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Japanese Some Amish drink alcohol, but far less than their neighbors, and Amish churches discourage it. Practice differs by affiliation: New Order Amish churches set out to end drinking, while surveys in Ohio find some Amish adults who drink. Wine is served at Amish communion, and most reported heavy drinking is among young people before baptism.
Are the Amish allowed to drink alcohol?
There is no single Amish rule. Each church district follows its own Ordnung, the rules its members agree to keep, and the Old Order, New Order, Swartzentruber and other affiliations draw their lines in different places. The authors of a 2011 study of diet among the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, and their neighbors summed up the general position: “Although no foods are prohibited in the Amish culture, alcohol consumption is strongly discouraged.”
Their survey of 134 Amish and 154 non-Amish adults bore that out. The Amish drank significantly less, and 85 percent of Amish women had never drunk alcohol, against 60 percent of non-Amish women. The authors cite a survey of 400 Amish adults from the late 1980s that also found lower rates of drinking among the Amish.
The New Order Amish, who separated from Old Order churches in the 1960s and early 1970s, made drinking one of the issues of the split. The historian G. C. Waldrep names tobacco, alcohol and bed courtship as the disputed practices, and writes that differences over technology were secondary at the time. New Order churches oppose drinking and smoking, and they also discourage the wilder forms of Rumspringa.
Do the Amish use wine at communion?
Yes. Amish churches hold communion twice a year, in autumn and spring, in a service that lasts about eight hours and includes, in the words of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, “the commemoration of Christ’s death with bread and wine.” The Dordrecht Confession of 1632, which the Amish affirm, says that the Lord Jesus “instituted it with bread and wine.” At the Last Supper Jesus gave his disciples the cup and said, “Drink ye all of it,” calling it “this fruit of the vine” (Matthew 26:27, 29).
Do Amish youth drink during Rumspringa?
Some do. In many communities Rumspringa is a period of greater freedom for Amish youth, boys more than girls, before they are baptized and join the church. Because they are not baptized, they are not yet under the authority of the church. Many keep to traditional Amish ways. The Young Center writes that the more rebellious groups of youth “sometimes drive cars, rent buildings for parties, or go to bars and nightclubs in nearby towns,” and that “Sometimes rebellious youth act out and abuse alcohol or use drugs.”
Practice varies widely. According to the Young Center, a wild Rumspringa “is virtually unknown in some smaller settlements and in certain affiliations,” and it is suppressed among many New Order groups. The Amish Youth Vision Project works to reduce alcohol and drug use among Old Order youth, and the Amish community holds primary responsibility for running it. A 2010 paper by C. Weber, J. A. Cates and S. Carey in the Journal of Groups in Addiction & Recovery described a drug and alcohol intervention with Old Order Amish youth.
What does the Bible say about drinking?
The New Testament condemns drunkenness. Paul wrote, “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18), and he listed drunkenness alongside “Envyings, murders” and “revellings,” warning “that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:21). A baptized Amish member who breaks the church’s rules and will not confess can be placed on probation and, in the end, excommunicated and shunned.
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