The Amish - Winners of the 20th century evolutionary contest
The Amish - Winners of the 20th century evolutionary contest
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Economist Eric Kaufmann asked this question in his 2010 book with that title. Kaufmann's answer was an astounding yes. And the religious group that most of all seems to be inheriting America is, according to Kaufmann, the Amish.
In 1920, there were about 5000 Amish in the US. In 2022, there were 375 000. The increase was almost solely caused by a high birth rate. Very few people converted to Amish groups. If this rate of growth continues, the Amish will be the majority population of the US in 2220.
There are a number of reasons why this will probably not happen. The Amish thrive as a minority. It is not obvious they will continue to do so when they are getting closer to becoming the majority. For example, the Amish are pacifists and as such they are dependent on surrounding populations for their defense. Nevertheless, we will see more of the Amish in the next few decades.
Introducing the Amish
After being alerted by Kaufmann's predictions, Anders and I started reading about the Amish. I read some of the multiple books by Professor Donald Kraybill, who is the only book-writing academic I have found who is squarely focused on the Amish. I have also read a number of autobiographies by current and former Amish people.
Anders and I even got the idea to write an introductory book about the Amish, since there is no such book in the Swedish language. But that project came to a halt when we quit both writing in Swedish and writing books. However, we have learned a few things about the Amish and this is probably only the first post of several on that subject.
A diverse collection
One of the first things I learned about the Amish is that they are not one centralized group with one set of rules. They consist of several different branches with the independence to set their own rules. All the branches share a fundamental theology: They are Anabaptists who believe that only adults can be meaningfully baptized. That means that their many children are not really members of their congregations. The Amish don't build churches; instead they gather in members' homes according to a rolling schedule. Congregations are not allowed to be bigger than about 30-40 families. When the congregations grow too big, they split. Religious leaders are chosen by lot. Only married men qualify. The "winner" becomes one of the 1-3 spiritual leaders of the congregation meaning a sometimes heavy responsibility with no pay or remuneration except the obligation to deliver a sermon during service every second Sunday.
Selectively low-tech
All Amish groups restrict their members' use of technology. But they restrict it very differently. The most conservative (and fastest growing) group is the Schwartzentruber Amish. They forbid most things: Electricity, any clothing containing elastane, tractors, telephones, hormonal birth control, the internet, indoor plumbing. But there are also things they don't forbid: Pesticides, chemical fertilizer, motorized washing machines. In general, the Amish have no issues with chemicals. They are no compulsive ecologists.
Other Amish groups permit more technology than the Schwartzentruber Amish. There is one branch, the Beachy Amish, that even allows cars, as long as all chrome details on them have been painted black. No other Amish groups allow car ownership, however. In general, Amish people (except the Schwarzentruber) are allowed to ride in cars, but not to drive them. No Amish groups allow their members to connect to the electricity grid. But the more technology-positive use a lot of batteries and even solar cells. Some groups use bicycles. Several groups have propane-powered refrigerators. An Amish kitchen can look a lot like any modern kitchen, with one exception: There is no dishwasher. Telephones are never allowed in the house, but in some Amish groups members can install a telephone booth outdoors in the garden.
Why did they win the evolutionary contest?
The obvious question is: Why are these horse and buggy-people reproducing more than any other population group in North America? They don't even believe in evolution, and still, they seem to be great at it.
The simple answer is that the Amish, like traditional cultures in general, oppress women into bearing many children. After having read a number of books both on and by Amish people, I don't believe in that explanation. The Amish have an ideal of amiability and cooperation between spouses. Domestic violence between spouses is tabooed (and very unusual according to most observers). People mostly marry in their early 20s and they freely choose whom to marry. In contrast to many other traditional societies, elders do not arrange marriages between younger people.
Instead, I think we have to look at the Amish lifestyle as a whole to understand why the Amish have more children than others. Many, if not most, religions encourage childbearing in theory. For example catholicism has rules that strongly discourages abortion and contraception. But discouraging measures against childbearing is not at all the same as encouraging childbearing. The Amish encourage not only conception, but a whole lifestyle where having another child does not impose a heavy cost. That lifestyle has several components:
Compulsively rural
There is no rule telling the Amish they cannot live in cities. But the Amish ban on motor vehicles pushes them to own horses instead. Unless you are very rich, it is impossible to own a horse in a city or a town. Consequently, all Amish live in rural areas, on horse-friendly properties.
What is horse-friendly tends to be child-friendly. But most of all, the Amish have avoided the high costs of living in a city. Rural properties are less expensive than urban properties meaning the Amish can afford bigger houses with room for more children.
Childhood not prolonged
All Amish groups require their members to quit school after eighth grade. Education higher than that risks leading to pride, they mean. That way, the Amish have escaped the partially wasteful spending on higher education that most middle class people view as compulsory.
Amish teenagers also become productive earlier. When they quit school at 14, they start working. That way, they actually work a number of years before starting families, just like the majority population. The difference is that they start both working and having children about ten years earlier than the upper middle class of mainstream society. That way, the Amish get ten more years to reproduce.
No cars
My neighbor, a mother of three, once told me:
"I really like having a baby. But when the children get older, they have to be driven to all their activities, and that takes a lot of time". So, basically, my neighbor's spontaneous explanation of her decision to have no more than three children was that she could not drive more than three children to their leisure activities.
The Amish avoid that obstacle to having children through not owning cars. They can't drive to soccer training because they don't drive.
No competition
The Amish also don't play soccer because they don't compete. If they play soccer, they do it only for fun. Competing is against the Amish spirit. Humility is one of the most important Amish ideals: A good Amish person does not try to be more than others.
This, I believe, affects fertility a lot. A very important reason why people don't have children or don't have more children is that they constantly compete: Parents have to compete with non-parents for jobs and promotions. In this competition, children will always be a burden.
The Amish are forbidden from participating in the status-competition of mainstream society. And so are their children. Amish parents are supposed to strive at not getting their children into elite universities and not excelling in music and sports. That is much easier than raising children who are better than other children. Forcing people to skip the rat race probably raises their fertility more than most measures.
No dishwasher
As far as I know, no Amish group allows dishwashers. Should this really be on the plus side? I think so. Because washing dishes is a communal activity. Even rather small children can help with, for example, drying the dishes.
With perfectly modern technology, two parents can carry three children to adulthood without getting any help from the children with the chores involved. That exercise is entirely possible, but the parents will be tired and probably feel that another child is beyond them. The Amish anti-technology rules effectively makes it almost impossible to raise children without teaching them to help out. The anti-technology rules also leave more work that is possible for children to do: There are many child-sized brooms on the market, but few child-sized vacuum cleaners.
With no dishwasher and vacuum cleaner and a couple of children, you need to be a good leader to maintain a decent home. And when you have become a good leader, you can have one more child and then another and another without things becoming chaotic.
High-investing fathers
This might be the most important reason why the Amish have many children: They are decisively monogamous. Mainstream society mostly disapproves of polygamy, people having more than one partner at a time. Serial monogamy, on the other hand, is seen as the most normal of the normal.
Not so among the Amish. As long as both spouses are alive, taking another spouse counts as bigamy. Divorce is simply not a possibility in the Amish world.
This naturally leads to some personal tragedies. But it probably also leads to higher fertility. In mainstream society, men start new families much more often than women after a separation. This affects how many men and women remain childless: Significantly more men than women never have children.
For the individual man, this means that he can never be sure this is it. If he is successful and handsome, it is not that improbable that he will meet a younger woman with whom he can start family number 2. Not so for an Amish man. He knows that it doesn't matter how rich and successful he becomes and how handsome he remains. The wife he has is the only wife he will have. Investing in his own mate-value on the open market is meaningless. He will be better off investing in his family.
There is a female surplus among Amish adults, because more young men than women leave the Amish when they grow up. In Date-o-nomics (2015), economist Jon Birger showed that in environments with more females than males, males normally get less interested in investing in pair-bonds and family. Instead, a hook-up culture, where women try to beat each other in terms of sexual availability, tend to form. The phenomenon exists in different kinds of dating markets: From universities in New York City to the Mormons (although among the Mormons, non-marriage is the problem rather than hook-up culture). However, I have heard no one suggest that the surplus of unmarried women make Amish men less interested in marriage. Could it be that the Amish culture is capable of counteracting the effects of a certain female surplus while most other cultures can not? That in itself would be a reason to study the Amish more.
Within the rules, there is only one way for a young Amish man to have a sexual and romantic relationship: To leave the Amish or to become a father. And Amish fathers are supposed to invest. Not only as breadwinners, but as physically present parents. For the Amish, it is a longstanding ideal that both mother and father should work at home. This is increasingly difficult to live up to. Amish writer Lena Yoder's husband tried to be a full-time dairy farmer, but had to take a factory job for financial reasons. A generation earlier, another Amish family with a book-writing wife faced the same struggle: Marlene C. Miller, author of autobiographical book Called to be Amish (2015), writes:
"Every night we knelt, asking protection for Johnny at work and praying, “God, if you want us to have a bigger farm, open up the door, so Daddy can stay at home and not have to work away from here.”
God didn't hear them, it seems, because in spite of buying a bigger farm and attempting full-time farming, Johnny ended up working 32 years in a factory before retiring.
Hard-working mothers
The Amish never shared the ideal that Dad should be away at work and Mom should be at home only taking care of the children. Instead, their ideal was, and is, that both mom and dad should be home working and taking care of the children in the process. That way, the lives of Amish fathers and mothers were often more similar than the lives of parents in mainstream society.
In mainstream society, childcare and work is seen as more or less incompatible. Taking care of two or three children and keeping a modern household going is seen as a full-time job, more or less. The Amish don't see it that way. Mothers as well as fathers are expected to work with more than childcare. Amish women not only cook and clean while they look after their children. They also grow food in their kitchen gardens, preserve food for the winter, sew clothes for the family and often also participate in money-generating activities like crafts, sales or agriculture (the Amish are good at greenhouse growing). For an Amish woman, a new baby doesn't mean that she needs to take "time off work", because she is always at work. A baby makes her less efficient for some time, but it doesn't alter her entire life circumstances.
Among the current generation of Amish parents, many have got used to the idea that daddy working away from home is a part of life. That doesn't necessarily mean that Amish mothers become traditional housewives. For example, Marianne Janzi, author of the autobiographical book Simple Pleasures (2016), is both a mother and a shoe-shop owner.
When Marianne married a construction worker called Allan and had her first child, she quit her job as a school-teacher. Instead she and Allan started a shoe-shop in a building next to their house. During weekdays, Allan works in construction, while Marianne takes care of the children, the home and the shoe-shop. On weekends, Allan sometimes assists Marianne's work. For example, they go on trips to Toronto to buy shoes for their shop.
In that sense, Marianne is not uncommon among Amish women. For them, there is no choice between work and motherhood. Both are natural parts of life.
Should we all become Amish?
I have my reasons not to be Amish - I like intellectual discussions, I think science is a great idea and I hate to wear things on my head, to mention a few. Still, after I started to read about the Amish, I was surprised at how much there is to learn from them. Like the Amish, I think that parents (of both sexes) should stay home with their children as much as possible. I value local self-sufficiency. I think that it is good when neighbors in the countryside cooperate and know each other. Learning about the Amish gives me clues about how those things can be done in practice.
For society as a whole, there is one good reason to get to know the Amish better: We will see more of them. The rise of the Amish is cultural evolution in real time. We know preciously little about the future but we do know that it will be populated by the descendants of the peoples having children today.
That fact leads to an important question for our society that the Amish could help us answer: Why is fertility shrinking? If the Amish can have many children and we can't, what in their culture permits them to? What in our culture prevents us? If we want a say in the future these are questions we need to ask ourselves.