Amish inbreeding

Factual Questions
21

The idea behind rumspringa is that being baptized into the Amish church is the start of a lifelong commitment, and not a decision to be taken lightly. It’s therefore thought that the person considering this step needs to know what they’re getting into, and what they’re giving up by doing so. And so, rumspringa.

The rumpspringa antics you see in the documentary “The Devil’s Playground” are real, of course, but they are the extreme end of the spectrum of what goes on during that time. The implied agreement of rumspringa is that the parents know that the kids will be checking out the English world, and my even stop dressing Amish or buy a car during that time. The expectation is that while they’ll bend the rules a little bit that they’ll still stick to the larger framework of the Amish belief system, so yes, sex with outsiders is strongly discouraged. Sex of any kind before marriage is strictly verboten.

Most of the Amish kids stay pretty close to the expectation. It’s more common for the boys to dress English than the girls, and there’s some drinking and smoking that goes on. But the rumpspringa of the typical Amish kid isn’t terribly exciting, which is why you see the extreme cases in “The Devil’s Playground”. That movie showed one Amish party where ~1500 kids showed up from several states, most of those kids were checking things out, maybe getting drunk, falling asleep in their cars, stuff like that. Most of them probably went back home after the weekend with the knowledge of what a hangover feels like and fell back into family life and pretended that nothing happened. And their parents looked the other way and did the same…

22

Thanks for the information, F5.disco! Welcome to the boards.

A similar issue is discussed in Robert Eisenberg’s Boychiks in the Hood, an examination of modern Hasidic Jewish communities. There are quite a few sects of Hasidim. Most Jews are probably familiar with the Lubavitchers–they’re the ones who are always trying to get us secular Jews to “convert” to their form of orthodoxy. Since they actively seek newcomers, albeit Jewish ones, and there are an awful lot of them, they don’t have too much of a problem with the inbreeding thing. Other sects are much smaller, and discourage marrying outside the sect. Naturally, some genetic problems have cropped up.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t have an index, so I can’t give you a particular cite. But if you’re interested, Google pops up some interesting stuff. In fact, in my cursory google search, I noticed that the Amish and the Hasidic Jews were often mentioned together as examples of populations where particular types of inbreeding problems occur.