Amish are the Fastest Growing Religious Group in the USA and Canada
I watched the BBC documentary “Amish: A Secret Life” and found myself oddly jealous of their close-knit community. As these particular folk are “Old Order” Amish, the rules they live by would drive me spare, but I would dearly love to travel around in one of their horse and buggies!
Anyway, do watch the documentary and although you guys outside the UK are prohibited from viewing, there are ways around this which you’ll have to figure out.
In the meantime, Professor John Byron has given me permission to cross-post the following:
Amish are the Fastest Growing Religious Group in the USA and Canada
Where I live in Ashland, Ohio we have lots of interaction with the Amish. I buy their vegetables at the market , watch their buggies pass my house as they head to Aldi and Walmart, and I may even wait in line behind one at the bank. But I had no idea that they were the fastest growing religious group. And apparently it is not due to conversions, but births. According to recent census information they are taking the “be fruitful and multiply” command very seriously.
A new census estimates that a new Amish community is founded every three and a half weeks in North America and they estimate that nearly 60% of these communities were founded after 1990. The census restricted the count to Amish who refuse or limit modern amenities, such as electricity and automobiles.
The researchers who compiled the census used a variety of sources to produce this count, including current and archival settlement directories and statistics from publications that cover some of the largest Amish communities, as well as by calculating estimates based on research-based facts about Amish settlement characteristics.
Accordingly, researchers say that this suggests that the Amish religion is the fastest growing religion in the United States, but this grow is not due to new converts. The growth is due to the number of children the Amish give birth to every year and every 21 to 22 years, these children grow up, become baptized as adults into the Amish religion, and give birth to several more children. Only adults may receive baptism into the Amish faith and among “the 250,784 Amish adherents identified in the census, 145,235 are considered non-members because they are children who have not yet been baptized.”
Those are some pretty startling figures. At that rate we will be the United States of Amish in a few years.
Tags: Religion Society
August 4th, 2012 at 9:44 am
Someone is bound to post this so let me be the first
Weird Al Yankovic “Amish Paradise”
August 4th, 2012 at 10:01 am
There is much to be commended about Christians who ‘return to the roots’. Not just the simpler way of life but a true focus on Christ in every part of their lives. In Russia and in the USA and Canada, there has been a resurgence not only in Orthodox Christianity but also an interest in the Old Believers – a schismatic group – who refused to go along with revisions introduced by Patriarch Nikon between 1652–66. Like the Amish,Old Believers eschew many of the trappings of modern ‘civilisation’, preferring to work on the land and derive their living from the produce of their own hands. I guess we all hanker after ‘The Good Life’ and some seem closer to it than others. Check out documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_KjiX-zPzw
August 4th, 2012 at 12:13 pm
I saw that programme, and thought it was very interesting.
Two things caught my attention, though.
The first was the fact that the BBC used a sung version of the Salve Regina during the covert filming of people arriving in the family’s home for a Sunday service. I wonder what the puritanically Protestant sect would have thought of this most Catholic of Marian anthems?
The second was when the two parents revealed that they had been secretly baptised by people from outside the ‘old ways’ as they thought their original Amish baptism was invalid (possibly because they had now moved towards an anabaptist or pentecostal view of adult baptism?). But the father then described this second ‘baptism’, saying that they went to a river and were “Baptised in the name of Jesus”. I couldn’t help but laugh to think that this second baptism was invalid – for a valid baptism has to be made (with the right intention) “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
I genuinely feel sorry for these poor people who base their lives on certain traditions which are man-made, as opposed to the traditions handed to the Church by the Apostles.
God bless
D
August 5th, 2012 at 5:52 am
What ritual do they perform while baptising? Can anybody help me here