Can the Amish Get Divorced? No, Their Church Forbids It

No. Amish churches forbid their members to seek a divorce or to remarry while a husband or wife is still living, and a member who does either faces excommunication and shunning. Unhappy couples sometimes separate instead. Divorce does happen now and then, but no study has measured how often.

Why the Amish do not divorce

The Amish take their teaching on marriage from the words of Jesus. When the Pharisees asked him whether a man could put away his wife for any reason, he answered from Genesis that husband and wife become one flesh, and added: “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). In Mark’s Gospel he tells the disciples: “Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery” (Mark 10:11–12).

The Dordrecht Confession of 1632, the statement of faith that Amish candidates for baptism still study, describes marriage as “an honorable state of matrimony, of two free, believing persons,” as God ordained it in Paradise with Adam and Eve. It says that Christ set aside the abuses of marriage that had crept in “and referred all to the original order.” The confession also asks members to marry “in the Lord,” that is, only another baptized member of the church.

The confession does not discuss divorce directly. The rule comes from each congregation’s Ordnung, the mostly unwritten regulations that members promise to keep when they are baptized. According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, most Amish groups forbid “initiating divorce,” along with owning cars, attending high school and college, and joining the military. The earliest Anabaptists allowed divorce for adultery, following the exception Jesus makes in Matthew 19:9. The Amish rule as the Young Center describes it makes no such exception, and in the 1950s Old Order Amish churches did not accept divorced and remarried people into membership.

What happens if an Amish person divorces?

Baptism is the decisive step. Amish young people usually join the church between 18 and 21, and the vow they make binds them to the church’s rules for life. A baptized member who breaks the rules and refuses to confess is first placed on probation and then, if still unrepentant, excommunicated by a vote of the congregation. Shunning usually follows. Its form varies from one affiliation to another, but members typically will not eat at the same table as the person, or accept rides or goods from them. A person who confesses can be received back into the church.

Someone who leaves before baptism has made no vow and is not shunned. The rules on divorce therefore bind only church members.

The Ordnung forbids a member to initiate a divorce, but a divorce can still come about when one spouse leaves the church. The one who has left can obtain a civil divorce and remarry under civil law. The spouse who stays Amish is still considered married and may not remarry while the other is alive, a position that follows Jesus’ teaching on remarriage after divorce.

Do Amish couples separate?

Sometimes. The Young Center notes that “some marriages sour” among the Amish, as in any community, and that only occasionally do Amish couples divorce. When a marriage fails, a couple may live apart without divorcing, which matches Paul’s instruction to the Corinthians: “Let not the wife depart from her husband: But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife” (1 Corinthians 7:10–11). Until the mid-20th century, Anabaptist and Mennonite churches generally allowed separation, whether arranged privately or through the courts, while permitting divorce only for adultery, if at all.

No reliable figures exist for Amish divorce or separation. The Young Center states that there are no systematic studies that would allow the Amish to be compared with other groups on such problems, so any published “Amish divorce rate” is a guess.

Can the Amish remarry if a spouse dies?

Yes. Paul wrote that a wife “is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39). Widowed Amish men and women often remarry, to another church member. Older widows and widowers sometimes marry for companionship, and some remarriages join two large families into one.

Do the Amish practice polygamy?

No. Amish marriage is between one man and one woman, the pattern of “two free, believing persons” that the Dordrecht Confession traces to Adam and Eve, and the Amish have never practiced polygamy. The idea usually comes from confusing them with other religious groups. The one Anabaptist group known to have taken up plural marriage, the radicals who held the German city of Münster in 1534 and 1535, was a short-lived outlier that other Anabaptists rejected. The Amish formed their own group in 1693, more than 150 years later.

Related reading

• Do the Amish get marriage licenses?
• Is remarrying after divorce a sin?
• Divorce in Christianity: what are the biblical grounds?
• Amish religious practices