As other people have said, “the Midwest US” is a pretty poor description of where the Amish live. Here is a list of the American states and Canadian provinces where the Amish live:
A better description of where they live is the following: Draw a north-south line through the U.S. so that it touches the westernmost point in Minnesota. Draw another north-south line through the U.S. so that it touches the easternmost point in Maine. Draw an east-west line through the U.S. so that it touches the southernmost point in Missouri. Draw another east-west line through the U.S. so that it touches the northernmost point in Maine. Inside the area of the U.S. and Canada that the rectangle that you’ve drawn covers are nearly all the Amish. This square includes maybe a fifth of the U.S. and a small part of Canada.
The problem with that, like most reports on the Amish, is that its hard for English to get good data. Having worked with a few various Old Order communities they look to have about the same rates of alcohol and drug abuse as well as domestic violence as anyone else. Maybe somewhat less but I don’t know that it would be lower enough to be really significant. Divorce and unemployment are another story.
One way to get more info would be to hit one of the Lancaster PA or Holmes County Ohio newspapers and track the DUI or D&D reports in the police sections.
My imagination painted a picture of a police car pulling over a buggy and saying “License and registration, please”. But then that morphed into a Amish person in a police buggy pulling over an automobile and saying “License and registration, please”.
OK, OK, so maybe saying “Midwest” was a bad idea. I was trying to think of a way to describe the Ohio-Pennsylvania-Indiana-Illinois-New York-Missouri area.
There are Mennonites in Mexico–in fact, they are quite renowned as cheese makers–???. I met a few, and they spoke only German and Spanish. There are quite a few Mennonites in Mississippi (I went to college with two). Yes—I realize it isn’t quite the same as Amish. My brother said he saw a couple of Amish-looking guys playing craps at a Tunica casino. He said they were throwing back drinks and having a great time.
There was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy featuring two young women of Amish heritage. One got mortally ill and her parents came to take her home. Her friend was the one who was shunned because she had already been baptized, but had left the Amish life, so she couldn’t go home with her friend to be with her at the end.
The Rust Belt isn’t a great description of where the Amish live either. A lot of them live in Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Ontario, Minnesota, and Tennessee (and some even further west), outside the states of the Rust Belt:
Even the ones who live in the same states as the Rust Belt live well away from the cities that really constitute the Rust Belt. The square that I described earlier catches most of them, but there are others west and south of that area. There’s no easy way to explain the distribution of Amish.
