Susan Trollinger is Professor of English at the University of Dayton. Among other publications, she is the author of Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia (Johns Hopkins, 2012). She is also co-author (with William Trollinger) of Righting America at the Creation Museum (Johns Hopkins, 2016), and “Is Resistance Proving to be Futile?: The Amish Amidst the Advance of Fundamentalism,” in Rhetoric and Religion as Resources for Resistance, ed. William Duffy (Peter Lang, 2025).

Here is Susan Trollinger’s NPR podcast: Weaponizing Amish Culture. And below is our interview with Sue.

1. How did you – a woman who grew up in a thoroughly secular family in the exurbs of Chicago – end up spending thirty years studying and writing about Amish Country Tourism?
   • I like writing about puzzles—things that, on the face of them, just don’t make sense. In the summer of 1996, I lived with my then-in-laws in Walnut Creek, OH—one of the three central tourist towns in one of the country’s largest Amish settlements. I thought that the draw for the millions of tourists who visited the settlement every year was the plain and simple life of the Amish. But what I saw on offer in the main tourist towns was anything but plain and simple. Walnut Creek was all about a Victorian aesthetic with lots of lace, elaborate tea sets, and Thomas Kincaid prints. Berlin was all about craft malls (selling quilts made in China), antique malls, and all manner of clutter. Sugarcreek showcased a manufactured Swiss theme with a giant cuckoo clock and a Swiss festival featuring Swiss-costumed yodelers, a parade starring a Swiss queen, and guys blowing alphorns and throwing boulders. What has any of that to do with the Amish, I wondered. It took me 15 years to figure that out.
2. Your first book was Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2012. In a paragraph, could you explain the book’s title?
   • My book is about how the Amish get figured in Amish Country tourism as the guarantor of authenticity in a made-up world that invites tourists to enjoy a fantasy of an American life that never existed.  I borrow from the theoretical insight of my sister, Barbara Biesecker, about nostalgia for a future. In the book, I argue that Amish Country tourism is not about remembering a perfect past. It is about projecting onto the future an imagined way of being that never was—a life in which gender is simple (it’s obvious who the guys are and who the gals are), gender roles are complementary and easy, women have plenty of time to produce comforting home-cooked meals, men spend their days engaged in productive and satisfying masculine labor, patriarchy rules, and White people are dominant. In this tourist economy, the Amish (supposed relics of the past) bring an apparent legitimacy to this fantasy. They seem to embody all of the components of the fantasy. They make it seem as if such a fantasy can be achieved, especially if you buy the right cookbook, or a woman’s devotional Bible, or 1950’s retro-style toaster (all for sale in Amish Country). 
3. Two years ago you were invited to give a conference presentation on Amish country tourism today — a paper which really was an update of Selling the Amish. For that paper you revisited the tourist towns of Holmes County, Ohio. Can you briefly describe what you found in your first morning of research, and how did this make you feel?
   • For Selling the Amish I interviewed shop owners, observed tourist behavior, and took thousands of photographs of merchandise in shops, restaurants, and museums aimed at tourists. But after the book came out, I shifted my focus. I gave talks around the state of Ohio for the Ohio Humanities Council on the Amish (and their profound economic shift from being an agrarian people to being an entrepreneurial people who excel at  business). I also teach a course at the University of Dayton on the visual rhetoric of fundamentalism and the Amish. With the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Core program, and the English Department, I have taken my students once a year to the Amish settlement in eastern Ohio for a day. We didn’t go to tourist sites. With the help of Shelly (who owns Heartland Group Tours) we visited a New Order Amish school, a candle shop owned by five unmarried Old Order Amish sisters, and a Swartzentruber Amish farm (they are among the most tradition-minded Amish—no windshields or slow-moving signs on their buggies), finishing the day with dinner in an Old Order Amish home. 
   • All this is to say that for perhaps a decade I didn’t visit those tourist shops. And then for this conference presentation I returned. I was shocked. White Christian nationalism is everywhere: personal beverage containers in the shape of bullets, coffee mugs listing various calibers of guns with the quote “All faster than dialing 911,” and Christian crosses with images of the American flag superimposed on them. The Amish are pacifists. They won’t go to war. Sure, they own guns for purposes of hunting, but they don’t think that “the second amendment is [their] gun permit.” The disjuncture between who the Amish have been and how they are figured today in the context of Amish Country tourism by white Christian nationalism is nothing short of stunning. 
4. In response to your Conversation article on this topic a reader commented: “I am having trouble getting my mind around the guns/patriotic merchandise. Are the Amish making money from the merchandise or do non-Amish own the stores and sell it? I would think the community would draw the line.” How do you respond?
   • None of the stores that I visited in the three central tourist towns selling this kind of merchandise are owned by Amish. The Amish certainly supply stores and restaurants in these towns with baked goods, jams and preserves, fresh produce, furniture, and so forth. But, to my knowledge, the Amish are not making wood crosses with images of the American flag superimposed upon them or signs claiming that the Second Amendment is “my gun permit.” The shops selling White Christian nationalist merchandise tend to be owned by Mennonites and non-Mennonites who have embraced Protestant fundamentalism and/or evangelicalism and who go to trade shows to learn the latest retail trends for shops aimed at the kinds of tourists who make up the largest contingent of visitors to Amish Country: White middle Americans. 
5. While your scholarship is not limited to the Amish – among other things, you have co-authored Righting America at the Creation Museum (John Hopkins, 2016) – you continue to write on the Amish. Could you briefly describe the article that is coming out later this year? 
   • When Bill and I visited the Creation Museum for the first time, we were taken aback by much that we encountered: animatronic T-Rexes playing alongside animatronic children (and not eating them), culture war narratives in which White evangelical Christians are persecuted while mainline Protestant Christians raise children who become drug and video gaming addicts, and mini dioramas depicting God’s global Flood slaughtering all but eight human beings – Answers in Genesis posits that there may have been as many as twenty billion people on Earth at the time of the Flood – because the rest, including the unborn, were so sinful that God had to exterminate them. 
   • Also present at the museum were a group of Old Order Amish (and, in fact, there have been Amish present virtually every time we have visited the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter). What? Taking the Lord’s Prayer absolutely seriously, the Amish forgave (almost immediately) a man who intended to sexually abuse Amish girls in a one-room school house in West Nickel Mines, PA and then shot and killed almost all of them before killing himself. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” If the Amish are to be forgiven their sins, they reason, they must forgive the sins of others. That being so, how could they possibly worship the extraordinarily vengeful God of  young-Earth creationism? 
   • Bill and I have written an article about the influence of creationism and evangelicalism/fundamentalism on the Amish. For about a century, the wisdom was that modern technology— the tractor, radio, telephone, and television – would bring an end to the Amish. The Amish would simply not be able to resist such technologies. Soon the Amish would connect to the electrical grid, and purchasing automobiles would shortly follow. But the smart prognosticators had it wrong. The Amish are not plugged into the grid. And they remain committed to the horse and buggy (along with e-bikes). 
   • That said, it turns out that evangelicalism/fundamentalism and young Earth creationism have found a foothold among certain Amish groups. Fundamentalism can seem like serious Christianity—a Christianity that takes the Bible seriously, which is to say literally. Our argument (coming out soon as an article in a collection of essays on rhetoric, religion, and resistance) is that while the assumed great threat to Amish life has been modern technology, it seems that this threat might be eclipsed by modern Protestant theology in the form evangelicalism and fundamentalism, which challenge Amish centuries-old commitments and practices from the inside, convincing Amish that their historical Christian witness pales in comparison to the “authenticity” of White evangelicalism/fundamentalism and young-Earth creationism.
   • As David Weaver-Zercher tells the story so well, Americans have had a long and deep investment in the Amish (for good and for ill) to either make them over in their own image or demonize them. Looks like the former is well underway in Amish Country these days. May the Amish find a way to remain wonderfully other.