Growing Up Amish: The Rumspringa Years

Chapter One: Amish Life: Plain but Not So Simple

[ Chapter One { Amish Life Plain but Not So Simple All good things go to ruin if we don’t work on them. —Amish parent Amish Youth: In the Spotlight, under the Lens When I first began studying the Amish in the early 1990s, I was hard pressed to find extensive or even superficial attention focused on their teenage years. Although several writers had documented their experiences at an Amish wedding, the couples are considered to be adults, and their marriages signal to the community that the newlyweds have completed their adolescence and are fully entering Amish adulthood.1 In the past, accurate historical knowledge about the youth culture of the Amish was limited to a few pages (at best) in the most highly regarded books of the time. Virtually no films, television programs, or popular books touched on any of the important aspects of that critical period when Amish youth decide whether or not to follow the Amish way. Amish youth are the business of their Amish parents or their community, and nobody else’s. Amish adults work hard to keep the happenings of their youthful offspring, especially the wayward young, as privileged information within the community. 4 [ Growing Up Amish { Despite their best endeavors, however, today almost every aspect of Amish adolescence is scrutinized, analyzed, or exploited by the media or academia—their friendships, their pastimes, their indiscretions, and their future either as committed Amish church members or as casualties along the way. Witness the abundance of television shows that purportedly deal in one way or another with most of the above experiences. United Paramount Network (UPN) paved the way with their youth-centered reality show, Amish in the City, in the first decade of this century. What followed was a succession of other self-proclaimed reality series, such as Amish: The World’s Squarest Teenagers in 2010 from Channel 4, London; the Learning Channel ’s Breaking Amish in 2012; and the most bizarre to date, Amish Mafia (also from the Learning Channel in 2012), a preposterous and fabricated offering having almost nothing to do with reality. This latter program claimed to expose the hidden underbelly of lawless Amish youth and adults, and the existence of stern-faced, ex-Amish enforcers. These “Mafia” members purportedly brought swift and sometimes violent resolution for Amish bishops who needed their help to quiet recalcitrant members or enforce unpopular decisions on an innocent and unsuspecting community. All of my knowledgeable Amish friends perceived this “reality” show as fiction. One of my teenaged friends captured the sentiments of the Amish community when she remarked, “Amish Mafia would be funny, Rich, except for the fact that a lot of people are going to believe that these things are actually true.” Today, in contrast to a decade or two ago, books on Amish youth also abound. Publishers have discovered that emerging interest in this topic is a bonanza for new and electronic book sales and profits. Look, for example, at the “bonnet fiction” offerings, with dozens of titles sporting covers graced by stunning-looking Amish females ready for romancing by eager Amish or English suitors (“English” is the term used by the Amish to describe the non-Amish). Since 2006, more than two dozen writers have written nearly 300 titles under the rubric of Amish romantic fiction.2 The three bestselling authors (Beverly Lewis, Wanda Brunstetter, and Cindy Woodsmall) have sold nearly 25 million copies, with Lewis accounting for nearly twothirds of that total.3 What happened to catapult Amish youth and their teenage years squarely in the public eye, both here and abroad? Seeds were undoubtedly planted [ Amish Life: Plain but Not So Simple { 5 in 1998, with the shocking news that the FBI had arrested two young men and a minor—all of whom had grown up in Amish homes—for dealing in drugs both with the notorious Pagans motorcycle gang and with members of Amish youth groups in Pennsylvania. Not only did reporters from around the world flock to Lancaster County, but these revelations and attendant publicity also shook the Lancaster Amish adult community to the core, and sent reverberations throughout all the large Amish settlements. The other major fallout was that it sparked curiosity about the period known as Rumspringa, a term most Americans had never heard of before the drug bust. The word Rumspringa comes from German and literally and simply translates...