Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Flightless Bird: Amish

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

In this week’s Flightless Bird, David Farrier sets out to understand the Amish, a group of Swiss Germans slash Alsatians that chose America as their home away from home. Why does a country that embraces fast cars, fast money, and fast food also embrace the very slow-moving Amish? David discovers why back in 2000 there were only 178,000 Amish in the US, and why that number has climbed to well over 367,000 - an increase of 106%. David sits down with Susan Trollinger, a professor from the University of Dayton, to talk about Amish tourism and culture. He also talks to Misty Griffin, who wrote a book critical of the Amish called “Tears of the Silenced” and consulted on the Peacock documentary “Sins of the Amish.” She discusses why she had a terrible time being Amish and the problems she says exist in the Amish community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm David Farrier, a New Zealander who accidentally got stuck in America, and I want to find out what makes this country tick. Now ever since I've been here, there's not a day goes by where I don't pinch myself and go, oh my goodness, what's going on over there? And that's definitely how I feel about the Amish. Before getting stranded in this strange tapestry that is the United States, the only things I knew about the Amish came from that Weird Al parody of Gangster's Paradise. I'm a man of the land, I'm into discipline.

Got a bible in my hand and a beard on my chin. I knew the Amish hated electricity and technology, and loved beards, farming, and God. Beyond that, I had nothing. Since I've been here, I've watched some breaking Amish and learned about Rumspringer, that period where teenage Amish leave the fold and go buck wild in the big city, experiencing all America has to offer before deciding if they'll go back and be baptized into Amishness for life. At least that's what I think Rumspringer is. Whatever it is, it makes for great reality TV. There's just so much going on in New York City. We just want to do and see as much as we can today.

Dude, this is nuts. I didn't know what a subway is. I didn't know where they go. But who are the Amish, really? And why the heck did a bunch of Swiss, German, slash Alsatians choose America as their home away from home? The United States is all about fast cars, fast food, and fast money. The Amish are none of those things. And yet America has been good to them. Back in 2000, there were only 178,000 Amish here. Last year, there were over 367,000, an increase of 106%. So comb that beard and grab that teat of your nearest cow and start milking,

because this is the Amish episode. I'm a flightless bird Touchdown in America Have you ever milked a cow? I have. It's a faded memory. It is. It didn't stick. Okay.

I think we went to a farm for school or like daycare. I did a lot via daycare. So you might have milked a cow. Yeah. Okay. I have a lot of repressed daycare memories. Okay. Do they have daycare so you might have milked a cow yeah okay i have a lot of repressed daycare memories okay do they have daycare in new zealand it depends what your definition of daycare is because we have such different words what is your daycare okay daycare is a place where you drop off

your kid how old they can be newborns okay so how old were you when you went to milk this cow? One. They take you on field trips and stuff. So normally daycare is after school. Okay. Because your mom is at work still. Yeah, totally. We definitely have daycare.

Okay. We aren't sent to milk cows. What about summer? Summer? What? How does summer change the cow scenario because in the summer they have to do field trips they have to fill out the whole day so they'll take you places no this feels a bit like summer camp territory which we don't do in new zealand you don't have

summer breaks from school we have four terms so our holidays are less we don't have this chasm in the middle of the year that you have to send your kids away. Okay. We don't have that. I'm glad we cleared that up. Yeah. But schooling, of course, it does fit in with the Amish, because all I really knew about the Amish going in, besides that reality show,

was that they're schooled to a certain point, and then they leave. No more school. I think they just do primary school or something. Really? I didn't know that. They don't do the whole thing. They start at the beginning, they do a little bit, and then they become part of the community and do No More School.

I mean, I want to keep talking, but I also really want to hear the doc on this because I know very little. We're in the same boat then. This is one of those topics that I feel so ill-equipped to talk about. I'm confident I got that schooling fact right. Okay. But beyond that, I've got very little. Rob backs me up.

Yeah, they stop after eighth grade. So yeah, but beyond that, I don't know a lot. I commend them for rumspringer because... I like your accent. Whatever that was. Did I do that? A little bit. What just happened? I think that? A little bit. I don't know what just happened.

It was wild. Maybe that's how you say rumspringer. Say it. I say rumspringer. Say it. Rumspringer. Okay, I said it like that. Anyway, I do really think that's a good idea.

Yeah. They're not just hoarding them. They're saying, go out and test out the real world and then make your decision for yourself. I like that. And it would be such a wild thing to do. Imagine if, I don't know, Scientologists or something did that. Just like you can stop all this for a day. Yeah. A month. Just go out, go crazy, do what you want. Learn about the rest of the world. Yeah. Take all this psychiatry and therapy work you need, do it all, and then come back to Scientology if you want. If you don't want to, don't. Yeah, it's very confident.

It's really confident. It's like they're confident you will come back to the system. Also, you're probably so indoctrinated into it by then, the real world is just a huge panic. Too scary. Like you try and take the subway and you're like, what is this thing? You don't know how to buy a ticket for the subway. You don't know what Uber is.

So many baddies. So many baddies everywhere. The world is terrifying. It is. But yeah, it's a difficult topic to get into. It was very hot in LA, so I didn't get out to talk to people. So I just got Americans. You're getting lazier and lazier.

I'm getting lazier and lazier. Just to send me some voice memos. Okay. Just occasionally, I don't like meeting people. These are sort of other Americans' impressions and sort of recent thoughts about the Amish. It's very American that you're getting lazier. It really is. No, it's

too hot. I was driving with my friends through central Wisconsin to go to an Amish bakery and they pulled over because this was when Pokemon Go was popular. They saw a Pokemon that they wanted to catch. As I'm sitting bored in the back seat, I look out the window,

and behind us is somebody who's Amish riding in a horse and buggy. And I thought, wow, this is really two ends of the spectrum, isn't it? So I do business with an Amish family. They would ask me who the president was and what was kind of going on in pop culture because they couldn't look at their phone for anything besides business use. I told them that I quit my job and then they proceeded to call me and text me and send me emails about how I was going to be banished to hell and all of this stuff because I didn't have a job and I didn't have purpose

and I needed to look at the Bible and he kept on sending me these Bible verses. We were driving to go fishing on this stream. As we're driving, we start to see more and more horse poop on the road, which obviously means that people are driving their horse and buggies around. So we start to now encounter the horse and buggies. You know, you kind of have to pass them. They don't go that fast. And we see that they're all headed in the same direction. So we kind of wanted to see what was up we drove by where they were all going and there was this huge

huge farmland and there were about 20 horse and buggies all parked in a line and they were having a big volleyball tournament and they're full dresses and everything everyone just looked like they were having so much fun when i got a puppy, I thought I might have been getting scams because the breeder wasn't sending me any photos of the puppies. But I brought my parents with me so that I wasn't alone and went to this breeder's house. Turns out he was just Amish and did not have a phone with camera capabilities. Everything went really well. I got a great puppy and he's so cute and lovely. When I was a senior in college in Indiana, I was a server at a steakhouse. And I remember

this like relatively large group of young Amish people came in with an English guy, meaning a non-Amish person who had clearly driven them in a big white van. And all the girls had Victoria's Secret bags because, as we were told, underwear was the only thing they could purchase in the English world because it was under the garments they sewed. And they had a big steak dinner and, I presume, went back to their Amish ways. When I was 11, it was a camp that adopted the Amish lifestyle, but weren't religiously Amish. So at the camp, you would wake up, have free time. We'd go play with the animals. I always like play with the kittens, have breakfast. Then you'd have a morning chore, which might be doing dishes or sweeping up the barn or, you know, feeding the animals.

doing dishes or sweeping up the barn or, you know, feeding the animals. And then you'd have lunch. Then we had siesta and then we had an afternoon special. So sometimes it was doing a chore, like I build a fence. This Amish food truck, they are the most incredible donuts. They're super thick, super dense, but they taste exactly like Krispy Kreme donuts. Oh, so they're way better than Krispy Kreme because they don't just like disintegrate in your mouth immediately, but they're these thick, bready, delicious donuts. During my first year of teaching in Waukerusa, Indiana, all the kids spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. So along with English, they also had this other language, making it really easy for them to talk behind your backs or make snarky comments in different language. Secondly, most Amish kids don't continue schooling after eighth grade. So a lot of them, they go home to work instead. And it really comes down

to the parent's decision. I was at a park and they had a booth set up and they were selling green beans, pickles, bread, pies, jellies and jams, cookies, and we bought a little bit of everything. And I have to say, the pie was a little soggy. Soggy pie. That made me desperate for a Krispy Kreme donut. Oh, well, apparently the Amish make an even better donut than the Krispy Kreme. You just have to go and find one somewhere. That's a huge statement. I don't know that I can believe it until I try it.

Is Krispy Kreme the best donut in America? It's so good. I'm going to get in trouble. You've just entrapped me. But, yeah. They're really good. I disagree. You can see Rob fizzing.

Rob likes his with, like, fruity pebbles and all kinds of stuff. That's not true. But this, that's an artisanal donut that Rob likes. But classic. Yeah. You can't get better than a hot Krispy Kreme with that. The light is on at Krispy Kreme and you drive in. I need to do a donuts episode of this show.

Oh my God. Yes. I agree. Krispy Kreme donuts are very good. Anyway, the Amish. I'm confused. Yeah donuts episode of this show. Oh my God, yes. I agree, Krispy Kreme donuts are very good. Anyway, the Amish. I'm confused. Yeah, no, hit me. How come they can text, but they can't know who the president is?

I mean, I get into this a bit in the documentary, but their relationship with technology is really interesting. And each community or type of Amish sort of has their own rules and regulations. Because the whole idea is not to embrace technology. And so there's different levels of it, though. It fascinated me that they can't take an Uber or a taxi. They can't drive themselves. But they can let someone else drive them in a car.

It's frustrating as an outsider because you're just like, just drive. Just drive. Because also now all you're doing is you found a loophole and now you're asking somebody else to do work for you there's another religion like this as well orthodox judaism absolutely yeah restrictions on using electricity yeah i went to university with this jewish woman and that was like a tv production course and there were certain days where we wouldn't film with her because that was a day where she couldn't use electricity. So similar restrictions around things. I had a friend whose neighbor was Orthodox, and he came over once and was like,

can you come turn on the lights in my house? Yeah, right. And you're like, what? I was like, wait, I think there's this tunnel vision that happens where they're way too close to the painting. They're only seeing pixels and they can't stand back and say, I don't think anything's going to happen by me actually turning the light switch. It's not like I'm not having electricity. As an outsider, it feels so frustrating. I guess it's like this idea of to do well in God's eyes, doing the right things.

And that's kind of like an honoring God thing. And that's the Amish too? Well, with the Amish, it's more like to stay as a community and to survive as a community, they have to ignore technology. So for instance, if they start using a ride on lawnmower, that is a slippery path to being like, oh, maybe we'll get a car. And once you've got a car, then suddenly you're driving long distances and your community starts to break up so part of not having the technology and to be able to drive and to be able to use the internet all the time and to like chat to other people in chat rooms is just to keep

this community together and it kind of works i mean the amish population is growing. Wow. I wonder if the population is growing due to this insane influx of social media, of everything being so globalized. The polarization, I bet that has made some people like, I want to abandon all of this. Yeah. And I guess maybe Rumspringer becomes even more stressful when people go to do it because they're like oh god this is horrific get me off tiktok immediately i hate it send me back to my amish ways geez okay well we've got to hit on victoria's secret for one second you were shook by that comment i hated that this all transposes onto all these other religions because that's a pretty common occurrence in the Muslim community. I think of Mormon magic underpants as well.

They've got special underpants in the Mormon community. No, but those underpants are not sexy. Oh, they're the opposite of sexy. Horrific. Yeah, awful. They can't take them off. No, never nudes. They're literally never nudes.

Yeah, never nudes, absolutely. Which is really funny because we have a friend, Erica. Erica, who you know. Perfect 10 Charlie's wife. Used to be a part of the Mormon church. Grew up Mormon. I didn't know that. She was a never nude.

She is a never nude. She hates being nude. And it's obviously. Or just not used to it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And she has like the perfect body. So it's a big sadness for all of us that she just

won't like walk around naked for us all yeah but it's never gonna happen it's never gonna happen because that has been indoctrinated islam under the burqas the women are often wearing extreme designer clothes all right under so you never see but they're like they're rocking it chaneled out wow i love that for them in a way i mean disappointing it can't be shown oh like you want them to be like showing up why are they hiding it away yes and it's the same thing with this victoria's secret it's like they're pretending that they're so pure but then there's these i see i kind of see it's like a fun hack you know it's like a party underneath did you fact check that because the site is saying that they must wear homemade underwear for Amish.

No, there's no fact checker on this show. Believe me, this is a memo. I do not fact check random things you will tell me. This.org says that they're not allowed to wear elastic in their underwear. Ew. And that they have to be homemade. That means they have droopy underwear. Well, I mean, good on them.

They're rebelling and that they'd have this Victoria's Secret stuff. I mean, if it's true. Yeah. I mean, who's to say? If you have to rebel and wear fancy underwear under your clothes, you're oppressed and I need you out of there. Get out of that stinky underwear. Get some good stuff on. Get some elastic.

I'm going to play the little documentary I made. Okay. I knew nothing. Real quick. I did order some Krispy Kreme donuts. No! That should come by the end of this recording. Fuck yes, Rob!

Rob, sometimes you do everything exactly right. You're the best. Exactly right. As those Krispy Kreme donuts arrive, let's learn about the army. It says 30, but I can't imagine it's going to take that long since they're fresh and ready. Apart from Weird Al, I didn't know where to turn to learn about the Amish. I didn't have any living nearby here in Los Angeles, and I wasn't sure how to approach them anyway. They seem private and self-contained. So I took the armchair expert approach and approached an expert. My name is Sue Trollinger. I am a professor at the University of Dayton.

Susan wrote a book about the Amish that took her 15 years to complete, so I assume she knows her stuff. She went deep. It just doesn't get any better than American religion. The juxtapositions, the tensions, I mean, they're just absolutely fascinating. I couldn't agree more. A while back, I visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where some Christians had built a life-size replica of Noah's Ark. It even had life-size models of all the animals on board. A pair of pelicans here, a couple of dinosaurs there. In my mind, the Amish were of a similar ilk, old school Christians who believed the earth

was 10,000 years old. I knew the Amish were a type of Christian with their origins in Anabaptism, a Protestant Christian movement from the 1500s whose Wikipedia entry is about 100 pages long. From Anabaptists came the Mennonites, and from the Mennonites came the Amish, who lived in Switzerland. Now most of them live in America, where they speak Pennsylvania German, make furniture, and read their Bibles. They are Biblicists. They take the Bible to be true. So if the Bible says that the earth was created in six days, they're not going to argue with it. But they're not like Ken Ham at Ark Encounter and Answers in Genesis,

who are going through the genealogies to say, well, we've got Adam, and then we have all of the generations after him. And when you add them up, it's less than 10,000 years. So the earth can't be more than 10,000 years old. They're not into that. I mean, that's not what they do. What do they do? What is their main focus then from the Bible, would you say? New Testament, following Jesus, Prince of Peace, paying attention to the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek so they're nonviolent, which is why they wouldn't fight in any wars. And that's usually what pushed them out of various countries in Europe and in Russia. So that's one of the reasons they ended up in America. Still, the whole nonviolent thing was

a problem when the Amish came here, specifically to Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. Initially about 500 came over, then another 1500 arrived in the mid-19th century, settling and farming in places like Ohio and Iowa, where years later Slipknot would form. But back before Slipknot, the Amish and their peaceful ways were a problem because they were seen as unpatriotic. They weren't real American citizens. They refused to fight in World War I or World War II.

They were sent to prison. Some of them were executed. Americans coming back from World War II looked at the Amish and heard all those German accents, which made them feel weird. The Amish got a big thumbs down. Then something changed. But then about mid-20th century, as turnpikes were being built, people started crossing the state of Pennsylvania and encountering the big Lancaster Amish settlement. And at that time, folks take a different kind of view of the Amish. Now they look quaint. Now it's like nostalgia.

Now it's like, oh, right, this is what it used to be like in America when we were farmers. And now it's the 1950s and it's the Cold War. They seem to be an earlier, more pure version of who America once was. Then the Amish had another win. Plain and Fancy opened on Broadway in 1955 and ran for several years. The first major depiction of the Amish in American pop culture. It was about a young woman who visits Lancaster County, falls in love with an Amish guy, and then they have to work that out. Once upon a time there was a country mouse, paid a visit to a relative, the city mouse.

But she didn't care a bit for the city house. A city mouse I never want to be. As my theory, that show was maybe the thing that finally cemented America's acceptance of the Amish. All they needed was a few catchy songs and all was forgiven. Plain and Fancy was a reminder of two things, that the Amish were quaint and cute and Christian, but also that modern Americans had it right too, with all their advanced technology. And with that came the knowledge that the two worlds could live side by side together, the best of both worlds. A lot of it is about making mainstream Americans feel comfortable about who they've become.

In the end, it's like, oh, it's good that you drive cars and not buggies. This is the modern, progressive right way to be. What do Americans in general think of the Amish? They are a special breed of American. They are honest and trustworthy, hard workers, true Christians. They have big families. They don't get divorced. So they can look just really wholesome again and like, oh, this is how we used to be back in the day. It was this idea that saw the proliferation of Amish tourism, a giant cash injection into Amish life and the economy in Amish parts of the United States. Tourism is a billion-dollar industry in the likes of Lancaster County, and a lot of that has to do with the Amish. You go to Walnut Creek and you can have a lovely Amish-style dinner,

for example, at Dare Dutchman, which has been there since the 1960s. Hugely successful. And you can sit down to broasted chicken, which is basically a version of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, which are actually a version of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, which are actually made from potatoes, not flakes. You can sit down and you can eat it family style if you want to. And it's slow food.

It's the kind of food that takes a lot of time and skill to produce. So this to me, this seems almost completely separate to the fact it's a religion. It's more like this is a culture that we're appreciating. It seems very separate. Right. Evangelical Christians in the United States connect with the idea that these are Christians and that they're very Bible-oriented and manifesting that understanding in the way that they dress and how they act and where they go. These are earnest Christians. But for a lot of folks, they want to buy a quilt or they want to eat some pie or watch some farmers in the field on their steel wheel tractors.

Who needs time travel when you have the Amish? To step into Amish territory is to step back in time. And I found myself wondering how the heck they cope. The last time I lost my cell phone for an hour, I could barely function. How do the Amish do it? How are the Amish even surviving in this world that is increasingly relying on technology to literally make money? So a crucial distinction that they make is that your home is one thing and work is another. So for example, this Keim Lumber Company in Charm, Ohio, state of the art.

It's like Lowe's and lots of Amish work there. What Keim Lumber does is they have vans and they send them out every morning to gather up Amish at their homes because it takes too long for them to get there on a buggy. They bring them to Keim and they'll be working at a computer. They're on the Internet. They're helping folks place orders or they're running some super high-tech lathe that they went to Michigan to learn how to operate. What a great little hack. It's a bit like that TV show Severance. You have your secular work life utterly severed from your religious home life. The best of both worlds, but there can be complications. What's been really tricky lately is if you have a cell phone that's associated with your work, you're taking it home.

What do you do about that? Because for 150 years, they were absolute about you're not going to have a phone in your house. So it's an ongoing negotiation, and it's very challenging. Facing a future unknown Stay tuned for more Flightless Bird. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Flightless Bird is brought to you by BetterHelp. Now, last year, I got obsessed with a certain problem in my life, and I just kept going on loop.

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per application pricing not available for everyone. Need to hire? You need Indeed. These challenges have led to different Amish affiliations. The Amish love affiliations. Even way back in the mid-19th century, the Amish split off into the old order Amish, who are very old school, and the Amish Mennonites, who don't mind using cars. The diversification just kept happening. And now you've got names like New Order Electric and the New Order Fellowship, the Swiss, the Troia, and the Schwartzentrubers.

That's the other thing that's changing, the diversification of affiliations. In the 1900s, you'd have like four affiliations. That's four kinds of Amish in the country. Now you have about 40. It's a bit like what Christianity has done in America in general, where it's really finding its own little niche in a different place and popping up. Right. And so the old order, that's an affiliation.

That's the biggest one in the United States. When you think Amish, you're thinking the old order, okay? Driving around in buggies, bonnets, and beards. But there are Amish who have felt like the old order have become way too liberal, and they're not going to remain Amish. Because they've adopted too many technologies, one of these days, next thing you know, they're going to have a flat-screen TV hanging on the wall, and they're going to be watching Netflix or something.

And so those folks have wanted to become more tradition-minded. We're going to keep our traditions no matter what. We are not going to change. So, for example, we are going to have steel wheels on our buggies. We are not putting rubber wheels on our buggies. The Swartz and Schuber Amish, who are among the most tradition-minded, they won't so much as put a slow-moving vehicle sign on the back of their buggy. They won't put a windshield on the front.

They won't even put gravel on their driveways. Their driveways are dirt. They won't put a shrub around their house. Ha! Shrubs and gravel are a step too far. Yeah, it's too worldly. The Amish have had to cope with a lot of change. A lot of them aren't farming anymore.

Land is expensive and there's just not enough of it. So they've found other work that they're well suited to. RV factories are a popular choice. Ding, ding, ding to our RV episode. And lumber yards are also very Amish adjacent. A lot of America doesn't have any Amish, right? It's just certain areas have Amish. I mean, I haven't seen any in Los Angeles. No, but this is part of this fascinating change over the last 40 years. It used to be that the Amish were concentrated. They still are in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. But the other two big states are New York and Wisconsin. Those are the top five. And then you have all kinds of other states like Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky.

But now they're moving farther west. You now have Amish in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming. The reason they're doing that is that you can't buy a farm in Lancaster County anymore. It's just too expensive. There's just not enough land. So they're leaving. Some Amish are leaving to places like Canada. There are about 6,000 Amish there,

if you have moved into South America. Is it a displacement or just a movement? It's a really good question. For some folks, it probably feels like a displacement. So they organize themselves by districts, which are a collection of 20 to 40 families that live together and worship together. You might only have one or two districts in a settlement. So that's not a lot of people. Some of them only have one district. I mean, I think it could be pretty hard, but they're growing so fast. They double in population size once about every 20 years. What? Oh, so it's growing. Oh yeah, big time. So in 2000, 178,000 Amish in the United States. The latest stats for 2022, 367,000.

That's an increase of 106%. I mean, it shouldn't come as a surprise. The average Amish couple has five children because of that. It used to be seven, but five is still quite a lot of kids. Considering the religion has an 85% retention rate, the population keeps growing. It's really hard to leave a really intense religion that you're born into, especially one that takes over your entire life. I guess it's an Amish paradise that most people born Amish paradise. But you'd probably think it bites living in an Amish paradise. Oh, yeah. There's a Weird Al documentary coming out soon for a dramatization. It looks really, really good. Oh, yeah. There's a Weird Al documentary coming out soon. Oh. Or a dramatization.

It looks really, really good. Oh, wow. Wait, what do you mean a dramatization? Harry Potter. Yeah, Daniel Radcliffe. Oh, a movie. Yeah, a movie. Okay.

Sorry. Okay, okay. It's a movie. Wow. Yeah, it looks really good. They call it movies here. What did I say? Dramatization.

Oh, yeah. First you said a documentary. Oh, yeah. And that's really confusing because you're a documentarian i just do want to say i've woken up from a nap recently and i think it's really showing it really is you're so i've never seen you so subdued yeah i'm just feeling quite sluggish you know yeah i napped too soon to the recording of the episode i really messed up how long was your nap my nap i went too long as well it was more of a

sleep it was an hour okay i meant to take 20 minutes and it was an hour and then i got up and i was like oh my goodness it's time so this is what it's like like a turtle or something look what have we learned okay does it endear you to the amish anymore what we've learned so far well that's one thing which she said that the overall opinion from Americans of the Amish are that they're wholesome. Yeah, hardworking. Right. Of the land, good morals. Yes.

I wonder, though, if I'm just an asshole, which is very probable or not. But, like, I don't think that. I think the take is is like right really sheltered uh-huh odd yeah potentially odd birds yeah i mean i honestly still don't know what to think of them and the second part of the documentary sort of goes into the slightly darker side of the amish which maybe we should crack into soon. But generally America likes them, and I had no idea that Amish tourism was such a big drawcard. I didn't know that you went along and you would have an Amish meal and you'd go and buy a rug made by the Amish,

and that was like a great thing to do. It's like a great pastime, go and eat some potatoes. Okay, she was so… With your fellow American. That's what a lot of America's doing, Monica. It's like the donut thing. I can't wait for the donuts. America does a good donut and a good mash, but the Amish do it better.

It's like they make a great cabinet. That's why the Amish are in these RV factories. They're making all the fancy wooden interiors and they just do it the best. They do it so well. And maybe that's why the Amish are really like a big thumbs up. They're just good at making donuts, cabinets and rugs and potatoes. Well, I guess there is a thought that they work really hard. So you're going to get good quality.

They're not trying to cut corners. They're not making TikToks. They're not doing tweets. They're not watching Netflix. It's hard to be too mad at a community that's anti-violence. It is. It's difficult. I mean, that's a good thing it's a great it's a great thing anti-violence is definitely a good thing is there any world where you would live as an amish person if your life it just had to be that way it's a rule that happened you're now amish you could still get joy

out of life you'd have friends there yeah you'd have good potatoes. You'd do a hard day's work. You'd feel satisfied and tired at the end. You'd sleep well as an Amish person. Yeah, better than you and your hour naps. I guess what I'm saying is, is it that bad? Is it that crazy? First of all, I don't think it's bad. I sort of think it's bad. It just horrifies me, if I'm going to be be honest the whole lifestyle i just don't like being out of the loop i'd really struggle not knowing what's going on and not being able to keep up with things but maybe that is that's they would look at me and go what a horrific life you're having well that's the thing we're all seeing the world through our own

perspective so i'm sure you're right that they are happy and that they do live a fulfilled life community i will say is i think the key to happiness yeah we struggle having that well that's what the experts say isn't it community is more and more difficult to get in our modern disconnected reality yeah and especially you who after the amazon episode and you said you wanted to escape and have your brain in a cloud. Absolutely. And not have a real body. Yeah, I want to be out there in the ether. That's the opposite of Amish.

Yeah, I am heading increasingly in the opposite direction. Well, anyway, I could just see it being a fulfilling life, but I guess you're going to teach me why it's bad. Some people have a less positive time. Okay. me why it's bad. Some people have a less positive time. Okay. I got to thinking about that 85% retention rate and the 15% of Amish that do choose to leave. I did some googling and came across a Reddit post from a few months ago. It was an AMA thread titled, I'm a former member of the Amish church. I left in 2005 and has started a petition asking that Congress put protections in place to keep kids safe. I'm looking for journalists and bloggers to help me get the word out.

The Amish are probably one of the most controlled religious groups that exist. I'd tracked down the woman who'd made that post, Misty Griffin, because I wanted to talk to someone who'd left the Amish and find out why. It proved difficult. I'd tried to contact a number of young people on their Rumspringer excursion, but every lead ended up being snuffed out. Often because the young people I was in touch with ended up asking their parents, who I assume said, no, don't go talking to a podcast because all my leads went dead. But Misty was long done with the Amish. She left because she says she was physically abused and witnessed others being abused as well. She's now a registered nurse and has written a book

about her experience called Tears of the Silenced. She ended up being a consulting producer on that Peacock documentary, Sins of the Amish, helping wrangle other former members who'd had a less than pleasant time. To the outside world, the Amish seem kind, loving, generous. But the odds of an Amish woman getting raped by a guy within their own community, it's one out of every six on a good day. Misty's book and the documentary series paint a very different portrait of the Amish life than Americans typically think of. The Amish don't really note the actual history of how things came about. That has not been handed down. I mean, the songs have, the prayers, but they have this mindset of just

do what you're told and don't ask questions. That's it. So nobody knows really where stuff started. The Amish came about thanks to Jacob Amman, who was born in Switzerland in 1644. He was a Mennonite elder who split off from the Mennonites in 1693, a split that happened because he created it. From what I can tell from the Global Mennonite Encyclopedia, which is basically Wikipedia for Mennonites, Jacob excommunicated all the elders and ministers in Switzerland who wouldn't agree to practices like shunning

excommunicated members. So he shunned them. He did a grand tour of all the Swiss congregations, acting in what he himself would later call in an ill-considered and harsh manner. Jacob Amann, the founder, he was sort of considered a nut job in his day. He was a Mennonite who broke away from the Mennonites, and he was shunned from the Mennonites because he just shunned so many people. He broke up so many families. I mean, he was an extreme radical, not a nice person. And a lot of the Amish don't realize that. Misty wasn't born Amish. She joined when she was 19. She was there for three and a half years before leaving in 2005. She'd already had an incredibly traumatic childhood before joining. Her parents were ultra-religious and raised her in isolation.

They idolized the Amish, studying all their teachings and passing that on to Misty. Eventually, they joined a small Amish community themselves. And Misty says there's a reason the image of the Amish is so clean. I mean, it really is. On their Wikipedia page, there's zero scandal. That's weird for a religion. When you're being baptized in the Amish church, one of the promises that you make is to keep church business inside of the church.

What concerns a church member is church business. So everything that happens is church business. I mean, there's nothing that's not church business. They are so indoctrinated from a very, very young age that you obey the rules of the church or you go to hell. How else do you get people to dress in uniform every day of their life? That's one reason why this stuff didn't come out because nobody would go outside the church and bring it out. That was the mindset she was in when she witnessed abuse and was abused herself. The thought of going to the police didn't really go into my head because I'd been taught that you never, ever, ever take church business outside of the church. You will be shunned. You will be outcast. That's just like the worst that you could possibly commit.

So I didn't think that I should turn him into the police. A couple of days later, he assaulted me again really bad. And I ran to a neighbor lady and I told her what happened. And she's the one that told me, she's like, you got to report this. At first I said, no, you know, I can't report the bishop of my church. But the more I thought about it, I thought, if I don't, who's going to save these kids? Nobody's ever, ever going to step in and save these kids. Nothing's going to happen.

going to save these kids. Nobody's ever, ever going to step in and save these kids. Nothing's going to happen. So it was wanting to save the children that finally brought me forward to go to the police and turn the bishop in. There are scatterings of stories like this, but they're hard to find. I mean, if you visit ohiosamishcountry.com, you see a page promoting a tour of an authentic Amish home built in 1869. It's the home of John Yoda, who died in 1997. That website leaves out that he died with a raft of sexual assault allegations against him. There's another headline from 2020, only reported in one place, behind a paywall on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A headline there reads, Lancaster County Amish man sentenced to prison for sexually abusing four girls. Amish tourism really, really squashed it down because some of the first few cases that came out

were in touristic areas and the media, they just don't pick it up. I mean, there are huge, huge chunks of the American economy that depend on Amish tourism. I mean, just Lancaster County loaned $2 billion. So think about Holmes County, LaGrange, Wisconsin. The governors know this. The mayors know this. You have all of these states that profit. I don't know how far it goes. I suppose if you're being charitable, you could say that all big groups of people have bad eggs. Certainly religious groups have proven again and again they're not exempt from that. But I think Misty probably has a point. The cash cow that is Amish tourism probably does factor into the good PR rising to the top. So we hear way more about the yummy meals

and quaint traditions than say the fact that 98% of Ohio's puppy mills are run by the Amish. In Lancaster County alone there are 300 licensed breeders and another 600 unlicensed ones. There's a reason Lancaster County is called the puppy mill capital of the United States. You won't see that on the Amish tourism brochures. They have learned over the years that society idolizes them because freedom of religion in the United States, I mean, I guess they say it's religion and guns. I mean, that's like top. You don't mess with those two.

So the Amish, they are religion and you don't bash religion. What I've discovered is that it's not an Amish paradise for everyone. There's a reason some people leave. I've also learned reality isn't as simple as it first seems with The Amish. Take that Breaking Armour show I talked about earlier, which sees Amish teens on their big rumspringer break, letting loose and getting lost on the New York subway system. Misty says that show was all bullshit. The whole thing was staged. That almost everyone on the show had left The Amish for good years prior to filming.

I guess it's hard to know the full truth about a religious group that's basically hiding in plain sight. Yeah, I did some googling of what Misty had said, and here's a bunch of articles that most of the people in that show had long gone. They'd been Amish, they'd left ages ago. They weren't on Rumspringer. They weren't going back. Oh. And that was a lot of the show.

I'm sad. Allegedly. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that was awful. It got bleak. Yeah, it did take a real turn. Yeah, there's certainly pockets of the Amish that aren't great,

as with any sort of closed-off group. Plenty of bad eggs. And the puppy mill thing is something i was completely unaware of but the amish run a lot of puppy mills and that sucks yeah i think of that beautiful puppy of that woman and i talked to at the beginning that was really excited by this puppy that she got from an arsh person potentially from yeah a puppy mill oh god you're right yeah maybe i need to email her back about that puppy i'm waiting for a story about religion to be all good absolutely and it just doesn't exist what was so weird about this is that it's really hard to find the bad stories about the Amish. I guess the population isn't that high.

It's under half a million. There's not a lot of people. But their Wikipedia page is literally, usually with any religion, there'll be a bit in Wikipedia that says scandal. And there'll be some things. There's nothing. It's just basically, here's this religious group. Here's their history. This is about the tourism.

Go on your way. It's weird because you'd think people who've left would at least come out and like this woman like misty yeah because even like you take scientology they have a whole blackmail system in place to prevent bad stuff from coming out yet bad stuff has come out so much yeah documentaries and tv shows and books and articles and everything. So I'm shocked that there isn't more of this. I mean, the Peacock Dock, I don't know how wide that's gone. I haven't even heard of it. Yeah, but she consulted on that.

And there's a lot of allegations in there against the Amish. I mean, the main thing that was surprising to me in this is that Amish tourism is a thing. I was completely unaware of that. And I was unaware of how awful it can get as well. Well, and also the sexual abuse portion is horrifying. But it's also anytime there's a group that glorifies perfection or cleanliness, there's always something bad underneath because there's no such thing as perfection. There's always going to be temptation.

And so if they don't have a clear outlet, they're going to do all these devious things. Their whole philosophy of only staying inside the church, of never taking complaints outside, you run into that in any sort of mega church reporting. They've got the same culture of you just upline it to the leader up above you and they'll sort it out. And of course, that just keeps the abuse in this closed system. so yeah i think yeah any group you're in where they're like if there's a problem just keep it in the group that's when alarm bell should go off we had a former employee of golden sacks on armchair and they have that built in place there you're right in that corporate culture yeah not to go well i guess any workplace right it's very much like if you have issues it's totally fine to have issues, but

tell me, go to HR, keep it in the family, basically. What's the policy here? At Armchair? If anything happens to me, am I allowed to sort of go out of the system? Who do I bring my problems to? Keep it in the family, David. Have you signed an NDA?

You probably have, so that's that. Rob handed me a few documents when I signed up to this whole thing. Don't read them. Just sign them. NDA. NDA, baby. Closed system. Yeah.

Well, I'm not surprised. You know, when we started this, my initial instinct, of course, is like, eh. But then. What? How does that go? What do you think of the Amish? But then I was like, I got to keep an open mind because that's bad. But now we've circled back to that.

I want to take you on this journey. I want to take you to the joys of the Amish and America loving them and then pull the rug out. Yeah. What a journey we've been on. Look, maybe for an Amish part two next year, I'm pitching this in the distance, it'll be a trip. We can go and have some of those soggy potatoes. Potatoes that aren't flakes. Some of those donuts.

We can check out the underwear. Well, not check out the underwear. And just see what's going on and just get a firsthand approach. Go in ourselves. Say to how are the experts? Let's see it firsthand. The first lady who you spoke to? Yes.

Who's an expert? She is an expert. Susan Trollinger took 15 years to write her book, which I think it would be a really good book. I haven't read it yet. Or she's a slow writer. But she's really smart. She seems pro, which is interesting.

No, that is interesting. And I reached out to a few academics to talk about the amish yeah and all the people i found were all very pro-amish they're like this is what the amish do here we go i got this little book off amazon written by the leading expert in amishness from a non-amish person exactly the the same angle. Just this is what the Amish does. This is what they're about. Nothing at all critical. And again, it feeds back into that whole weird idea.

It's really hard to find people saying anything negative. Misty is one of the few that's actually said, no, there's problems in this community and we need to do something about it. It's really weird. Fuck. Well, what if Misty's wrong? Oh, well, I mean, I think that's the thing.

I think with Misty and the show she consulted on, there's enough people backing her up. Because you could say that about a lone voice. Being like, is this someone just, I mean, it's what everyone that comes up with any kind of allegations faces, right? Right. Victim blaming. Yeah. There's a bunch of people now backing her with other stories from in this world what's really strange is that it isn't being talked about in a much wider form at the

moment and maybe that's just because there aren't many amish it doesn't affect many people yeah there's not millions of them there's only a few so maybe that's why the conversation's not happening and they're not trying to recruit no yeah So it's not like they're out on this mission to recruit. It's a really good point. They've got no interest in converting people. That's actually a really good point. I think that's maybe why there's not very much said, because no one's getting like entrapped. Yeah. No one's had their son or their daughter be suddenly whisked off joining this strange group of people that's not happening you've got to be born in now did i zone out and start thinking about donuts or did misty tell us

why she joined she didn't mention her parents were super bonkers religious they idolized them and so her parents who were also quite abusive dragged her into the amish okay so she joined as a teenager having no interest at all in it oh no she did because of her parents right okay but when she got too much she just got the hell out of there now david when will you do an episode like this on religion how triggered are you yeah it makes me a little bit skin crawly at elements of it i think any system that tells you what to think And what to believe and what to do It winds me up

When you're in it, you can't really do much about it So yeah, I get a little bit like You know I'm someone like I do, I get a bit And Misty got a bit And she left and that was great Yeah, I'm grateful she did

So she's a nurse now She's a nurse Now you forgot to ask her A really important follow-up question Yeah Does she have Munchausen's? Oh, my proxy She doesn't

Can you say that as a fact? A lot of people Not a lot Not a lot Most No, I'm not gonna No fact? A lot of people. Not a lot. Not a lot. Most. No. There are two groups of people mainly that make up the Munchausen's community. One is women 20 to 40 who are in the health care system.

Right. I decided not to. You didn't ask? I decided, yeah, I've sort of got a policy of not accusing interviewees of different things or clearing them of crimes. The other group is? Men. You. Me.

30 to 50 year old males. Well, I've thought about getting into it. Okay. Thank you for your honesty. I'm just teetering around the edge and haven't quite decided. But maybe me and Misty will team up. All right. Well, that's very American of you.

So I think you did a good job today. Thank you. We can all go together and increase our American-ness by about 10 to 15 percent. Perfect. Let's have these

donuts.