The Amish

by Steven M. Nolt

  An Amish theology of adult baptism ties the hands, to some degree, of parents and ministers in controlling behavior in the late teen years. At the same time, long-standing rural traditions of youthful “running around” with one’s peer group on weekend evenings lend weight to the idea that turning sixteen (or seventeen in more conservative affiliations) marks the beginning of a rite of passage toward adulthood.

  Amish Adolescence

  One feature of Amish adolescence that is sometimes lost in all the breathless descriptions of Rumspringa by outsiders is that Amish teens spend a great deal of time working and bear significant responsibilities for running family farms and businesses. Amish children end their formal schooling at age fourteen or fifteen and thereafter are engaged full time in farm, house, or shop work. State labor laws keep them from taking full-time employment beyond the family setting, but there is usually enough work at home to keep them busy or they might work for a relative on a part-time basis. In any case, Amish teens bear remarkable responsibilities that would be unusual for those their age in the English world. A fifteen-year-old girl may manage her mother’s dry goods store several days a week, handling sales, managing inventory, and preparing wholesale orders. A sixteen-year-old boy, having learned hydraulics repair skills in his father’s shop, may be given major off-site repair jobs and be expected to advise non-Amish clients on their equipment needs and upgrades. In this sense, Amish adolescents function, in many ways, with decidedly adult responsibilities.

  At the same time, Amish youth are in the process of becoming their own person. That process, however, is colored by Amish culture. In Western societies imbued with the belief that individualism is a virtue, many people assume that adolescents develop their identity as they become autonomous. Psychologist Richard Stevick argues that for the Amish, and other collectivist cultures, that connection is not so obvious. The values of Gelassenheit, cooperation, and obedience discourage autonomy, and Amish parents and teachers rarely if ever encourage independence. Having grown up with distinctive dress and horse-drawn transportation reinforcing one’s identity on every childhood trip to town, identity and autonomy for Amish teens are actually in tension with one another.

  Amish adolescents are given adult work responsibilities. Credit: Daniel Rodriguez

  A key question for Amish youth, then, is how they will understand their personal identity in the context of the group. For the vast majority, that question hinges on connecting with an Amish peer group apart from the extended family and finding a mate so as to establish one’s own adult household within Amish society. Rumspringa provides a space to pursue these goals.

  In popular media portrayals of Rumspringa, an emphasis is often placed on the question of whether a young person will join the church or leave the community for good. This sort of question may plague a few Amish teens, but for the vast majority, the decision to join the church is assumed. Outsiders like to ponder how they would respond to such a high-stakes choice, and have made this sort of existential struggle the central theme in novel plots and movie scripts featuring Amish characters. But for Amish teens, the focus is on developing a peer group and finding a marriage partner. “Running around” alludes to this element of peer socialization.

  This does not mean that there is no anxiety wrapped up in Rumspringa years. For some teens, a fear of dying before they have joined the church—and the possibility that they might therefore end up in hell—is terrifying. For others, lack of information about the dangers of alcohol and drugs has deepened the consequences of experimentation with such substances.

  Innocent Fun and Deviant Behavior

  What the relative freedom of Rumspringa means varies greatly from one community to another, and even from one family or one individual to another. In some settlements and among some affiliations, youth activities are closely monitored by parents, while in other settings, teens are given freer range. Many teens spend these years doing very little that their parents or ministers would not approve. Others engage in deviant behavior—from an Amish perspective—such as going to the movies or wearing non-Amish clothing. Boys often take such deviance further than girls, and it is not uncommon, in many places, for a Rumspringa boy to obtain a driver’s license and buy a car—usually from another Amish boy who is selling his car because he intends to join the church! A percentage of Amish youth spend these years in more reckless behaviors, such as underage drinking or sexual promiscuity. In no case do parents “send” or encourage their children into such activity.

  One of the central features of Rumspringa, regardless of the nature of the activity one chooses, is finding a specific Youngie peer group, known as one’s “crowd” or “buddy bunch.” In small settlements, the community’s entire age cohort may constitute this group. In large settlements, with a thousand or more Amish teens, different groups, each with its own nickname and reputation, form. A sixteen-year-old may join a group based on the recommendation of an older sibling or a school friend, or with an eye to the group’s general reputation in the community. Some groups may be known for engaging in rowdy behavior while others are reputed to be quite tame.

  Some socializing is done in single-sex crowds. Teen boys in some settlements participate in softball leagues, go fishing, or play ice hockey. A 2012 article in Runner’s World described a group of twenty or so Amish young men in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who—wearing top-of-the-line running shoes but also “black pants held up with suspenders and long-sleeve, button-down shirts”—regularly run half marathons, largely for the camaraderie.2

  Most Rumspringa activity is mixed gender and can include birding, which is popular in the Midwest, and volleyball, which is popular everywhere. Some Amish refer to volleyball as their national pastime. Requiring little expensive equipment and open to people of varying skill levels, it can be played in pastures, lawns, and parks. Volleyball nets can be strung from designated poles, trees, and even parked buggies.

  One youth activity with a long tradition and present in virtually every settlement is the Sunday night singing. In most places, youth gather on a Sunday evening at the home of the family that hosted church that morning. The evening begins with singing German hymns in the slow cadence used in morning worship. Soon the tempo increases, unison gives way to four-part harmony, and the songs switch to English, often gospel songs such as “Amazing Grace,” “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder,” or “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Snacks may be served at intervals and there can be social chatter between songs. Occasionally, to the chagrin of the evening’s hosts, members of a rowdy Youngie group may appear to heckle or otherwise interrupt the hymn singing. The evening of singing culminates with conversations—some preplanned, some spontaneous, some awkward—in which young men ask to escort young women home. These sorts of contacts constitute a typical (though not universal) public indication of courtship.

  Apart from a Saturday afternoon of volleyball or a Sunday evening of singing, some Amish crowds (especially in large settlements where even a small percentage of “wild” teens can translate into a sizable number of people) plan raucous parties. They may hire a band, bring a dozen kegs of beer, and draw several hundred participants. Observers suggest that men outnumber women at such parties three to one. In a twist on typical Amish aversion to engaging law enforcement to settle disputes, some parents who learn of such parties and are fearful of the possibility they hold for heavy drinking or even drug use have been known to call the sheriff on their children. (The Amish are not, traditionally or on the whole, teetotalers, so drinking alcohol itself is often not seen as a problem so much as drunkenness.)

  Volleyball is a popular social activity for Amish young people in many communities. Credit: Daniel Rodriguez

  In the New Order affiliation, and among many others, especially in smaller settlements, the social life of the Youngie is quite restricted and closely monitored. Dating takes place only at home and in the presence of parents, and adult chaperones accompany larger youth groups to evening volleyball games.

&
nbsp; The presence of Amish teens on Facebook, made possible in some large and relatively progressive settlements by the presence of smart phones which allow youth to log on to social media even though their homes do not have electricity or Internet service, suggests one difficulty parents face: most of them are largely unfamiliar with Facebook or with other social media and web-based technology. To be sure, social media has not penetrated every Amish settlement, nor is its presence universal in the places that it has. But the photos, language, and connections that some of the Youngie post on Facebook and Instagram are much more easily hidden from today’s parents than is an alcohol-laced party in the woods. Such hoedowns, while clearly frowned upon, have been around for generations and elders have some idea of what they are dealing with. Not so with the new social media.

  Some of the Youngie’s postings would shock their elders. At the same time, since Amish kids on Facebook are generally only “friends” with other Amish youth, the Rumspringa foray into Facebook illustrates one of the critical yet often overlooked aspects of Rumspringa generally: activities during this phase of Amish life, even those that the Amish deem deviant, generally reinforce group identity. Although Rumspringa raises eyebrows among onlookers, and Amish parents of wayward youth may worry through sleepless weekend nights, the practice actually insulates Amish youth from the world. Even when Rumpsringa groups engage in deviant activities, they do so as sizable and identifiable groups of Amish youth, not as lone individuals swallowed up in an English crowd.

  It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the vast majority of teens end their Rumspringa years in the same way they have seen so many older members of their peer group do so: requesting baptism, moving under the discipline of the church, and marrying.

  Courtship and Marriage

  The Amish have never had arranged marriages or any sort of parental matchmaking. Young people are free to identify mates within the Amish community, although both individuals must become members of the church to be married in the church. Baptism, then, can be a sign that one is getting serious about settling down. In some affiliations, including among the New Orders, dating is only allowed for those who have already joined the church—a practice that leaves dating teens subject to church rules rather than parental discretion.

  Courtship practices are one area of Amish life where there is a great deal of variation from place to place, sometimes as a result of differing old customs and sometimes due to the way even common patterns have evolved along different lines over the years. Traditional customs, which continue to be presented in tourist venues operated by English entrepreneurs, involve couples keeping their relationships secret, even from their parents, until the prospective son-in-law approaches a girl’s father with a marriage proposal. Such secrecy persists in a few places, but is no longer typical. Likewise, the practice of “bundling,” whereby a couple spends a good portion of the night, fully clothed, in the young woman’s bed, is also quite rare nowadays. Not surprisingly, this custom, which was practiced by New England Puritans and many other northern European immigrant groups, provoked a great deal of tongue wagging and more than a few sermons from Amish ministers through the years. The widely reported story that Amish parents paint fence gates blue to signal they have a marriageable daughter ready to begin dating has never been true. It is a pure myth, through and through.

  In some communities it is common and expected for individuals to date several people during their Rumspringa years, some casually and others more seriously. In other settlements courting itself signals a serious relationship, and consent to date is all but tantamount to engagement. In some very conservative affiliations, much courting is done via letter writing, even if the two parties live quite close to one another.

  Although keen observers of Amish society know that there are cases of physical abuse in Amish homes, they also note the near absence—compared with patterns in wider U.S. society—of physical aggression on the part of Amish young men toward their girlfriends. In more than a quarter century of work with Amish youth, one psychologist had never “heard of a single case of an Amish young man hitting or beating up his girlfriend,” despite hearing from individuals who freely shared other painful experiences and sensitive information. Although he believes there must be some cases, he “is convinced that they occur far less frequently … than [among] mainstream American youth,” and hypothesizes that the “teaching and example of Gelassenheit, coupled with minimal exposure to violent media” contribute to this positive pattern of behavior.3

  There are various traditions surrounding marriage proposals. In some places, proposals are made through a “second”—often a good friend of the prospective groom. In other cases, the young man will ask the deacon of the church district in which the young woman lives to ask her and her parents. Once a couple agrees to marry, planning and preparation for hosting and feeding hundreds of wedding guests begin. In the Kalona, Iowa, settlement, and a few other places, the young man may take up residence in his future parents-in-law’s home as the wedding approaches so as to lend a hand with the work involved in getting everything ready to host the big event.

  The average age of marriage in Amish circles is 21 for women and 22 for men. And almost everyone marries: more than 90 percent of people over age thirty are wed (or have been widowed). Wedding details vary from one settlement to another, but they share a number of common attributes. The wedding ceremony does not highlight the creativity or originality of the couple. Instead it sets the husband and wife in the church-community context of which they will be a part, it reaffirms tradition by following prescribed elements and resisting innovation, and it highlights the role of the church in providing a kind of sacred canopy over all of Amish life. There are no photographs, gowns, or rings. The couple wears new clothes, but not different in color or style from what they would wear to church on Sunday. Typically there are four attendants (two men and two women) who are friends of the bride and groom and who constitute the wedding party.

  In the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, settlement and communities stemming from it, weddings are most often held from late October to early December and again in March, while in some other places June is a common month. Weddings typically take place on a weekday and are held in the bride’s home or the home of one of her relatives. Because the wedding hosts will use the church district’s benches for seating guests, it is difficult to have a wedding on a Monday or Saturday, since that would involve hasty movement of benches between the homes hosting church and hosting the wedding. Midweek weddings make those logistics easier.

  A decorated Eck, or bridal corner, at a wedding reception in northern New York. The newly married couple sits here with their attendants for an afternoon of eating and visiting. Credit: Karen M. Johnson-Weiner

  Weddings follow a format similar to that of a Sunday morning worship service, with prescribed hymns, prayers, and lengthy sermons. Sermons usually look at the joys and the pitfalls of family life as revealed in the stories of biblical families, such as Isaac and Rebecca. Almost always there is a retelling of the story of Tobit, a Hebrew book not included in English Protestant Bibles but usually included in German translations of Scripture. Tobit does right by marrying someone from his own people, a choice that affirms the Amish practice of endogamy, or marriage within the group. Although the Amish forbid the marriage of close relatives, and marriage partners are rarely from the same church district, finding an Amish mate—and usually one from the same affiliation—is expected.

  At the end of the three-hour service, the bishop calls the bride and groom forward for the five-minute exchange of vows and declaration of marriage. The rest of the day is spent with a series of bountiful meals provided for the several hundred guests in attendance.

  The newlyweds typically spend the day after the wedding helping to clean up from the big event—taking down benches, scrubbing floors, and the like. There are no elaborate honeymoon plans, though couples may take several weeks to several months visiting extended family before moving into their ow
n place. As married members of the Amish community they have now established their own household and are expected to assume their responsibilities as adults. One of those responsibilities is to create a home for children and to raise them in the faith.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Family and Schooling

  “We holler, we shiver, we jump, we scream, we cheer, and we groan.” Loren Beachy, a young man from the Amish settlement in Elkhart and LaGrange Counties, Indiana, was describing an evening playing Pictionary with family and friends. On this particular April evening Aunt Inez and her husband, Andrew, had invited nieces and nephews and those young folks’ friends for supper. After dinner Inez asked the guests if they would sing, and they obliged with a number of English gospel songs. Although there had been joking and friendly banter all evening, when the group divided into three teams around the table to compete at drawing and guessing words such as wag, tidal wave, and moccasin, the laughter and teasing rose to a whole new level: “Calvin is our artist for beg. Simple word, right? But try drawing it so your partners can guess it in a minute flat!”

  For Loren and the others, it was a memorable evening, but not an unusual one. Gathering for dinner, singing together, visiting, and playing indoor or outdoor games is standard Amish fare. Family groupings that span the generations are often central to such occasions, but the inclusion of neighbors and friends—especially if the get-together includes teens or young adults—is assumed. In this case, the Pictionary teams were gender segregated. That arrangement is not always the case, but on this evening Loren thought the friendly gender rivalry generated much of the energetic laughter as the women were “breathing down our necks” and the teams swapped the lead as they moved around the board.1