Do the Amish Get Circumcised? Some Do, but Not as a Religious Rite

Some Amish boys are circumcised, but not as a religious rite. No Amish confession or church rule calls for circumcision, and the few scholarly sources that mention it treat it as a decision for parents, their doctor or their midwife. No study has measured how many Amish men are circumcised.

Is circumcision part of the Amish religion?

No. The Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College names baptism and communion as the two important religious rituals of Amish life. Candidates for baptism review the eighteen articles of the Dordrecht Confession of Faith, a Dutch Anabaptist confession of 1632 that the Amish affirm. It covers baptism, the Lord’s Supper, foot washing, marriage and church discipline, and it does not mention circumcision. Neither does Mennonite Church USA’s Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective.

The Amish and the Mennonites share an Anabaptist origin and have been separate groups since 1693. Anabaptists baptize adults who choose to join the church, not infants. When Menno Simons, the former Catholic priest whose followers became the Mennonites, looked for grounds for infant baptism, the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger pointed him to circumcision, which God’s covenant with Abraham required for boys at eight days old (Genesis 17:12). Menno rejected the argument. Bullinger, he wrote, “directed me to the Old Covenant and circumcision. This, as well, I found incapable of being substantiated by Scripture.”

In the New Testament the question of circumcision for Christians was settled at the council in Jerusalem. Some teachers had said, “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1), and the council ruled “that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God” (Acts 15:19). Paul wrote, “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God” (1 Corinthians 7:19), and “in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love” (Galatians 5:6).

How common is circumcision among the Amish?

No one knows. No published study has counted circumcised Amish men, and the scholarly record is thin. A 1968 study of cervical cancer among the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, by H. E. Cross and colleagues in the journal Cancer, reported that according to physicians who had practiced in the community for many years, “few Amish were circumcised until recently.” The observation came from local doctors, not from a count of Amish men, and it suggests that the practice was already changing by the 1960s.

Natalie Jolly, who spent two years studying Amish midwifery and home birth, describes in her 2007 Penn State dissertation a midwife who “felt very strongly about the issue of circumcision and encouraged Amish families not to circumcise their boys.” In her account the question belongs to each family, and a midwife could advise either way.

That fits Amish practice in medicine generally. The Young Center says that “There are no explicit religious prohibitions against certain types of medicine,” and that the use of modern medicine “varies greatly from family to family and group to group.” Old Order, New Order, Swartzentruber and other Amish affiliations each follow their own Ordnung, the rules of the church district, and medical choices differ among families within each. Circumcision may therefore be more common in some settlements than in others, but no study has compared them.

Related reading

• Amish religious practices
• How the Amish and Jews compare
• How the Amish and Mennonites are related