The Amish Population is Surging

According to a new study:

There are nearly 251,000 Amish people in America and Canada, according to Ohio State University researchers. That's more than double the estimated population in 1989 of about 100,000. Researchers estimate the population will double again to half a million within about 21 years.

Much of the growth has to do with the fact that more Amish children are staying with the religion and starting their own high-fertility families. "Some people would claim 90 percent of daughters and sons get baptized Amish and start families," says lead researcher Joseph Donnermeyer, a professor of rural sociology at OSU. He says this number has been increasing steadily since WWII.

The Amish live in small groups of 20 or 30 families known as settlements, and Donnermeyer's team has shown the number of these settlements to be growing quickly. In 1990, there were 179 settlements in the U.S. By 2012, Donnermeyer and his colleagues counted 456, including a handful in Canada.

The way Amish society works is this: at the age of about 16, Amish kids are turned out of their families to experience life in the mainstream. This is called Rumspringa, and in some communities the kids are encouraged to be as wild as they want to be. Many date widely, searching for a future spouse. After a few years of hard partying, they face a choice of being baptized into the Amish church and returning home, or being cast out forever. The Amish have big families, but the cult stayed small throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because many kids left. For about the past thirty years, though, most have come back.

It would be easy to interpret the Amish surge as evidence that our society is getting more horrible all the time.   But there might be another reason why a smaller and smaller percentage of Amish people leave the fold: the ever-growing distance between mainstream and Amish cultures. People who grow up on Amish farms are not acquiring the skills needed for success in the rest of the world, and the cultural gap grows ever harder to navigate. Unable to earn decent livings outside the Amish world, or to enjoy a society so different from the one they grew up in, most young Amish people go back.

I have occasionally imagined a future in which there are no more farmers in eastern North America except the Amish and similar groups, who would totally dominate the countryside. This is what you end up with if you extend the current trend for another century.