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Summary
- Amish and Quakers are confused because both were called Plain people and both refuse to fight. They come from different countries, centuries and convictions.
- The Amish are Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptists, formed when Jakob Ammann split from the wider Mennonite community in 1693 over whether members under the ban should be shunned in daily life.
- Quakers began in England in the 1650s around George Fox, who concluded that God speaks directly to every person without clergy, buildings or sacraments. The name was originally an insult.
- They share three substantial things: refusal to fight, refusal to swear oaths (Matthew 5:34), and an original commitment to plainness — which the Quakers largely abandoned in the nineteenth century.
- They differ on separation. The Amish withdraw from wider society; Quakers went further into it, with long records in abolition and prison reform, and a shared Nobel Peace Prize in 1947.
Bibliography (Click to show)
Sources: standard histories of Anabaptism and of the Religious Society of Friends for the 1693 Ammann division, George Fox and the origin of the Quaker name, and the abandonment of plain dress among Friends in the nineteenth century. The Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. Scripture quotations from the NIV via BibleGateway (Matthew 5:34; Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 6:14).
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