ABSTRACT
The Plain People adhere to a sense of personal responsibility, which translates into altogether different measures of value. In sum, the negative and positive lessons of twentieth-century America suggest that a sustainable rural community and a subsistence farm economy can survive in democratic society only within a strong religious context. Indeed, it is the Plain People of the late 1990s, living on subsistence farms, that almost alone among Americans continued to show high levels of community-wide fertility. Doctrinal opposition to the use of birth control has combined with the fact that a large number of children "are an asset to the Amish farm economy" to produce families averaging between seven and nine children. The difference is that the Plain People refuse to apply the coercive power of the state to achieve their ends. To the contrary, they rely on voluntary adherence to the community by their members, the purposeful socialization of their children, and the application of informal social controls.
