About 380,000 Amish live in the United States and Canada. Most of them you’ll never see. The Old Order communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and a slowly growing list of other states keep deliberately apart from mainstream culture, and the deliberate apartness is part of what they’re doing. Meet the Amish followed several Amish young people travelling outside their communities for the first time during the rumspringa period — the Amish-recognised window in late adolescence when teenagers can taste mainstream life before committing (or not) to baptism into the church. Geography Scout’s team rewatched the series for this piece because the Amish remain one of the more misunderstood subcultures in North America.
Sienna Holt led the historical and theological thread. Marlowe Pearce ran the cultural angle. The Amish are the kind of community where almost everything the popular media says about them is partially wrong. We tried to get the rest of it right.
What the Amish Actually Are
The Amish are a Christian Anabaptist tradition originating in Switzerland and the German-speaking regions in the late 17th century, named after Jakob Ammann, who led a 1693 schism within the broader Mennonite movement. The schism was over questions of church discipline, particularly the practice of Meidung — social shunning of excommunicated members — which the Ammann faction insisted on enforcing more strictly than the Mennonite mainstream.
Amish migration to North America began in the 18th century, with substantial settlements in Pennsylvania (the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, where “Dutch” is an Anglicisation of “Deutsch” — German). Subsequent migrations expanded into Ohio (now home to the largest single Amish settlement in the world, in Holmes County), Indiana, and progressively across the Midwest as land prices and family sizes pushed congregations to seek new agricultural land.
The contemporary Amish population is divided across multiple affiliations and orders. The most strict are the Old Order Amish, who limit electricity use, prohibit motor vehicle ownership (riding in vehicles owned by others is permitted in some affiliations), and dress in the distinctive plain clothing — broad-brimmed black hats and long beards for married men, prayer caps and aprons for women. The New Order Amish are slightly more permissive on technology and dress. The Beachy Amish use motor vehicles and limited electricity. The Mennonites are a separate (but related) tradition that has drifted further from the Old Order practice.
The community is not, contrary to common assumption, technologically frozen. Amish communities make collective decisions about which technologies to adopt based on whether the technology supports or undermines the community’s core values: family cohesion, modesty, separation from mainstream culture, and self-reliance. The result is a selective adoption pattern that admits, for example, gas-powered farm equipment and battery-operated milking systems in some affiliations, while excluding telephones in the home and personal motor vehicles. The pattern is not anti-technology; it’s deliberate-technology.
Rumspringa: The Misunderstood Window
The English-language popular conception of rumspringa — driven partly by various sensationalised TV productions — is that Amish teenagers are encouraged to engage in extended periods of mainstream debauchery before deciding whether to commit to the church. The reality is more nuanced.
Rumspringa (Pennsylvania German for “running around”) is a period in late adolescence when Amish young people are released from some of the community’s behavioural rules. The specific permissions vary substantially by community: some allow motor vehicle use, some allow attendance at non-Amish social events, some allow extended periods of work or travel outside the community. The duration varies — typically two to three years — and ends with either a decision to be baptised into the church (a permanent adult commitment) or a decision to leave.
The retention rate is genuinely high. Most studies estimate that 80-90% of Amish young people who begin rumspringa eventually choose to be baptised and remain in the community. The popular framing — Amish teenagers escaping into wild lives in the cities — describes a small minority of cases. Most rumspringa is comparatively quiet: dating within the community using slightly relaxed rules, attending some non-Amish events, perhaps a job in a non-Amish business for a period, and then a return to the church.
The decision to leave is, when it happens, profoundly costly. The departing young person is typically subject to Meidung (formal shunning) by their family and community, which severs primary relationships in ways that mainstream culture rarely matches. The shunning practice is one of the most contested aspects of Amish life, both within the community and from outside critics. It has become slightly less rigid over the past several decades but remains substantial.
The Economic Reality
The Amish economy has shifted substantially over the past two generations. Traditionally agricultural — the dairy and produce farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania are one of the iconic Amish landscapes — the community has progressively diversified into other small-business sectors as land prices have made full-time farming less viable for young families.
Contemporary Amish business activity includes furniture making (the Amish-built furniture sector is a substantial market segment in the eastern US, with high-quality solid-wood furniture sold through both Amish-owned showrooms and mainstream retailers), construction and building services (Amish carpentry crews work on residential projects across multiple states), small-scale manufacturing (everything from buggies to specialised farm equipment), and food service (the Amish-style restaurants in tourist regions are mostly Mennonite-owned but employ Amish staff).
The economic story is one of the underrated success cases for traditional communities adapting to modern markets without compromising core values. Amish-owned businesses generally have low debt, family-cohesive workforces, multi-generational planning horizons, and customer-relationship-driven marketing rather than the advertising-dependent model that dominates most modern small business. The result is unusual resilience through economic cycles. Amish business closure rates are substantially lower than the comparable mainstream small-business rates.
What the Documentary Got Right
The Meet the Amish series handled the rumspringa material with appropriate restraint compared to some of the more sensationalised treatments of the period. The young people interviewed were given space to articulate their own perspectives, the community context was explained without being either romanticised or pathologised, and the structural questions (why does the community accept the loss of some young people, what does the shunning practice actually involve) were addressed with the seriousness they deserve.
The contrast scenes — Amish young people encountering specific elements of mainstream urban culture — were handled with care. The production resisted the easy narrative of “naive teenagers shocked by modern world” and instead let the young people respond on their own terms. Some were curious; some were unimpressed; some were relieved to return home. The diversity of response is closer to the reality than the homogenised “Amish discover the city” framing.
Sienna’s note: the documentary also gave appropriate screen time to Amish leaders explaining the community’s own logic. The Old Order theological position — that separation from mainstream culture is itself a religious commitment, not just a cultural preference — was articulated by community members rather than filtered through outside commentary. That editorial choice is rare in mainstream documentaries about religious communities and worth flagging.
What the Documentary Missed
Two structural issues. First, the production focused predominantly on rumspringa, which gives a misleading impression of how central this period is to ongoing Amish life. The vast majority of Amish life is the daily practice of agricultural and family work, weekly worship, and the slow rhythms of farming-community life. A documentary giving more screen time to baptised adult life would have been more representative of what being Amish actually means.
Second, the diversity within the Amish world was under-treated. The differences between Lancaster County Old Order, Holmes County Ohio Old Order, the more conservative Swartzentruber Amish, the more permissive New Order, and the various smaller affiliations are substantial. The documentary’s framing implied a more monolithic “Amish” experience than the real community demonstrates. A serious treatment of contemporary Amish life would address the affiliation diversity directly.
Visiting the Amish Communities
For Geography Scout readers planning a visit, our team’s notes from previous trips:
The Pennsylvania Dutch country (Lancaster County and the surrounding region) is the most-visited Amish area and has the most developed visitor infrastructure. The risk is that the visitor experience can become substantially commercialised — the buggy rides, the Amish-style buffet restaurants, the souvenir shops — without much actual contact with the community. A more rewarding visit involves staying at a working Amish-owned farm bed-and-breakfast (these exist and are well-rated) and engaging with the community directly rather than through the tourist infrastructure.
Holmes County, Ohio is less visited and arguably more authentic for a serious visitor. The local restaurants, businesses, and farms are more genuinely community-integrated. The drive from Cleveland is about 90 minutes through rural Ohio that is itself worth the trip. Plan at least two days; longer if you want to visit some of the smaller settlements (Geauga County, Trumbull County) that are less developed for tourism.
Etiquette matters substantially. The Amish are not a museum exhibit; they’re a living community of working farmers and tradespeople. Photography should not include faces (Amish religious practice considers personal photography inappropriate, particularly for adults). Sunday is the day of rest and worship; visiting Amish-owned businesses on Sunday is unwelcome. Respectful conversation with shop owners and at restaurants is fine and often welcomed; aggressive curiosity about religious practice is generally not.
The Modern Amish Question
The Amish population has been growing rapidly. Family sizes remain large (typical seven to nine children per family), retention rates remain high, and the community has been progressively settling new geographic areas as land becomes available. Population projections suggest the North American Amish population could exceed one million by mid-century at current growth rates.
This raises interesting questions about what the Amish presence in modern America means. The community is one of the largest contemporary examples of a deliberately separated religious community successfully reproducing across generations in a pluralistic mainstream society. The mainstream secular culture’s accommodations of Amish practice (legal exemptions for compulsory schooling beyond eighth grade, conscientious objector status for military service, exceptions to certain regulatory requirements that conflict with religious practice) have generally functioned well.
The Amish themselves have shown a quiet capacity to engage with mainstream culture on their own terms when necessary. Lobbying around farming regulations, legal action to protect specific practices (the 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder Supreme Court case affirming the right to limit Amish schooling), and selective adoption of communication technologies for business purposes have all happened without compromising the underlying community identity.
What to Watch and Read Alongside
For viewing, our team’s recommendations: the PBS American Experience documentary The Amish (2012) is the gold standard for serious treatment of the community on television. The follow-up The Amish: Shunned (2014) is the deeper treatment of Meidung specifically and is harder to watch but worthwhile.
For reading, Donald Kraybill’s The Riddle of Amish Culture is the academic standard for contemporary Amish studies. John Hostetler’s Amish Society is the older classic and remains useful. For a personal narrative, Saloma Furlong’s Why I Left the Amish gives the perspective of a former member and is one of the more thoughtful contemporary memoirs. Karen Johnson-Weiner’s Train Up a Child covers Amish education in detail.
Why It Matters
Geography Scout’s broader interest in the Amish is what they teach about the possibility of deliberate cultural difference within a pluralistic society. The Amish demonstrate, across multiple generations and growing in size, that a community can maintain values substantially at odds with the mainstream while operating productively and peacefully within it. The accommodations they require are modest. The contributions they make — to agriculture, to artisan trades, to the broader American cultural texture — are substantial.
The popular framing of the Amish as anachronisms or curiosities misses the point. They’re a contemporary community making contemporary choices about which elements of modern life to accept and which to reject. The choices are different from the ones most readers would make, but they’re choices, not the absence of choices. We rate the documentary as a competent introduction; we’d send anyone wanting to engage seriously to the PBS American Experience treatment, to Kraybill’s books, and ideally to a thoughtful visit to one of the major settlements. The community is worth knowing about. So is the question they implicitly raise about how the rest of us might choose to live.
Related Reading from Geography Scout
- The Story of God with Morgan Freeman: Six Faiths, One Set of Questions — world religious traditions reviewed.
- The Human Family Tree: Our Shared DNA Across Continents — the deep story of human cultural variation.
- Mystery Files Documentary Review: King Arthur, Cleopatra, Robin Hood — the broader cultural and historical thread.
Further Reading
