Fancy Dutch

The term Fancy Dutch or Gay Dutch[1] refers to the Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania Germans) who do not belong to the Anabaptist churches.[2] Unlike the Amish, the conservative Dunkards, or Old Order Mennonites, they do not wear plain clothing, nor do they refuse to fight in wars. Many popularly associated characteristics of Pennsylvania Dutch culture, including spielwerk, hex signs,[3] and other aspects of Pennsylvania Dutch art, music, and folklore, are derived from the Fancy Dutch. The tourism industry and mainstream media often erroneously attribute such contributions to the more conservative Plain Dutch, though they would reject these aspects of their more worldly Fancy counterparts.

For most of the 19th century, the Fancy Dutch far outnumbered the Plain groups among the Pennsylvania Dutch. But since the two World Wars and the subsequent suppression of the German language in the US, as well as socioeconomic trends generally, there was substantial pressure on the Pennsylvania Germans to assimilate. All the while, the Amish population has grown, especially in recent decades. Thus, today most Pennsylvania German speakers are members of Plain groups, while the Fancy Dutch have mostly been assimilated into the larger Euro-American ethnic culture of the United States and no longer present a distinct ethnic separateness. This fact contributes to the widespread misunderstanding in the 21st century whereby the term Pennsylvania Dutch is misinterpreted to be synonymous with the Plain Folk. While Plain Dutch communities are centered on Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and Holmes County, Ohio, the Fancy Dutch or their descendants live in the countryside surrounding Reading, Allentown, York and Lebanon. Most of their descendants are now assimilated with the larger Euro-American culture and speak English principally and often exclusively, no longer speaking the Pennsylvania Dutch language on any daily or fluent basis.[4]

Fancy Dutch people were traditionally mostly of Lutheran and Reformed church congregations (non-sectarians), and they were therefore also often called Church Dutch or Church people, as distinguished from so-called sectarians (Anabaptist plain people),[4] along the lines of a high church/low church distinction. The former tradition among Anglo-American Pennsylvanians of ethnic prejudice against the Pennsylvania Dutch, whereby the stereotypes of "the stubborn Dutchman" or "the dumb Dutchman" were the butt of ethnic jokes in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, was never specific to the Plain Folk; most of the Pennsylvania Dutch people in those centuries were Church Dutch. The prejudice is now mostly a fossil of the past, the subject of consciously clichéd jokes rather than true spite or discord ("laughing with rather than laughing at"), now that assimilation is widespread. Just as Fancy Dutch or their descendants no longer speak the Pennsylvania Dutch language with any regularity (or at all, in many cases), these assimilated German-Americans today, like the rest of the mainstream culture, are not necessarily religious anymore, meaning that calling them "Church Dutch" is no longer particularly apt, although even among those that no longer regularly attend any church, many remain cultural Christians.