A group of 16 men and women now known as the 'Bergholz barbers' terrorised and humiliated the small Amish community of Bergholz throughout 2011, shaving off the hair and beards of their victims in violent, late-night attacks.
The bizarre news quickly spread around the world, fuelling talk show jokes as well as serious reports.
‘I thought it was a joke, a prank of some kind,’ says Donald Kraybill, an expert on the Amish at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania. ‘I thought a reporter somewhere got it wrong. It was just so bizarre; I couldn’t believe it was true.’
The beard is a symbol of their ethnic identity. It’s a symbol of wisdom, influence, power and stature within the community.
The Amish, after all, are pacifists and in his recent book Renegade Amish: Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes, and the Trial of the Bergholz Barbers, Kraybill writes that ‘apart from beards, bonnets, and buggies, non-violence is a cardinal signature of Amish identity.’
‘That a band of supposedly pacifist Amish had assaulted their own people shattered all the Amish stereotypes in the popular imagination,’ he says.
Just how were the supposedly peaceful Bergholz residents transformed into violent attackers?
The answer, according to Kraybill, lies in the nature of the community itself.
‘The Bergholz Amish was a small, isolated Amish community. Its founder was Samuel Mullet. He started the community in 1995. He was soon selected as the minister, and then in 2001 became the bishop.’
‘He emphasised old traditions. He portrayed himself as being very strict and conservative in terms of the use of technology, and making sharp boundaries with the outside world.’
‘But underneath that he developed bizarre practices. He was autocratic. One summer he excommunicated eight or nine families without due process. They developed weird practices such as using paddles to spank and punish adults.’
‘They had so-called Amish jails, where they put people in small animal pens for several days in cold weather. All sorts of rituals like this, which were really completely contrary to basic, standard Amish practice.’
Related: The hairy history of the beard
Kraybill’s analysis begs the question—was the Bergholz Amish really Amish?
‘Many times the story is talked about as Amish-on-Amish violence. But my argument is that they gradually drifted away from the Amish faith.’
‘They call themselves Amish, they still drive horse and buggy, they wear Amish dress and they speak the Pennsylvania German dialect, but in terms of all their basic practices, they departed far away from the Amish world.’
Instead, Kraybill prefers to refer to the community as ‘renegade Amish’.
According to Kraybill, Mullet’s unconventional Amish practices laid the foundation for the humiliating attacks.
‘All the people who were victims of the attacks had been critical of the unorthodox ways he was operating the Bergholz community. He strongly disliked criticism. He envisioned himself as a prophet in the Old Testament, with a direct relationship with God. And so he was always right.’
Mullet began to encourage his followers to take action against his detractors. There were five separate attacks in total, three of which followed the same template.
‘They broke into their [victims’] houses at night,’ says Kraybill, ‘Took the people out of bed, and for the men cut their beards and cut their hair. There were several women that were also victims, but the primary victims were men—and the primary target was the beard.’
Two other attacks occurred inside the community, and involved the perpetrators luring outsiders—who had family members within Bergholz—into the community for a visit.
‘They guaranteed their safety, but after they were there, they jumped them, attacked them, and cut off their beards as well,' says Kraybill.
‘The hair is clearly a religious symbol, for the men and the women. The beard is a symbol of their ethnic identity. It’s a symbol of wisdom, influence, power and stature within the community.’
‘The Berholz barbers knew exactly what they were doing, and it was very clever of them to strike this very public symbol of Amish identity.’
Related: The new religious intolerance
Over the course of 2012 and 2013, Mullet and his accomplices were charged and convicted of a variety of offences—including committing a ‘hate crime’ under new federal legislation known as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
The legislation referred to two crimes, one in which a 21-year-old homosexual student was tortured and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming, and a second in which an African-American man was killed by white supremacists in Jasper, Texas.
The act makes it an offence to wilfully attempt or cause bodily injury to any person on the basis of their actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.
Mullet’s conviction was a historic one—the first hate crime found to have religious grounds. However, in August of this year, the conviction was overturned by an appellate court. The judges writing in the majority argued that the trial judge had erred in his instructions to the jury.
‘Here’s what the judge said to the jury: “You will need to determine whether religion was a significant motivating factor for these crimes.” And the appellate court majority said “Well, significant isn’t strong enough. There might have been three significant factors, or four significant factors. But to qualify for a hate crime, religion needed to be the dominant factor, the main factor, the primary factor,”’ Donald Kraybill explains.
‘This is no longer about Amish. It’s no longer about religion. It’s about how, precisely, that statute will be defined and applied in the future.’
The legal issue in question is central to determining the way in which the Shepard-Byrd Act will apply. Many commentators—including Kraybill and the trial judge in the Bergholz trial—have speculated that case could end up before the US Supreme Court, as the final authority on statutory interpretation.
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Even if this does not occur, the story of the Bergholz barber attacks has underscored the ambivalence with which mainstream Americans perceive the Amish.
‘They view them in positive ways as idyllic replicas of early American experience, and they admire them for the strength of their community and their courage to stick with their traditions,’ says Kraybill.
‘Yet, some people say they are self-righteous, or hypocritical. And so when an incident like this happens, some Americans take satisfaction in seeing them fall from grace.’
‘The mainstream Amish communities have been so embarrassed by the way this incident has tarnished their brand. Part of what my book does is vindicate the 290,000 devout Amish who would never do this sort of thing.’
As for Samuel Mullet, he remains incarcerated in a federal prison in Texas, serving a 15 year sentence for crimes related to the Bergholz beard-cutting incidents.
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