Genius Toiling in Obscurity

To Be, or Not to Be, Amish

Last night I watched Devil's Playground, a documentary about Amish teenagers during a period of life called rumspringa. Starting at the age of sixteen, Amish teens are given enormous freedom to explore the "english" world before they decide whether to undergo baptism and join the Amish church. This documentary follows some of the teens during this time. Their parties are apparently legendary, with alcohol, rock music, and drugs. I actually found much of the film dull; the Amish kids are disappointingly typical, and watching them play Nintendo, smoke, do beer bongs, and fondle each other was just about exactly as much fun as watching english kids do it. The only thing way to sustain any interest in these scenes was to keep reminding myself, "These kids are Amish!" But the novelty of seeing a girl in a bonnet light a cigarette wore off pretty fast.

For most of the film, the young people focused only on the most shallow aspects of mainsteam culture: drinking, drugs, driving cars, shopping. I kept waiting for one of them to say, "The first thing I did when I turned sixteen was get a library card and start reading all those books I was never allowed to read!" None of them were shown going to museums, or enrolling for classes at the local high school. One girl made an allusion to having visited a Baptist church for services, and another, who decided to leave the Amish, eventually does go to college, but for the most part, the parts of our culture they chose to sample struck me as the least valuable and appealing. Perhaps this has to do with having left school at thirteen, as all Amish children do, so that they were less prepared to engage with the better side of our culture, or perhaps it had to do with their age. It crossed my mind that sixteen is perhaps a bad age to turn kids loose, with no supervision.

I was a bit disdainful of these teens, to tell you the truth, listening to them spout shallow philosophy while portioning out drugs to sell. And I was a bit disdainful of the parents, as well, who during this time seem to completely abdicate parental responsibility. The Amish generally refuse to be photographed; even one of the girls the film focuses on stopped participating in filming once she joined the church. But the filmmakers were able to interview an Amish preacher, who said, "we have no jurisdiction during this time." So these naive kids, with an obviously distorted view of what it means to be english, are turned loose with no guidance to play out their version of mainstream life. For most, that just means getting drunk a few times before they go back home, but for one poor hapless kid it meant addiction and death threats from drug dealers. The pastor further said, "We have all the same problems with drugs and alchohol and teen pregnancy, and once they have given all that up they are welcome to come back." Once they've given it all up? Is there no help for them in their community?

The film says that the church currently has a 90% retention rate, which is the highest in its history. That seemed odd to me, but I've decided it does make sense, given the version of english life these kids sample. It's like college, without the college. At least our young people, when they're partying all night, are dragging themselves out of bed most mornings and going to classes; they're being exposed to shallow hedonism, and also being offered a taste of what is better in the world, a vision of their future, and a pathway to get from the wastefulness of party life to something more satisfying. The Amish kids work in factories, or do yard work, or, for the girls, wait tables, and when they decide they're tired of the life they're living, they don't know how to get from where they are to where they might be. One poor young man, who was tired of partying all the time but not ready to join the church, simply did not know what to do with himself, and the lost expression in his eyes was heartbreaking.

I think it's wonderful that 90% of them choose to remain Amish. But the film also made me feel they are making a false choice, that they don't have much chance of really understanding what english life is like. They choose between the Amish culture they grew up in and the weakest, worst version of us. Poor lambs.

Posted by Su Penn at August 17, 2003 09:33 PM | TrackBack