The North Country has a growing and robust Amish community, particularly in the St. Lawrence Valley, so this story — reported most recently by NPR — caught my eye.

In Amish country in Ohio, there has been an outbreak of a particular kind of violence:  beard cutting.

On the night of Oct. 4, Myron and Arlene Miller were asleep in their home in Mechanicstown, Ohio, when they heard a knock on the door. According to their friend Bob Comer, when Myron came downstairs, he found five men standing on his doorstep.

“They pulled him out in the front yard, and they have scissors and a battery-powered shaver and everything,” Comer says. “They’re trying to hold him down and cut his beard off and cut his hair off.”

Miller yelled at his wife to call 911. Then the men let him go and ran back to the trailer and had the driver take off, Comer says.

Myron Miller, who declined an interview, was left with a ragged beard: a shameful state for an Amish man.

“The beard for Amish men is a symbol of their adult manhood,” says Donald Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College and author of several books about the Amish, including Amish Grace and Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites.

There have been no reports of similar incidents in the North Country.

So here’s one of those biases that journalists are supposed to keep carefully tucked away in the backs of their minds:  I’m kind of disgusted by doomsayers.

Preachers of apocalypse, almost invariably, are evangelists of over-simplified fairy tales.  And they are purveyors of that most unattractive of social ailments, the Big Cop-ut.

A fairy tale is what you’re hearing whenever someone tells you that the earth is set to end on a certain date.  A fairy tale is a warning that if we elect a certain political party, or pass a certain law, the Republic will come to a crashing end.

And yes, a fairy tale is when someone tells you that the Mississippi flooding is definitely part of global climate change.

Whenever someone reduces big stuff (the fate of the world, complicated science, complex political dealings) to something that fits on the back of a napkin — or a pamphlet handed out at a subway stop — it’s a fairy tale.

So here’s the first instruction for anyone reading this on May 22nd:  You should thank the latest gaggle of apocalistas for educating you about the complex, unpredictable nature of life on earth.

Next time someone shoves a brochure in your hand and tells you to quit your job, thank them very kindly for trying to boil the world down into a nursery-room-level set of talking points, then get back to your life.

The second reason these people peeve me is because their world-view invites the Big Cop-out.  That’s the way of thinking that goes something like this:  “We’re all doomed, so I might as well do nothing.”

Is it going to reverse global warming for you to buy a more efficient car, or eat more local food.  No, of course not.

In the same vein, it wasn’t going to end Jim Crow for one business owner in the South in the 1950s to open his doors to African Americans.

But little steps multiplied by billions of people really do matter.

All of us making small, generous contributions to our shared world make it livable, make it better, make it incrementally more hopeful and sustainable.

So here’s instruction number two:  Next time someone tells you that any particular end-times scenario is about to play out, fight back by doing one cool, generous, positive thing.

Sure, you could go out and arm yourself and stock up your basement with a year’s worth of Evian water and wrap your children’s heads in lead foil.  (Don’t ask…)

But wouldn’t you rather go down with a shovel in your hand?  Wouldn’t you rather see the fireball rise while planting a tree or while cleaning up a park?  Why not go up in smoke at a potluck dinner surrounded by your best friends?

Before I go, let me mention a final reason that doom-sayers creep me out:  Life on earth is actually pretty hard for a lot of people and this kind of stuff makes a mockery of their struggles.

It’s a patently sad fact that most of these outbreaks of hysteria occur among people who are fairly well-off and fairly comfortable.  If I had to simplify, I’d say that a lot of these True Believers are just sort of bored.

Getting up and going to work every day, and raising your kids, and paying your mortgage, that’s all sort of dreary when looked at from one point of view, especially if money’s tight and you’re not sure about your future prospects.

But set all that hum-drum daily stuff against the backdrop of Judgment Day and it begins to look a lot more melodramatic.

That’s why you don’t see the folks staring down the flooding Mississippi or braving the tornado outbreaks in the South standing in their yards with goofy home-made signs welcoming the Rapture.

Those are the real heroes, the people who are facing the real dramas, the real crises that our world often hurls our way.

They’re doing it with hope and faith and grit.  And with that trait that most often helps us to push back the darkness:  a sense of humor.

So here’s my final post-doomsday instruction:  Next time someone asks you to donate to or volunteer for an organization that believes in the end of the world, give a little instead to a group that actually believes in saving the world.

An environmental group.  A community rebuilding coalition.  A church that’s building affordable housing.  A political group that has real plans for a better America.

Yes, building stuff is a lot harder than sitting around waiting for that first Crack of Thunder.  But in the end, it’s also a lot more satisfying.

The Roman Catholic church is still reeling from the “pedophile priest” scandal, which damaged the institution’s credibility badly, while also culling a lot of desperately needed (but dangerous) clergy.

The Diocese of Ogdensburg is reconfiguring its entire mission in the North Country to account for a growing priest shortage.

Now a new study by researchers at the widely respected John Jay College of Criminal Justice has reached a startling conclusion:

The sex-abuse crisis wasn’t a side-effect of the Church’s culture, or of the chastity vow, but a product of the 1960s.

[M]ost of the priest-offenders came from seminary classes of the 1940s and 1950s who were not properly trained to confront the upheavals of the 1960s, when behavioral norms were upended and crime overall in the United States spiked, the researchers said.

“There’s no indication in our data that priests are any more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society,” said Karen Terry, principal investigator for the report, at a news conference where the report was released Wednesday.

The study is the subject of an Associated Press article that appeared today in the Glens Falls Post Star.

Terry argues that their research was conducted independently, without input of meddling by bishops.  But critics of the church quickly blasted the report.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the report as “garbage in, garbage out” because the bishops paid for much of the $1.8 million study, along with Catholic foundations, individual donors and a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Some additional questions are likely in order here.  If the sex-abuse crisis was a product of the 60s, why did it also erupt in parts of the world — Ireland, Mexico, Spain — that remained socially conservative?

But at the very least, this study will add to a meaningful discussion of the crisis that has wounded a cherished North Country institution.

It also suggests another important question:  If priests weren’t being adequately prepared for the modern world, has that training improved?

Will the next generation of priests be better equipped to deal with the complexities and ambiguities of American life?

As always, your comments welcome.

In case you’ve missed it, there is one particular flock of Christians convinced that the end of the world is nigh…as in, very nigh indeed. 

May 21st, to be exact. Check out NPR’s story on the end-times prophecy here.

Talk of millenial doom (for sinners) and salvation (for the saintly) is a more or less constant part of the human condition, in all faiths and all eras.

But it turns out one of the biggest end-time dramas played out right here in the North Country.

In the 1840s, a Baptist preacher from the Washington County town of Low Hampton named William Miller rose from obscurity to lead the early “adventist” movement, which came to be known as “Millerism.”

He claimed that the Second Coming was about to occur when the wheat would be separated from the chaff.  With his followers, he established October 22nd, 1844 as the fateful day.

The so-called Millerites waited eagerly, but nothing happened.  “We wept, and wept, till the day dawn,” one of Miller’s followers wrote afterward.   The day was rechristened by many adventists as The Great Disappointment.

“Some are tauntingly enquiring, ‘Have you not gone up?’” Miller himself wrote afterward.  “Even little children in the streets are shouting continually to passersby, ‘Have you a ticket to go up?’^“

There was a certain amount of scandal and Millerites faced mockery, scorn and even some hazing and violence.

But in the way of such things, a lot of Christians continued to believe and these days Miller’s North Country home is maintained by an Adventist congregation as a historical site, complete with an “ascension rock.”

I know it’s futile, but in cases like this I am always a bit baffled that devout Christians — Miller was obviously no huckster — would ignore that most explicit of warnings in the book of Matthew.

The Bible can be tricky and vague and complicated, but this particular passage is straightforward, warning bluntly about  “false prophets” who claim to know when the end-times will occur.

“But concerning that day and hour no one knows,” Jesus is quoted as saying, “not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.”

One of the most significant textures shaping the 2012 presidential campaign is the nature of the Christian faith of the two odds-on frontrunners.

President Barack Obama spent much of his adult life as a member of the Trinity Baptist Church in Chicago, a mostly-black congregation whose pastor, Jeremiah Wright, became a talking point in the 2010 race.

Conservatives have attacked Mr. Obama for belonging to a church that espoused what they view as anti-white perspectives.  A growing number of right-leaning voters also suspect that the president may be a closeted Muslim.

But questions about Mr. Obama’s faith don’t just linger on the right.

Gays and lesbians have been increasingly confrontational with black church leaders who make up a significant part of the progressive coalition in America.

Many African American churches have opposed gay rights — and same-sex marriage in particular.

Over the last three years, LGBT groups have pushed Mr. Obama to abandon his opposition to gay marriage, which they describe as “religious-based bigotry.”

So depending on who you ask, the president is too Christian, the wrong kind of Christian or not Christian at all.

On the other side of the aisle, meanwhile, you have Mitt Romney, the telegenic and well-spoken former Massachusetts governor — who also happens to be a Mormon.

Politico has a front-page story on their website today suggesting that Romney’s faith is a big problem for some core conservative voters, especially in key GOP-primary states such as South Carolina.

The article quotes one politically active pastor as saying, “I don’t think Mormons are Christians – I don’t think they see Jesus Christ as a deity.”

Publicly, most conservative voters say a candidate’s religious faith won’t determine their vote, but many political experts say they’re unsure about the impact once the voting-booth curtain closes.

In an effort to lock down his base, Romney has tacked to the right on many social issues.  After campaigning for governor as a pro-choice candidate, he has now embraced the right-to life movement.

So here again, he may not be Christian enough for some voters, but in moderate parts of the country such as New England — and among female voters — he may appear “too Christian” or too conservatively Christian.

Lurking behind this political debate is the much larger issue of what “being Christian” means in America.  The white-anglo-saxon-Protestant consensus fractured long ago.

While most of us still describe ourselves as Christian, that umbrella term now incorporates a vast array of doctrines and dogmas, as well as national and racial overtones.

Also at play is the fact that a growing number of Americans are no longer Christian at all:  we are either agnostic, atheist or “other.”

And it makes some voters uncomfortable when issues central to our lives — whether we can choose to have an abortion, say, or get married — could be shaped by someone else’s faith.

So what do you think?  Should religious faith play this large a role in our politics?  Do Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney fall within your comfortable definition of  “Christian”?  And if not, does it matter?

Comments welcome and, as always, keep it civil.