Out of Amish way

By Luke Benedictus
August 14, 2005

A new reality show follows the fortunes of five young Amish adults as they strive to make their way in the outside world. Luke Benedictus reports.

It all started when an American TV network was forced to pull the plug on its new reality TV show The Real Beverly Hillbillies. The idea had been to relocate a bunch of dirt-poor rednecks from the rural south to a Hollywood mansion complete with swimming pool, personal assistants and bucketloads of cash. Watch as these clueless hicks attempt to adapt to a luxurious life of flash cars, designer clothes and fancy restaurants - what a hoot! Promoting the show to the media, one CBS executive joked, "Imagine the episode where they have to interview maids!"

It was perhaps unsurprising, then, when The Real Beverly Hillbillies proposal stirred up mass protest (though it must be said that chronic bad taste is rarely an impediment to reality TV, as America's dwarf-dating show The Littlest Groom proves). The Centre for Rural Strategies in Kentucky organised a nationwide campaign against the selection of a "particular group of Americans for ridicule", and CBS was forced to back down.

So, did the network take a good hard look at itself? Not really. It just turned to the Amish community instead. As CBS president Les Moonves explained, "The Amish don't have as good a lobbying group".

The result was Amish in the City, the new reality series now showing on pay-TV channel Arena, in which young Amish adults Ruth, Miriam, Randy, Jonas and Mose are pitched from their devout communities into the gaudy excess of life in Los Angeles.

The change in lifestyle could hardly be more drastic. Back home, this strict Christian Mennonite sect takes the scriptures' command to be "in the world but not of the world" literally and remains stuck in an 18th-century time warp. Determined to follow a simple life, the Amish shun television, electricity and the internal combustion engine. Some orders even forbid buttons on clothing. In the TV show, these kids get a crash-course in modern culture, sharing a Big Brother-style house with five streetwise city slickers.

Peddling culture shock as popular entertainment is nothing new. The fish-out-of water formula is a staple of the film world, with everything from Midnight Cowboy to Crocodile Dundee plunging small-town bumpkins into the big bad city. But these young Amish adults are the real thing. They've never encountered escalators or parking meters before or heard of avocados or white chocolate. Their isolated upbringing also provides a reliable source of humour. When Whitney, the token African-American housemate, asks about the existence of black Amish people, Miriam replies, "I have a friend who gets real dark in the summer".

When Preview spoke to Mose, one of the Amish housemates, he confessed: "Probably the biggest culture shock for me was gay people. I didn't even know there was anything like gay people existing in the world. All of a sudden you move to a state where maybe 20 per cent are (gay). I felt a little uncomfortable walking down the street at first."

Given their limited experience of it, what's remarkable is how well the Amish deal with their brave new world. They're so open-minded, tolerant and mature that one critic described the show as "the best recruitment campaign the rural religion has had waged on its behalf since Kelly McGillis donned a bonnet in Witness".

Their conduct contrasts starkly with that of their city counterparts. The show's producers clearly set out to attract housemates who were as far from the Amish stereotype as possible, and succeeded in assembling a stunningly obnoxious group. Reese is the screamingly gay Hollywood club promoter; Ariel is a vegan Nazi who describes eggs as "chicken abortions"; Meagan is a wincingly shallow fashion stylist; and Whitney is a tough-talking girl from South Central LA whose boyfriend was killed in a drive-by shooting. Only Kevan, a muscle-bound swimming instructor from Las Vegas, shows any interest in the Amish. The rest are inane, vacuous and offensive, literally laughing in the faces of the Amish when they arrive.

"It seems like that's the way the world is out here," says Mose over the telephone - incidentally, a device he had never encountered before leaving his Amish community. "It's dog eat dog. You heard all the city kids saying, 'I just want people to take me for who I am'. But when the Amish kids arrived they couldn't take them for who they were."

What makes the show intriguing is that beneath the surface lurks genuine real-life drama. The five members of the Amish community are experiencing the outside world as part of a religious rite-of-passage known as "rumspringa", a Pennsylvania Dutch term meaning "running wild". The Amish don't believe children can make an informed decision about their religious faith, so baptism is delayed until adulthood. Before this comes rumspringa, a period when young Amish adults can sample the temptations normally banned within their religious communities.

Once their coming-of-age experience is over they face a stark dilemma: commit to the Amish church or sever all ties with their community forever. In the final episode of the series, each of the Amish participants must reveal their decision.

The implications of this life-changing choice add an emotional edge to what would otherwise be formulaic reality TV. In the first episode, Jonas stands atop a skyscraper, wrestling with his plans for the future. "Looking at the city, I realised how many possibilities there were," he says. "And how hard it might be to go back to the Amish life."

As it happens, Mose, 26, decided not to return to his Amish community in Wisconsin. For the two years since the series was filmed, he's been living in Missouri, where he's started his own construction business with his 18-year-old brother, who also abandoned the Amish faith.

Mose's decision to leave the community means he will never again see his parents or 12 other siblings. "For you to understand the full impact of this let's visualise a room filled with a whole bunch of friends that you've made in the first 23 years of your life," he says. "Then you walk into another room and you can never return to the room where your friends are again. You can never see those friends or ever speak with them again. You don't even have any pictures of them because the Amish won't allow you to have pictures (photos are believed to encourage vanity). The fact that I made all those friends and the door to that room is now closed is really hard to accept."

Understandably it's been a rocky period of adjustment. Mose's biggest struggle has been coming to terms with the lack of morality in the outside world, particularly when it comes to business. "It amazes me that you can't just shake hands with someone on a price and it's settled," he says. "Even contracts don't mean anything any more because people will get lawyers and try and fight so they won't pay you when the time comes. That sort of thing, the fact that you can't trust a lot of people, is the hardest thing for me so far. I've been very, very shocked by that."

Does he think he'd have made the same decision about his future if he hadn't appeared on TV? "The show didn't really decide it actually one way or the another," Mose insists. "It just gave me a better outlook as to what I'm getting into if I leave."

Most Amish teenagers embark on their rumspringa between the ages of 16 and 18, but Mose never took the opportunity and had already been baptised into the church, which made his decision to go on TV even more controversial. But Mose felt compelled to explore his options. Although he considers himself "a very religious person", he had become increasingly frustrated by regulations within the community that had no Biblical foundation whatsoever. "I just couldn't abide by them, although to be Amish that's what I had to do."

He found many of the community's rules to be pointlessly archaic. "I don't mind hard work but we always had to do our field work with horses. So I could be out there ploughing for maybe two days straight with horses and not get that much ploughed. Then on the third day the English neighbour would come out with a tractor and a plough and in about four hours have finished his whole field while I'd still only be halfway there. That seems unfair to me."

The Amish rejection of modern culture may seem stubbornly perverse, but recent research has fuelled America's fascination with the sect. Last year two psychologists from the University of Illinois collected data on the "life satisfaction" of sociological groups around the world. Members from the Pennsylvanian Amish sect reported some of the greatest levels of satisfaction of any the groups surveyed. Levels of depression were also found to be substantially lower than the American average.

But whether the Amish lifestyle leaves people equipped to deal with life outside the community is more questionable. The sect's total rejection of higher education means that after a child completes eighth grade, they must devote themselves to a life of farming and domestic chores. The Devil's Playground, a feature documentary about rumspringa, suggests that those who turn their backs on the Amish faith are left with little option but to support themselves through factory work or manual labour.

It's not a view Mose holds with. His construction business has earned a glowing reputation in Missouri, he claims. "We are hard workers, and the reason we are is that it's the way we were brought up."

Amish in the City is on Arena Saturdays at 7.30pm

No going back
Filmmaker Lucy Walker became closely involved with the Amish community while making The Devil's Playground, a feature documentary about the coming-of-age process known as "rumspringa". The experience left her deeply ambivalent about the the Amish way of life.

"Sometimes it occurs to me that being Amish should be illegal," she wrote in 21C magazine. She listed some of the things that had turned her against the Amish way of life. "Learning that an emaciated 42-year-old woman I knew was anorexic because it was her only means of birth control and after eight children she couldn't face any more," she wrote. "Listening to yet another boy describe how desperately he begged his parents to let him go on through high school and how much he loathed his factory job. Meeting a gay man whose Amish teen years had been a living hell of chastising himself and praying to be released from his 'affliction', which the Amish consider so sinful that they won't even acknowledge it."

But Walker also fouind much to admire. "I still fantasise about giving it all up to be an Amish farmwife with 16 kids," she admitted. "One magic hour, sitting on the porch drinking lemonade with an old Amish couple, I was moved to tears by the love and peace and grace of their lives - free from clutter, no question as to how to live, eternity sewn up, surrounded by children and a community guaranteed to lavish love and care until the end of their days."

When her filmmaking experience was finally over, Walker left the Amish world and went back to her own. And, she wrote, "The 'English' world was ugly when I returned".
