An Amish Sin (First Snow Productions, Barbara Lieberman Productions, Amish Pictures, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 30) I watched the last two in a cycle of four Lifetime movies about Amish people: Expecting Amish, An Amish Murder, An Amish Sin and last night’s featured “premiere,” Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story. An Amish Sin, the first I saw, was surprisingly good. It was based on the real-life experience of Joanna Yoder, who grew up not among the Amish but in a similar “Plain” community called the Mennonites. (Both are surviving branches of the original Anabaptists, a group of ultra-hardcore Protestants who split off from mainstream Lutheranism early in the Reformation period.) As a teenager, Yoder was allegedly raped by a fellow Mennonite, and instead of supporting her the church covered it up and accused her of “tempting” her rapist. I’m not sure just how closely the film follows Yoder’s real-life experience – though my source for background was an interview Yoder herself gave the Nashville Tennessean (https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2022/11/16/lifetime-movie-an-amish-sin-joanna-yoder-advocates-for-mennonite-communities/69646584007/), she didn’t go into the details of just what happened to her – but An Amish Sin, directed by Michael Nankin and co-written by him and Barbara Nance, is a quite remarkable film.

I looked up the Wikipedia page on the Amish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish) and found that there are quite a few different sects of Amish; all reject the use of telephones and motor vehicles but differ on how much other modern technology they also ban. Amish communities speak a language commonly called “Pennsylvania Dutch” but which has more in common with modern German than modern Dutch (though there are different variations of “Pennsylvania Dutch” in different Amish communities, and after World War I and the forcible suppression of German as “the enemy’s language” through much of the U.S. many Amish communities adopted English as a second language). Amish people are governed by a strict code of conduct called the Ordnung (German for “order”) and are required to recite it from memory at least twice a year. Because Amish people reject so much modern technology, it’s estimated that the personal carbon footprint of an Amish person is one-quarter or less than that of an ordinary American. Most Americans think of the Amish as a relatively benign group of eccentrics - there are even tourists, shown in this film, who take trips to Amish country just to gawk at them and their rejection of cars and telephones - but An Amish Sin portrays them as a kind of Christian version of the Taliban, fearful of human sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular.

The heroine of An Amish Sin, Rachel Albrecht (Dylan Ratzlaff, in a stunning performance of a conflicted and highly complex character), is clandestinely molested by her uncle Iddo (Micah Steinke) starting at age eight, when he reaches under the collective dinner table and starts fingering her under her dress. Rachel grows up committed to the Amish faith but also worried that her transgressive thoughts – particularly about a hot young man named Nate (Khobe Clark) who lives on the Amish farm but has thoughts of escape to the outside world – are going to get not only her but her entire family doomed to hell. (The Amish are very big on collective guilt.) The film opens with Rachel’s baptism day at age 18 – the ceremony in which according to Amish tradition you reject the rest of the world and commit to the church for the rest of your life. Rachel has the dim sense of a broader and more interesting world that her status as an Amish is excluding her from, but what decides her to make her break from the church is when Iddo lures her to the barn, ostensibly to gather eggs, but when she picks up an egg and Iddo declares it “broken,” he smashes it against her face. Then he outright rapes her in the barn. Rachel goes to her father Levi (Troy Mundle), but far from supporting or believing her, he chews her out for “tempting” Iddo and beats her almost literally within an inch of her life. Rachel’s mother Anna (Camryn Macdonald) suggests that Rachel should marry Iddo (also a belief in extremist Muslim cultures like Afghanistan and Iran that a woman should be forced to marry the man who raped her to make her sexuality “respectable” in the eyes of Allah), and Rachel plots her first escape attempt.

Unfortunately, as she’s stealing the community’s petty cash fund to finance her run for it, her mom catches her and she’s sent to the Amish equivalent of a “reparative therapy” camp, where she’s told to do penance and forbidden to wear shoes. She escapes anyway and manages to make it to a nearby city, where she’s taken in by Grace (Rukiya Bernard), an art photographer whom Rachel met previously while she was out in Amish community taking pictures of the local Amish as part of a series she’s doing on people looked down on by outsiders. Grace has a live-in boyfriend whom Rachel encounters naked, or nearly so, in Grace’s hallway one morning. She’s also friends with Nate, who comes over one night and tries to force Rachel to have sex with him – he’s long had the hots for her – and Nankin and Nance do a great job paralleling her victimization at home by Iddo and her near-victimization by Nate (she’s saved from a second rape by Grace’s timely arrival and intervention). One other thing Nankin and Nance do right is superbly dramatize the culture shock Rachel is in as she faces the non-Amish world for the first time. It’s a symbol of how different the worlds are and how much less trusting the non-Amish world is that the first time she sees Grace, Grace has to unlock a white sliding security gate to let Rachel in because “it’s a bad neighborhood.” Despite the initial culture shock, Rachel seems to be taking quite well to life outside the Amish until the community’s minister (Eugene Lipinski) visits her at Grace’s and tells Rachel that her mother is in the hospital dying of heart disease.

At first I thought it was just a trick to lure her back to the Amish community and force her into another round of “conversion therapy,” but her mom is genuinely ill and on her deathbed she tells Rachel that she once thought of leaving, too, before she decided to remain with the Amish and marry Rachel’s dad. After mom’s death Rachel returns to the Amish but finds an old journal her mom had kept which revealed she had real talent as both a writer and an artist. At an Amish church meeting Rachel announces that she has sinned, not by leaving the Amish community at all but by sneaking away from it in the dark instead of walking out of her own volition and in full view of the Amish members. She gets a ride back to the city from her friend Nate, though in a genuinely surprising “twist” Nate has decided to return to the Amish and accept baptism. Nate tells her that there’s one thing she needs to do before turning her back on Amishdom forever: he drives her to the police station and sends her in to report Iddo’s rape of her. The film closes back in Amishland, where local sheriff’s deputies arrest Iddo for raping Rachel and the minister for helping cover up the crime. Most of the imdb.com reviews of An Amish Sin expressed disappointment that the film supposedly did little to dramatize its themes – the spirit-crushing regimen cults in general impose on those unlucky enough to be in their grasp and the difficulty in leaving a group that not only excludes you from most of modern life but keeps you intimidated into believing that if you dissent you could be condemning not only yourself but your entire family to hell – but I thought it was a brilliant piece of filmmaking that fully rose to and embraced the challenges of its story.