Antiques, Eagles and Chickadees

It seems very clear from the description that these are five Amish youth who were raised in Amish homes but have left the community. A construction worker, Randy, has a pierced ear; a factory worker, Ruth, has died hair and smokes cigarettes, her family calls her very bad and she only sees them about twice a year. Construction worker Jonas is a self-described bad-boy; Mose had left the flock in his teens, returned to be baptized and now left again;, he's considered very rebellious and a bad influence.

My impression is that these are basically very worldly-wise Amish, likely young adults who have decided they're going to leave the church, and they're angry at the church. So they're not even technically in Rumspringa. These kids have decided they're leaving the community. They're the wildest of the wild.

And that was a major criticism I had of this whole program initially--that they will not be able to recruit typical Amish kids that reflect and represent typical Amish teenage life. Anybody that they're going to be able to seduce into this and pay them off is someone that is very marginal and for all practical purposes has already left the community. In a sense these are ex-Amish.

One of the falsehoods that has been part of this story over the last several weeks, and it's been repeated again and again, is the statement that during this period Amish youth leave their homes and leave their community and move away and decide if they're going to come back. That's simply not true. What happens is that, typically, when they're 16, they can go out on weekends with their friends. They may go to singing events, or Amish volley ball games. Before that, they don't go out in the evenings on the weekends. So when they're 16, often the young males will get a carriage, and then at that point they can go out and socialize with their friends. And they often join an Amish group of maybe 100 kids. In

, there are over 25 of these Amish youth groups.

They have friends who join the group, or somebody in the group recruits them. It's somewhat driven by geography--for example, someone in

is more likely to join a group nearby, but someone from

might go to

to a group that meets more frequently there. And the groups sort of move around. They may have a singing in Elizabethtown one night, and two weeks later in New Holland.

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