I am sitting right now in the center of the ex-Amish community, Columbia, Missouri, USA. How did it come to be this way, a center for people who break away from their Amish community? No one really knows, just some people who left the community themselves with some organizational skills. They, in turn, attracted other emigrants from that community. Maybe Columbia makes sense as a place for the Amish to flee to because of its location. It’s not really a city and the Amish don’t do cities so well. It’s more of a town. In certain places in the Midwest like the Columbia area, you can get manual labor work without much schooling and that’s more or less all you have when you choose to leave the Amish. You can’t really rely on your language skills since, even though you might understand and speak English, you have been speaking it with a closed community for whom it is not a native language. And furthermore, “English” is coded at the outset as an outsider language because “English” is the term used for the non-Amish, the big other.
Columbia, the first stopping point along the path leading away from the Amish community, isn’t near an exceptionally large Amish community. But the Amish settlements are not far away, either. The Amish are everywhere in the States now. They have swelled their ranks through high birth rates and successful community retention (reportedly 90% of young people stay in the Amish community). In fact, there are more people than work opportunities in the community and so the Amish now have to get creative to find employment for their people that will suit their religious lifestyle. But the Amish have succeeded in keeping the secular world out, including the standards of public education which act for all Americans as a currency to continue study at universities and to qualify for nearly any work opportunity. So the Amish haven’t graduated high school, they haven’t taken standardized tests to measure their abilities against other American students. They don’t even have standardized language skills or cultural knowledge. They are complete unknowns. Add to this the fact that the Amish have no debt and therefore no credit and they almost never have profits in their individual families, certainly none that a young person from an Amish community can access. And so the process of transition from the Amish world to the English world is exceptionally difficult. No money, no good language, no modern skills. Just one’s hands and youth.
An ethnographic study into an “exotic” world such as this one is compelling for a television/film/internet video viewing audience. This is especially true for American viewers, who occupy this same territory as these Amish “others” yet they do even not live on the same existential plane with them. It is especially comforting in the US, when looking at a vast, monolithic landscape of strip malls and truck stops and box stores where everything is the same same same, to think that even in America, there is “eine Welt, viele Welten.”
So television has offered a smorgasbord of Amish show options (of variable quality and authenticity, I might add): The Amish (PBS), Breaking Amish (TLC), Amish Mafia (Discovery), Amish: Out of Order (NatGeo), Amish in the City (UPN), Amish: A Secret Life (BBC1), Leaving Amish Paradise (BBC2), Living with the Amish (Channel 4). Most of this Amish documentary genre was started by the documentary film, “The Devil’s Playground”(2002), by Lucy Walker, which was as much about the Amish practice of rumspringa as it was about the synth soundtrack of the film, which was crafted by Aphex Twin, et al. and recalled Walker’s days working as a DJ in film school. [At the time it came out, a Swiss friend of mine called Walker’s documentary “boulevard” but since the explosion of Amish reality trash TV, I am going to label it the “highbrow” piece in the genre. Yes, I know Oprah devoted a whole show to the film.]
If you choose to watch this collection of films, whether because they remind you of what it must be like to break out of a strict Hassidic Jewish community and that’s interesting to you or because it’s just a great diversion from daily life, you will learn a couple of things:
Life is largely shitty to those Amish who choose to leave. Sure, there’s the quick pleasure of drinking, sex, cars, drugs and acting out. And all of it seems to happen all at once to an ex-Amish person, often with calamitous results. Then there’s working low wage jobs because you can only offer manual labor. And with it, suddenly, the best economic problems that capitalism can throw at you: predatory insurance practices, wildly uncontrolled rent prices, expensive commodities that are aggressively marketed to the teen to twenty-year old generation as status symbols, the list goes on. Naturally, the low wage job doesn’t cover the costs of this brave new marketplace so some ex-Amish become homeless, turn to drug dealing, and get into problems with the law. Occasionally there are some ex-Amish who are able to “make up” the schoolwork they have lost and somehow get into college. Of course, without a credit/debt history, it’s rather hard to integrate into the world of student loans, car loans, house loans, and so on. And thus it is hard to focus on one’s studies.
But it’s not all bad, of course. Ex-Amish do what a lot of formerly frum Jews do, namely, they remain socially connected to other ex-Amish people who are the only ones who can really “get” them. We can’t talk of assimilation of these folks, only of acculturation since, in the best-case scenario of an ex-Amish life, the person is able to navigate the “English” world and learn its codes, but continues some of the traditions and practices and social affiliations that they brought with them from their Amish community.
Television will tell you that these ex-Amish were once living a pre-modern life and when they enter into the “English” world, this means they are entering into modernity. This idea is the worst sort of arrogance possible. The Amish life (like the Hassidish life) is simply an alternate form of modernity to our own, one that has its own claims on traditions that in reality are not very old at all. If you were in the 19th century and your value systems were being swept away by forced mobilization of workers, fluctuating markets, the proletarianization of labor, and war as indeed most of Europe was at that time, you can either choose to transform what your values are or hold onto the external aspects of those values (i.e. dress, language, modes of transportation, food, community regulations, family order) for dear life. And what those “other modernity” communities seem to do very well is the practice of maintaining a face-to-face community, not as a control mechanism (though that’s what it also does) but as a way of being with others in the world. It has many benefits and most of the “ex” people feel the lack of that presence of people around them in the Amish (or in the Hassidic) world as a terrible loss that they never knew that they would miss when they left. And in the “this modernity” world that I inhabit, here, right in Columbia, Missouri, G-d knows I don’t ever see these ex-Amish people nor do I know any of them. I just sit in the house, in my private world, and hear about their presence here in this town where I am, through the “digital community” of YouTube.