When Will We See the Teens Year Again
One Twelvemonth Later: How Amish Teens Decided
ABC News revisits four teens who were thinking of quitting the Amish customs.
Sept. 4, 2009 — -- Adolescence is typically a time to experiment and test boundaries. Merely if you're an Amish teenager, you face a confounding pick between family or isolation, tradition or the mod globe, faith or uncertainty.
Concluding summer "Primetime's" Jay Schadler told the story of four Amish teenagers in central Ohio who found themselves at a crossroads. Schadler had followed the teens for a year during the Amish rite of passage known as rumspringa.
This catamenia of discovery, loosely translated in the Amish's Pennsylvania Dutch language as "running around," gives Amish teens the adventure to explore the ordinarily forbidden modern world before deciding whether they will forever commit themselves to the Amish style of life.
ABC News returned to Ohio this summer to run into what paths the youths had chosen. Had they decided to return to Amish life? Or were they setting a different form, one that would lead them away from their families and customs?
The Amish way of life means living according to a strict gear up of religious rules, with no electricity, no cars, no music and no education beyond the eighth course. The Amish wear traditional apparel and stay away from the outside, or "English language" world.
Baptized in one case as children and once again as adults, the Amish believe that just adults can make informed decisions virtually their own salvation. The decision to join the Anabaptist Christian Church means they consciously have on the responsibility of following the Ordnung -- the unwritten rules -- that take sustained the culture for several centuries.
The challenge is that if the outside temptations evidence more powerful than the world they accept always known, the teens will spend the rest of their lives severed from their families. It'due south a high-stakes option between the enticement of freedom or returning to the faith and condolement of family and community life.
Iv Teens at a Crossroads
According to studies done by Thomas J. Meyers, a sociology professor at Goshen College in Indiana, more than than 80 percent of Amish youth eventually join the church.
In 2007, when ABC News outset spoke with the 4 teens (whose concluding names accept been omitted to protect the identities of their families), each was grappling with the question of permanently leaving the Amish customs.
"If you don't grow up in the Amish, then you don't know what it's like," said Danny, then 18, who ran away from his Amish family past jumping from the second-floor of his father's subcontract house late ane night.
He negotiated his way through a serial of kickoff encounters with the modern globe, including remote controls, text messaging and drunken nights, to find that he had escaped one set of rules for some other he didn't understand. Danny'due south internal conflicts about the determination to exist or not to be Amish landed him, first, in problem and, then, in jail.
"They think I'm lost," Danny said at the time. "If I were to die, they think I tin't get to heaven. I hateful, I might not go to heaven, just not every Amish is going to heaven."
When ABC News first spoke with Lena almost two years ago when she was 16, she cleaned houses by 24-hour interval and at night texted and talked secretly on her cell phone by candlelight. "Y'all have a large decision if you desire to stay with the Amish or if y'all desire to leave," said Lena, the youngest of 11 children. "I'g dislocated in my life."
Although Lena dressed in Amish wearing apparel, underneath her unproblematic dress and white bonnet she wore a T-shirt and blue jeans. "Well, my dream correct now is to go out the Amish and do what I want to," she told Schadler at the fourth dimension. "I want to do a lot of stuff, and simply become out and have freedom for a while, complete liberty."
Lena'southward human activity of rebellion was that she planned to become her GED -- a total high school diploma. The Amish traditionally only go to schoolhouse through eighth course because they believe that life experience trumps formal pedagogy and that young people should apprentice to larn the basic skills needed to make a living.
When ABC News first spoke with him, Nelson, who turns 20 today, drove a souped-up buggy, consummate with a stereo organization, subwoofers and an iPod charger.
He laughingly called himself a "high-tech Amish." Only he besides said he is not much dissimilar from the generations before him. "Information technology seems like every generation takes it a little further and a little farther," he said. "My grandpa told me when he was my age, they had a trivial radio, but information technology was a existent old type and they nonetheless had to creepo it to get music out of it."
Harley, 19 at the time, already had left his community when Schadler start spoke with him. He had gear up out with the clothes on his dorsum and $21 in his pocket. When he outset spoke with ABC News, he admitted no second thoughts. "Some people can take information technology, and some of them can't," he said. "For me, information technology's like, my best choice I ever fabricated."
Harley had tried to maintain a relationship with his family, he said, but his parents didn't desire him to visit very often, every bit they were afraid he would exist a bad influence on his 12 younger siblings.
"My one fiddling brother, he was nigh a twelvemonth old when I left," Harley recalled. "Every time I'd come dwelling and I'd walk in the door, he'd stitch yelling my proper name. 'You going to stay at habitation this time?' And I tell him, 'No.'
"When I beginning left the Amish, I missed my family similar very bad," he said at the time, adding that he nonetheless collection by his family's home sometimes. "I try and stay away and so to respect mom and dad. They're ... they're disappointed in me."
All the teenagers had to decide for themselves if those family bonds were plenty to go on them in the community.
"Basically, the reason I'm staying is my family right now, at home. I know I'd miss them and they'd miss me," Nelson said last summer. "I just similar the lifestyle, information technology's a elementary life. Piece of work hard, play hard, it's just fun."
Where They Are Now: an Update
Each of the four youths profiled by ABC News last summer has altered his or her course, some turning back toward the community they know all-time, others looking farther afield.
Self-proclaimed bachelor and captain of the road Harley, now 21, realized his dream of being a truck commuter. But afterward 7 months on the road, he became so homesick that he decided to give the Amish life another try.
"I just decided to come home and endeavour to live the Amish life again. ... Life without family sucks," he told ABC News.
He's now dating an Amish girl and plans to be baptized into the Amish religion in the leap.
Two weeks after the "Primetime" programme aired last year, Lena, now 18, moved in with her young man, Ruben, in a house a few miles down the road from her mother. She no longer rides in a equus caballus and buggy. She has traded information technology in for a red sports car.
"I never really imagined I'd actually drive but I like it at present. ... Felt like I got freedom," she said.
The beer bottles and drinking that used to be office of her life take been replaced by baby magazines and late-nighttime feedings. In June, she and Ruben welcomed a baby boy into the world. While she has no plans to return to the Amish, she said she's finally at peace.
Nelson tin can now be plant in Illinois, where he works as a wrangler at a children's campsite. He left his family to explore himself and to travel.
The "high-tech" Amish has traded in his buggy for a Camaro, and when he'south not updating his profile on Facebook, he'south learning what the outside world has to offer.
"A lot of people thought that I was going to stay Amish and then I guess I surprised everybody," he said.
Every bit for Danny, his midnight escape took place two summers ago, but he'southward never been too far from home.
"Yeah, I'll go back," he said. "Probably be Amish in 10 years ... just for the sake of my parents, I estimate."
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/2020/amish-teens-tempted-drop/story?id=8473224
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