When I was 16, my high school film class watched a documentary called "The Devil's Playground." You can watch the full movie on YouTube. When I was 16, I thought this movie was awesome. I was taken in by sensationalism, elitism and a distorted mythos about Amish adolescence. The narrative we tell about the Amish paints a curious picture. If the myth is to be believed, between the ages of 16 and 21, Amish youth participate in a rite of passage called "Rumspringa," in which they are not subject to their communities' standards of behavior. They are encouraged to experiment with the "English" (mainstream) culture, and Amish parents are not supposed to intervene or discipline them. The Amish teens "go wild" with drugs, cars and partying, and experience a pastoral version of "Scared Straight" when they are unable to cope with the influences of the outside world, and they come crawling back to the Amish Church and become full fledged adults in their repressed, conservative communities.
This is not actually true, nor is it a story about the Amish. It's actually a story about us. Amish society doesn't do this to young adults. We do.
First, Rumspringa is real. The term translates roughly to "Jumping Around" or "Hopping Around" in Pennsylvania Dutch, the traditional language spoken in Amish communities. But for most Amish teens in communities that practice it (and not all Amish communities do), it's less a time of sanctioned partying, sex, drugs, and popular music than it is about dating. In Rumspringa, certain social prohibitions are relaxed to give the kids a chance to develop closer social and ideally romantic relationships with the opposite sex. It's not about partying. It's about courtship. Not all communities of Amish do this (just like Amish communities make practical decisions about their use of technology) and in those that do, the incidental "experimentation" mostly consists of soda and video games. It's not the sensationalized, exciting coming of age that "The Devil's Playground" portrays. It's much more mundane and rarely lasts 5 years. And no, Amish parents are not prohibited from disciplining their teenagers or intervening if they do go too far and disrupt community life.
Let me say a couple things as disclaimers: I am not defending the Amish lifestyle as ideal. I would not want to live in an Amish community. I would find it overly religious and repressive. My sexuality and atheism would hardly be tolerated. But Amish society has its good points too: it is cooperative and communalist, and these aren't bad things. Humility and modesty also are not bad things. And as a social worker with a background in anthropology, and having an intense hatred of exploitative and sensationalist media, I don't like when our narratives rob people from other cultures of their agency and dignity. I am also miffed by the tendency to simultaneously idealize, fetishize, and other-ize the Amish. Amish people are more like other human beings than not. They're not Puritans, they're not Pilgrims, they're not living relics whom time has passed by. Nor are they Luddites. Luddism is an "English" tradition. Their choices about using or not using particular technologies are primarily oriented toward maintaining their lifestyle and autonomy by preserving their pace of life and not depending on the "English" world. It's about modesty, not ignorance.
A multi-year long time of sanctioned experimentation exists in our culture. It's called college. And just like Rumspringa, not every one in our culture practices this.
The Amish are anabaptists. They believe that only a consenting adult can make a choice to accept God's salvation and become a full fledged member of the Amish church. Amish parents are no more likely to be cold, distant and aloof than "English" parents, and there is plenty repression in our own culture. Amish parents also do not fail to teach their children appropriate coping skills and then leave them to be "scared straight" by the outside world. This is not just a misconception, it is elitist propaganda. I am not an anabaptist, but the idea that only a consenting adult can participate fully in religious life isn't that alien to me. I actually kind of agree with it. And frankly, most people don't make a total break as adults with the culture or religion they were raised with as children. Amish, like everyone else, thrive in positive relationships with their families and other members of their community. That's why most Amish kids join the church as adults. It's not because they're traumatized by modernity. It's because they are human.
But guess who do fail to teach kids how to cope with a chaotic and troubled world and leave them at the mercy of that world to sink or swim?
We do. "English." Westerners. Mainstream Americans. The disciples of Industrial Capitalism.
The myth of Rumspringa is not really about the Amish. It's a story about us.
"The Devil's Playground" is also a monument to bad research. The filmmakers hyper-focused on one youth who spirals downward into drug addiction and isolation before rejoining his community as an adult when he forms a relationship with an Amish girl. They took his and a few other rebellious teens' accounts of Amish life at face value and interspersed these segments with an interview with one elder who was probably the only Amish adult who consented to being filmed. This isn't just exploitative filmmaking, it's bad research, bad documentarian technique, and sensationalized propaganda aimed at promoting the dominant culture as morally superior to those backward, rural technophobes we imagine the Amish are.
Dear "English" world: stop doing this. It's condescending and dishonest. Teach your own kids the coping skills they will need to navigate the world and stay above negative influences, and stop projecting our own society's social problems on a minority culture.
Thank you. Until next time, comrades and fellow travelers.