So, aren’t you afraid of the Amish moving in and imposing Ordnung law?

These peaceful-looking folks buy up large tracts of land, send their children to their own private schools, and even speak a strange tongue among themselves. It won’t be very long until they ban automobiles, require all women to wear bonnets, mandate beards for men, and pressure everyone to buy their discounted quilts. It’s clearly part of their long game.

If that mix of real Amish religious practice and wild extrapolation sounds completely ridiculous, good. That said, this is what propagandists do all of the time.

Anabaptist radicals—the forebearers of Amish—once aggressively seized control of the German city of Münster in 1534–1535. They established a violent theocracy, practiced polygamy, executed religious opponents, and even drove thousands of Lutherans and Catholics out into a freezing snowstorm. It is a historic episode that ended in horrific bloodshed. After defeat, the survivors gathered at the Bocholt Conference in 1536 and chose not a full rejection of violence, but only a tactical pause—force was futile “for the time being.”

Imagine someone using that bloody 16th-century event today to argue that modern Amish families, purchasing farmland in central Pennsylvania or across Ohio are secretly just biding their time, growing their numbers, and simply waiting for the perfect moment to strike and impose strict religious regulations. We’d call it fear-mongering and absurd—and rightly so.

None of us would seriously worry about Amish Ordnung (community rules) being imposed on ordinary Americans. There’s no will, capability, or realistic pathway to do so.

In the United States, religious communities have long maintained their own schools, arbitration systems, and customs. Orthodox Jewish Beth Din courts and various Christian panels are operated legally, protected by the First Amendment and always subordinate to national and state law. The Amish aren’t coming for your car or your clean shaven appearance.

The Selective Sharia Panic

That brings us to Sharia.

For many, this is treated as a real and imminent threat—no-go zones, creeping theocracy, city blocks under Islamic law. The irony is thick. The loudest promoters of the “Sharia takeover” narrative often trace back to networks tied to pro-Israel advocacy, as well as major defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman). Figures and foundations pushing this perspective have functioned, in effect, as part of a sustained effort to maintain a boogeyman that justifies forever wars and interventionism.

Whether the fear is genuine or manufactured, the U.S. Constitution is more than sufficient to block any religious code from overriding secular law. I’m far more concerned about domestic elites—lobbyists, intelligence agencies, and the entrenched interests with real power to buy politicians and shape narratives—than about hypothetical theocracies in the American heartland. On Sharia itself, certain elements (such as the ban on usury) could even offer lessons for breaking cycles of debt slavery. At minimum, we should respect those who reject having our own exploitative financial and cultural systems imposed on them.

The Christian standard remains: treat others as you wish to be treated. Lead by the attractive power of example and love, not through bombs or domination.

Europe’s Demographic Reality

Europe faces a genuine transformation. Muslims currently make up roughly 7-8% of Europe’s population. However, while alarmist projections of a Muslim-majority continent in decades—all assume unchanging high fertility that the data contradicts. It is true Muslim immigrant fertility (around 2.6 children per woman) exceeds native rates (around 1.6), but this drops sharply by the second generation.  Assimilation?

In fact, the fastest voluntary fertility declines in modern recorded history have occurred in stable Muslim-majority countries: Iran, UAE, Tunisia, Oman, and Bangladesh.  Peace, female education, and general economic development lower birth rates across cultures—just as they do in the West.

Europe’s core problem is not invasion but its own fertility collapse well below replacement. Aging societies need workers to sustain economies and welfare systems.  Immigration is filling a vacuum created by native demographic decline.

What drives the migration waves?  Decades of destabilization—wars, regime changes, sanctions, and proxy conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. NATO’s intervention in Libya (Hillary Clinton’s “We came, we saw, he died” cackling) turned a viable country into a source of slave markets and refugees. The pattern is consistent: create chaos abroad, then face the human consequences at home. Neo-cons often cheer destruction overseas while panicking about the resulting flows.

Conflict and poverty keep fertility higher simply as a survival strategy.

Stability is the best contraceptive.

Ending endless interventions—the trillion-dollar wars, support for destabilization covert action, and regime-change cycles—would reduce the pressure to migrate. Sovereign nations should govern themselves. Saddam would’ve happily sold us oil. Iran’s original sin in Western eyes included rejecting a CIA-backed coup against its elected secular leader. Nations we’ve harmed have often shown more pragmatic forgiveness than expected when we finally stop killing their people and taking their resources.

This approach won’t magically reverse Europe’s native birth-rate collapse or cultural self-doubt, which predates recent immigration. But it would ease the crisis, allow more selective policies, and let more people thrive at home: Syrians in Syria, Palestinians to be free again on their ancestral land, and Europeans preserving their heritage without perpetual emergency.

Global diversity’s viability ultimately requires reciprocity—ending systems of domination and apartheid everywhere, allowing resource-rich countries to benefit their own populations, and fostering mutual respect over war propaganda. Second- and third-generation immigrants adopt the low-fertility patterns of developed societies. Prosperity and stability are self-correcting.

Fearing the Amish by dredging up Münster is absurd. Painting every Muslim as part of some monolithic conquest is equally so—and also is conveniently profitable for certain interests.

The real threats are internal cultural decay and the foreign policies that export chaos, and then import its victims. The saner path is to seek peace abroad and then spiritual renewal at home: lead by competence, example, and vitality of faith rather than fear and bombs.

Learning the Münster Lesson

Amish have learned, maybe through the error of their less peaceful Anabaptist forebearers, that it is better to farm than fight.  They have a greater strength than their numbers through rejection of violence than they do through arms.  We are not set free by our militarism or aggressive posture—we are bound to the military-industrial complex and state of propaganda.  A moment of real and true honest introspection may spare us a world of future pain.  Maybe we’re not those blameless heroes we imagine ourselves to be?