The strange world of the Amish
I’ve just finished watching the last of the four fascinating television programmes in a Channel Four series called “Amish: The World’s Squarest Teenagers”. The Amish are an amazing religious community, based almost totally in the United States, who effectively live life as their predecessors did when they emigrated from Switzerland in the 1700s & 1800s.
They have an interesting practice called ‘Rumspringa’ which allows teenagers to experience things normally forbidden before deciding whether to be baptised into the Amish community (which apparently some 85% do). The Channel Four series took five young Amish men and women on ‘Rumspringa’ and exposed them to four very different British families.
Years ago, while on a holiday in the USA, I visited an Amish community in the Lancaster County of Pennsylvania. As a secularist and modernist, my lifestyle is a million miles from theirs. Yet I admire their non-materialistic and family-orientated way of life with its powerful sense of community and morality.