Growing Up Amish: The Rumspringa Years

Chapter Eight: Rumspringa: Stepping Out and Running About

[ Chapter Eight { Rumspringa Stepping Out and Running About We don’t give our young folks leave to go out and sin just to get it out of their system. We give them a little space so they can be with people their own age and find a life partner. —An Amish minister A New Stage Until the two young men from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, were charged by federal agents in summer 1998 with trafficking in cocaine, the word Rumspringa was known only to Pennsylvania German speakers and a few academics who studied the Amish. Since then, it has been cropping up on talk shows, television advertisements, and t-shirts (one logo reads, “What happens in Rumspringa stays in Rumspringa”). An alternative music group from Los Angeles calls itself Rumspringa, and a number of bands (including Nits, an art-rock group from Holland) have featured a song by that name. There is even the musical, Rumspringa. UPN’s reality series, Amish in the City, brought the term into pop culture by using the word in every episode. Likewise, several American television series, including ER and Judging Amy, featured an Amish rumspringa-based plot. Oprah 176 [ Growing Up Amish { Winfrey devoted a program to the Rumspringa of young adults who grew up in Amish families, which also helped to popularize the term and give it a place in mainstream culture and thought. Although entrepreneurs have yet to invent “Rumspringa Rum,” a small company in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania , calls itself the Rumspringa Brewing Company. British filmmaker Lucy Walker’s documentary, Devil’s Playground, focuses on the extreme end of the rumspringa experience. The main focus of Devil’s Playground was Faron Yoder, a young man from LaGrange County, Indiana, who had spent time in reform school and who claimed gangster rapper Tupac Shakur as his idol. Yoder, the son of an Amish minister, was a likeable eighteen-year-old who dealt drugs to support a $100-a-day methamphetamine habit.1 In fear for his life, he went into hiding after allowing law enforcement authorities to plant a wire on him to obtain incriminating evidence on other local drug dealers. Although not as deeply involved as Faron, the other main characters also indulged in various self-destructive behaviors—or, at the least, atypical practices for Amish adolescents . One teenager bragged, “If I were living at home, then I couldn’t have 200 different channels of DirectTV, stereo, Nintendo, and a fridge full of beer.”2 Critics of Devil’s Playground generally acknowledged Walker’s persistence and skill in filming this previously undocumented aspect of Amish life. Most were surprised that she was able to penetrate the Amish community in amassing over 300 hours of highly unusual footage. What many failed to recognize, however, is that she was dealing with an extreme end of the behavioral spectrum, and that the experiences of Yoder and the others were not the norm. Typical Amish adolescents, even in their rumspringa years, would not permit anyone to photograph them in the way that Walker did. Not only would day-to-day rumspringa behavior have been unavailable to her and her camera crew, but most viewers would have undoubtedly lost interest in the mundane world of weekly singings and Amish teenage friendships that would have filled her documentary. The partying and drug use that Walker has captured occurs not only in the northern Indiana settlement featured in the film, but also in the other large settlements. As we have seen earlier, drinking occurs in some small settlements too, but drug use there is typically uncommon. If Rumspringa [ Rumspringa: Stepping Out and Running About { 177 signifies more freedom for teenagers to choose their friends and activities, however, then it occurs among the Amish everywhere.3 Although nobody knows when such a practice began, it probably relates to the Amish beliefs in adult choice and the baptism of believers. Devil’s Playground viewers learn that being born into an Amish family is not enough to qualify one for church membership. Only a teenager or adult, choosing freely, is qualified to become a full-fledged part of this believers’ community. A Mennonite writer who grew up Amish presents a much more nuanced and accurate portrayal of the rumspringa years, at least as it still occurs in parts of Ohio and elsewhere. Although his book, Ben’s Wayne, is listed as fiction , it is a thinly...