Growing Up Amish: The Rumspringa Years

Preface

Preface If they still take us back after being on television, they’ll take us back no matter what we do. —Mose Gingerich, from Amish in the City When I began this revision of Growing Up Amish in January 2012, a number of friends expressed surprise that I was working on this project less than a decade after the original edition came out in early 2007. “After all,” they asked rhetorically, “what significant changes could occur among Amish youth in a few years?” Admittedly, much appears to be the same as it was even a decade ago: children learn to work hard early on, they complete school by the age of fourteen or fifteen, and a year or two later they begin their Rumspringa, that brief period of comparative freedom for Amish youth to date, seek a mate, and explore the outside world before they choose or reject the Amish faith and culture. Most eventually do join the church, find a “special friend,” and “settle down” to become the latest generation to embrace the Amish way, just as their parents, grandparents, and generations of other forebears did. Yet other things have changed with the Youngie, as Amish youth are known, in a relatively short time, and this revision will provide some answers to my friends’ questions. One of the events that led to this revision was that my editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, Greg Nicholl, was intrigued by an article that he x [ Preface { discovered in the Lancaster Sunday News in June 2011 about Amish youth on Facebook and the Internet.1 He rightly concluded that this subject was both interesting and an important development in the Amish community. In the 2007 first edition, I had not even mentioned Facebook’s predecessor , Myspace, and had given only eight words of coverage to cell phone use. Those subjects were off my radar when I did most of my initial research during the decade surrounding the millennium. Now the scene has changed dramatically, as thousands of youth in the large settlements are dedicated Internet and Facebook users, thanks to their sophisticated smartphones and e-savvy Amish peers. While working on his Facebook-Amish article, reporter Gil Smart contacted ten Facebook users with Amish-related names to ask if they would be willing to communicate with him. Predictably, not one replied. Amish youth, even those “cruising the fast lanes,” routinely protect their culture, family, and friends. Smart was correct, however, in surmising that many Amish youth were seriously involved in Facebook. My experiences in charting Amish youths’ electronic journeys for the last eighteen months has led me to believe that each of the three big Amish settlements in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania currently have more than 1,000 Facebook Youngie. Discerning that fact, however, turned out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. First, I needed to get on Facebook. A young professor friend helped me sign up as a bona fide user. As a member of the “Grandparents ’ Generation” and one who is marginal at best on the Internet, I first had to learn to navigate the intricacies of Facebook and, later, how to understand and utilize this resource’s potential to learn more about what Amish elders would call the “fast (or fast-track) Rumspringa.” A young colleague taught me how to seek “Friends” and how to respond to requests from others to be their Facebook “Friend.” At first I rarely checked my status or did anything on my account. I did not even know the difference between a pro- file picture and a cover photo. I never uploaded any photos to my Facebook page. This hands-off approach changed quickly when I realized the potential available on Facebook to learn about Internet Amish youth. The invitation from Johns Hopkins University Press to research and write about the Amish-Facebook connection sealed the deal. My first breakthrough came when a young man who grew up in Lan- [ Preface { xi caster County befriended me. In the process, he bequeathed access to his list of 532 Facebook “Friends” to me, 80 percent of whom were Amish. Later, his seventeen-year-old rumspringa sister identified all of her 800plus “Friends” as to their heritage (reared in Amish homes or not), state of residence, youth gang, and church membership. Then my friend Jim Cates, a psychologist and founder of the Amish Youth Vision Project in northern...