teachings — teachings that are diffused far and wide and that actively groom children. I believe the sentiment of Malachi 1:10 applies.
“Oh, that one of you would shut the temple doors, so that you would not light useless fires on my altar! I am not pleased with you,” says the LORD Almighty, “and I will accept no offering from your hands. (Malachi 1:10)
It is not just the Amish communities Mary describes who cultivate the “predator’s paradise” Mary exposes. Don’t let the cultural specificity be an excuse not to recognize the many similar problems and failings happening in many of our own backyards.
To this day, Mary still receives threats. Demons from the past take the form of abuse perpetuated and power exerted in whatever way possible. Some call the perpetrators of extreme abuse against Mary “godly” for maintaining the right outward forms of religion — a man who confessed to hundreds of r*pe incidents. Speaking out and pursuing justice for themself and others has been extremely costly for Mary and every survivor I know. Anyone who has a conscience, or a remote sense of right and wrong, cannot choose silence in the face of such evil.
I hope that this book will touch hearts and stir religious people, from any community, to action.
