But he said that no new religion he is aware of currently qualifies. In the modern Western world, some people feel free to choose the religion that feels right to them. “I feel you can be trusted, so you are sitting at my table,” Daniel says. His wife – Daniel and Ira’s oldest daughter – died of Hodgkin lymphoma when she was just 23, soon after the boy’s birth. “The Bible says a husband must love his wife and if a wife follows his lead then you will have a happy family,” says Sam, 28, a father of four. Ira, Daniel’s wife, describes her day to me: “quiet time praying”, then “the girls help with breakfast and we are done by seven so the men can go out.” Her husband tells me Ira is not a “women’s libber”. Later I learn the family was driven to move by cheaper land, tensions over technology in their previous church, and Daniel’s desire to spend more time with his family. Settlers are lured by land cheaper than in the Amish heartlands of Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania – the photogenic backdrop for the film Witness, starring Harrison Ford as a police officer hiding in the community.

A range of factors, from ending the draft in 1973, which forced young Amish men (as conscientious objectors) to carry out community work, through to a more recent trend towards educating Amish children in their own schools, has meant less interaction with the outside world. ‘Our faith will be lost if we adopt technology’: can the Amish resist the modern world? The Baháʼí Faith in Norway began with contact between traveling Scandinavians with early Persian believers of the Baháʼí Faith in the mid-to-late 19th century. The Amish are followers of Jacob Amman, a hardline Swiss bishop who broke with the Mennonite faith in 1693. The Amish began emigrating to America in the 18th century, mostly settling in Pennsylvania. It is the fastest-growing faith group on the continent, with predictions that there might be more than 1 million adherents by 2050. This marks an extraordinary turnaround: there were only 5,000 Amish in America a century ago. In 1989, there were some 100,000 Amish scattered in 179 settlements across North America. But this one-off incident, many years ago, speaks to the reasons why this 52-year-old sold his thriving Ohio clothing business, one that supplied hundreds of stores across North America, and moved his family to this idyllic farm in upstate New York three years ago.

“They don’t integrate, and why should they? “They are well liked here,” says Leslie Stroh, a publisher who worked on Daniel’s fields as a boy. Its strategic location made it an ideal meeting point for traders who sought to exchange goods and establish lucrative business connections. Yet behind those distinctive long beards for men and white bonnets for women, there are some smart business brains, with soaring numbers of multimillionaires. Analysts speculated that the remarks could give white working-class voters the excuse they needed not to vote for Obama, whose candidacy has been regarded with scepticism in the state but had shown some signs of growing momentum. Among Republicans, 29% are white evangelical Protestants, 22% are white mainline Protestants, and 15% are white Catholics. “Our values are different and we chose to safeguard them,” he says. Sam, who has travelled abroad, says he is old enough to remember a pre-digital era, before computers and smartphones. This German-speaking sect, which demands simple lives of self-reliance based on the Bible, may be at odds with the rest of today’s society – yet surprisingly, it is booming, rather than being swamped by a fast-evolving world of smartphones and social media.

By the time the pilots graduated in March 1942, the United States was entrenched in World War II. This has reinforced a sense of separatism and fuelled higher retention rates than in the years before the second world war, when differences with wider society were less stark. “I can be doing things a lot more beneficial than going to bars or spending time looking at a phone.” Children can choose to be baptised into the church in their late teens – and researchers say retention rates appear to have risen in recent decades. The Church must be rooted and grounded in God’s Word. “To us, death is not God’s punishment. I speak to one man running a firm with 500 employees that he started aged 50 in his barn, while others have become wealthy from land ownership as their population expands, driving up land values. While the family insist all key decisions are shared, it is noticeable that the women are reticent in these male-dominated discussions. Although clearly devout, with hymn sheets stuck to his own kitchen table for the family to sing together, Sam admits to me the day after our dinner that, as a teenager, he questioned his belief – if it “was a learned thing rather than the truth”.