In communities in which the young people have greater access to non-Amish society and may even work for outside employers, those pressing the boundaries might wear Amish clothing and ride in slow-paced carriages during the week but dress “English” and cruise in sporty cars on the weekend. On Saturday nights, they may listen to hard rock music and watch movies, and then eight hours later snooze in church during the slow songs of the Ausbund. Such Youngie live in a different world on the weekends when they step into Rumspringa.
The gangs in the larger settlements have different identities. For example, the Amish settlement in northern Indiana has about a dozen crowds, each of which attracts from two hundred to five hundred young people.15 The larger groups have half a dozen subgroups that meet periodically. The gangs have distinct reputations and names, such as Topekas, Whassups, High Clintons, Low Clintons, Easties, and Barrens. The large Lancaster, Pennsylvania, settlement has some forty groups, with thirty to 150 members, with names like Shotguns, Broncos, Mustangs, Dominos, Eagles, Hummingbirds, Swans, and Quakers. Groups are fluid, and they frequently form and dissolve. According to one Amish observer, some thirty-five new gangs formed in the Lancaster area over a ten-year period. Some withered, others morphed into different groups, and still others were fresh start-ups.16
Not surprisingly, when multiple groups emerge, each develops its own identity and reputation. So-called “slow” groups tend to be more traditional in dress and behavior. Members of the “faster” gangs press the boundaries of acceptable Amish behavior by driving cars, using drugs and alcohol, visiting bars, and playing video games. For example, in one settlement with nearly a dozen groups, Amish informants identified the distinguishing traits of two of them—the Scavengers, and Rangers.17 The Scavengers, they said, were “old school” because they drink Budweiser and smoke Marlboro Reds. Very few of them drive cars. One informant considers the Scavengers conservative and strict because they wear Amish clothing, play volleyball and softball, and attract large groups to their singings.
The Rangers, on the other hand, try to mimic the English way of life by driving cars, wearing fashionable clothing, bowling, and watching movies. Sometimes they get together just to show off their cars. Many wear name-brand clothes, such as Abercrombie, Hollister, Buckle, Billabong, and Hurley, and some occasionally wear Goth or hip-hop clothing. They are not very involved in church activities, and most delay baptism until their early or mid-twenties. The Rangers play basketball and softball and hold volleyball tournaments. A Rangers subgroup does some extreme sports such as wakeboarding and snowboarding.
In large church communities with diverse gangs, most youth anticipate their sixteenth birthday with an eye on a particular group. The choice of group matters because members generally choose marital partners and long-term friends through gang connections. Teens may choose a gang through the nudging of their parents, in reaction to it, or in response to invitations by peers, siblings, or cousins. Teens in the same family may join different crowds. Some preteens even know the names, reputations, and markers of each group: the type of haircut, the tilt of hats, the color of suspenders, and the style of buttons on boys’ shirts. For girls, the hem length, brightness of dress materials, use of straight pins or buttons, and thickness of stockings can signal group identity. Such symbols locate a particular crowd on the reputation grid of the region.
In some Amish settlements young men play pickup football at social gatherings. Women rarely play, and some adults consider football a worldly sport to be avoided. Daniel Rodriguez
A group’s ethos, whether docile or rowdy, will shape teen behavior, including their likelihood of joining the church. Group selection is not just a teenage matter. It keeps some parents awake at night because they, better than their children, grasp its long-term consequences. A father described his son’s choice of a gang as “one of the severest trials I went through in my lifetime—that [my son] wouldn’t get sucked into the bad crowd.” Parents who try to persuade a daughter or son to join a particular group realize that if they push too hard, their efforts may backfire.
Whether youth groups are adult-centered or peer-centered depends not only on community size, but more importantly, according to Stevick, on “a community’s local history, tradition, and moral beliefs.”18 Although the peer-adult difference historically reflects the size of the settlement, that distinction has been diluted somewhat by the rise of adult-supervised youth groups in the twenty-first century. The front-page, drug-bust headlines in 1998 spurred some parents to establish parent-supervised groups in the large Lancaster settlement. Twelve years later, over half of the groups in that area had parental direction. The guidelines for one parent-centric group include the following stipulations:
• Dress shall conform to church standards.
• Singings and other activities will be supervised by two or three sets of parents.
• Parents, with input from teenagers, will determine the place and time of singings and what games will be played.
• The singing will begin at 7:00 p.m. and end by 9:00 p.m.
• Youth will leave the singing before 10:00 p.m. and arrive at home by midnight.
• Smoking is prohibited at the suppers and singings.19
A group of parents in the Old Order affiliation in Holmes County, Ohio, also established supervised youth groups for their offspring. Even some smaller, more traditional settlements have reasserted stricter behavioral guidelines, and parents are often present at singings and similar gatherings. One father noted, “Sometimes after church [the youth] may get together and play games. They sing every Sunday. There’s a 1:00 a.m. curfew.” An adult couple must also accompany the young people on any trips. All of these changes underscore the growing influence of parental guidance during Rumspringa in some communities.
Courtship
As with Rumspringa, courtship varies across groups and settlements, but there are some typical patterns.20 All Amish groups practice endogamy—marriage within the group—which means that the bride and groom must be church members in fellowshipping congregations before they marry.21 Although the church does not arrange marriages, the church membership requirement means that it does sanction them. Most, but not all, dating partners come from the same Amish affiliation.
Courtship is energized by the fact that marriage and having children are highly valued in Amish society. It is rare for a person to choose to remain unmarried or for married couples to decide not to have children. Apart from baptism, marriage is the most important rite of passage; it signals the step from girl to woman, boy to man. Marriage, not baptism, is the doorway to adulthood.
Dating never begins before age sixteen, and some youth wait until they are seventeen or eighteen. A few affiliations, especially the New Order Amish, permit only those who are baptized to date. This lowers the age of baptism and marriage and increases the church’s control over dating.
Traditionally, secrecy surrounded courtship, and even parents did not always know whom their children were dating. The wider community would only learn about romances when wedding plans were “published,” or announced in church, two weeks before the wedding. Although secrecy still shrouds dating in more conservative communities, the veil has lifted elsewhere. Yet, although it is often known when a boy and girl are dating, couples try to keep their plans quiet despite widespread speculation about when they will be published.
As in past generations, youth most often find partners at Sunday evening singings. The boy always takes the initiative. Dating partners in more traditional settlements may learn to know each other at social or work frolics. A boy may express his interest to a particular girl in advance by sending her a card or letter. Or he may ask a friend or relative to alert her of his interest so that she is not surprised when he asks to walk with her or take her home after a singing. In a growing number of communities, prospective partners become acquainted by texting prior to the first date. Traditionally, the initial date happened at a singing, but that too is changing in some areas.
Courting usually proceeds at youth gatherings or at the girl’s home. A boy will travel by horse and buggy—or, depending on the Ordnung of his church, by bicycle or in-line skates—to see his girlfriend. If she lives in another settlement or some distance away, he may need to take a bus or hire a driver.
Some leaders say the sole purpose of dating should be to search for a spouse. In such communities, boys are permitted to date only one girl. But in other communities a boy may date several girls—one at a time—in the course of a year. When a couple begins dating, they typically see each other only every other week at the girl’s home and otherwise communicate by letters. In some settlements, though, teens have cell phones and call or text their boyfriend or girlfriend throughout the week. They may also hang out together during the week and attend parties together on weekends. At the other extreme, a dating Swartzentruber Amish couple will not be seen as a couple in public until after their engagement has been announced two weeks before the wedding.
The Amish oppose premarital sex. Nevertheless, some dating couples do engage in it—the rate certainly varies by community—and undoubtedly some use birth control. As noted in chapter 11, transgressors are expected to confess their sin before the Gmay.
An old courtship practice, which the Amish and other immigrants brought from Europe, is known variously as bed courtship, bedding, or bundling. In this practice the dating couple spends much of the night together in bed, clothed but ostensibly without sexual relations. This was the traditional practice in most Amish communities until the mid-twentieth century. Since then, the practice has sharply declined, and it likely persists in fewer than 10 percent of Amish groups. It provoked considerable debate in some areas, and opposition to it was a factor in the formation of the New Order Amish movement in the 1960s.22
Most, but not all, Swartzentruber groups have retained bed courtship, and parents ensure that their Rumspringa-age daughters have a private bedroom, at least on weekends. When the young man and woman arrive at the girl’s house, they go quietly to her bedroom and lie together, fully dressed, on her bed until long past midnight. Swartzentruber girls will remove their outer dress, keeping on the “courting” or under dress, which is “never sheer, low cut, or otherwise suggestive.”23 According to one Swartzentruber woman, “Under dresses can be almost any color, but not white or pink or yellow. Girls just make it so it’s new and not worn out.” Often the young man’s male friends and the young woman’s sisters—members of the Youngie but not yet dating—try to “drop in” on the couple, but they must do so quietly so as not to disturb the rest of the family.24
The Andy Weaver affiliation in Holmes County, Ohio, allows bed courtship, but some parents discourage it in favor of “chair courtship.” In some districts, this means that the young woman sits in her boyfriend’s lap as the two occupy a single chair, leading an elder to lament, “Lap-sitting chair courtship … causes a lot of problems.” In his Gmay, families with daughters about to join the young folks invest in a wide chair so the couple can sit side by side. Noting that this purchase often elicits comments about a possible wedding, one mother said with a smile, “Sometimes we parents just say we’re getting a little wider in our old age.” Her husband added that the couple “[could] put two regular chairs beside each other, but it’s just not as comfortable.”
The diversity of courtship practices among the Amish illustrates the variety of ways in which local communities define proper behavior for finding and dating one’s future spouse. Across affiliations, however, chastity remains the goal for unmarried teens.
Identity and Autonomy
Rumspringa is a liminal time fraught with ambiguity for Amish youth, who are neither Amish nor English, neither children nor adults. They live at home, but their locus of external control shifts from parents to peers. In a culture that stresses submission to adult authority, teens are especially vulnerable to peer influence.
Developmental psychologists contend that the teenage search for identity and autonomy requires a successful resolution for a stable adulthood. Western models of psychological development assume that identity is self-constructed and that autonomy—especially independence—is a virtue. Similarly, modernity prizes self-esteem and self-actualization. But the construction of identity and the search for autonomy are different in collective societies such as the Amish. One Amish man flatly rejected the notion that modern adult identities are self-constructed by noting that “all kinds of cultural influences shape identity everywhere.”
Stevick argues that, while identity and autonomy are independent and complementary psychological states in mainstream culture, in Amish society they are in more tension.25 Some adolescents step into Rumspringa with little anticipatory socialization as they explore questions of identity and autonomy: Who am I? What do I believe?26 For a few Amish youth, the exploration results in ambivalence about self, faith, family, and morality, but that is of course true for mainstream teens as well.
An Amish child’s identity is both collective and personal, but the group identity is especially prominent in interactions with outsiders. Dressed in the garb of their tribe, children grow up with a keen awareness of being different from outsiders. The experience of riding in a carriage, subject to curious stares, crystallizes a sharp sense of Amish identity. One’s personal identity is further shaped by one’s niche in the thick web of a large extended family. At the same time, however, personal identity is somewhat blurred because playmates dress similarly and engage in the same cultural practices. Moreover, the importance of cooperation, obedience, and humility—not autonomy—are highlighted in hundreds of ways for children before they turn sixteen.
The highly communal nature of Amish identity formation places some youth at risk during Rumspringa. In one change-minded settlement in which dozens of youth drive cars and pickup trucks, local officials use the acronym DWA (Driving While Amish). Police engage in Amish profiling—stopping cars carrying Amish teenagers for DUI checks. With little orientation to the dangers of drugs and alcohol, some teens sink into abuse. Growing up sequestered, those needing help may have little knowledge of social services or how to access them. In 2002 the Amish Youth Vision Project began to work with court-assigned offenders in northern Indiana. Over a three-year period (2006 to 2008), 185 Amish youth participated in a series of eight weekly alcohol and drug education classes.27 All of them had been arrested for alcohol consumption or possession or both and were assigned to the program as a condition of their probation. In addition to alcohol, some participants had problems with nicotine and marijuana, and a handful had used methamphetamines. In this community, as in some others, alcohol was the drug of choice among Amish youth. Two-thirds of the participants in the program were male.
Regardless of the settlement, young men have greater freedom to challenge traditional mores during Rumspringa than young women do. As Stevick notes, boys are often more overt in flouting community dress standards and more likely to own cars or trucks, use alcohol, and engage in other rebellious activities.28 This is true in even the most isolated communities. A young Swartzentruber male working away from home, for example, recharged his forbidden cell phone at an outdoor electrical socket in a strip mall—something a young woman in his church-community would never do.
Big Questions
The Rumspringa experience has several layers: psychological, religious, and social. It is a psychological journey in self-understanding, a search for identity that fits within the contours of Amish society. On the religious level it brings youth face-to-face with spiritual questions. Will they embrace Amish understandings of Christian faith? Anxiety about one’s salvation and eternal destiny may expedite this choice. In the end, the ultimate question is whether to be Amish—to join the church, marry, and accept the church’s authority for the rest of one’s life.
The religious and social layers blend together, since the confession of Christian faith and the promise to surrender one’s life to the church are woven into the baptismal vows. For some youth
the emphasis is on personal faith; for others it is on accepting the church’s authority. In any event, they are two sides of the same baptismal coin.
Most youth process the big questions in one of three ways. First, the vast majority embark on Rumspringa assuming they will join the church. For them, rather than a crucible of crisis, the teenage years are a time of greater freedom, a time to socialize with friends, find a spouse, and simply have some fun.
Second, a few youth set their sights on leaving the Amish long before Rumspringa. Perhaps they dream of becoming an airplane pilot or a nurse and know that those occupations require advanced schooling. Or, unable to imagine being bridled by church regulations the rest of their lives, they think that leaving will expand their personal freedom. Still others plan to exit as a way of coping with painful or dysfunctional family situations. Those who reject baptism will not face excommunication or shunning, and whether or not such a decision ruptures their family ties depends a great deal on the attitude of their parents and church-community.
For a few in the middle—unsure about joining or leaving—Rumspringa presents a real dilemma. They count the benefits and liabilities at night before drifting off to sleep. A forty-year-old man who ultimately did join the church reflected on his decision: “The thought of stepping into a somewhat foreign culture looked far more difficult and less rewarding than submitting to the expectations of the Ordnung simply because I was already used to them.”29 Ira Wagler, who made the opposite choice, explained his journey this way: “I had every intention of returning and settling down … but it didn’t happen. In fact, it pretty much went just like the preachers always claimed it would. Once the ‘world’ gets its grip on you, the probability of return recedes into impossibility. One can weep and wail and repent at leisure, but it will be too late. You can’t go back.”30
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