Is this L.A.? Where do I park my buggy?

The turmoil has been caused by a new reality TV series called Amish in the City featuring five young Amish people plucked from rural obscurity and sent to live in a house in Los Angeles with six supposedly sophisticated urbanites.

The series has shone the media spotlight on the Amish in a way they haven’t experienced since Harrison Ford fetched up in Lancaster County with Kelly McGillis in tow. They were unhappy at some aspects of the way they were portrayed in Witness. They are outraged by this latest modern intrusion.

The contrast between the the sheltered world of young Amish and the west coast of wannabe MTV exhibitonists is stark. But does this collision of the two signal that the encroachment of the 21st-century world on Amish life has reached critical mass? The show takes as its starting point the Amish tradition of rumspringa, the period between a young Amish person’s 16th birthday and their marriage, when they can “run around” in youth groups or gangs. Many sample alcohol and drugs and dress in the clothes of what they call the outside or “English” world. During this time individuals must decide if they will be baptised and enter the church, a process that takes place a year or so before they marry — usually in their early twenties.

It is popularly believed that rumspringa is a period when anything goes and that it is fully sanctioned by the community. This is how it has been interpreted by the programme’s producers. The first episode claims that the young Amish will “explore everything that LA has to offer with one thing in mind: will they return to their lives or remain Amish in the city?”

The series does contain some moments of genuine discovery, mostly for the Amish kids. One girl, Ruth, is entranced by a visit to an art gallery. She has never seen art before. “I didn’t know you could make something from boards with paint on them that would look so nice,” she explains. “The Amish don’t study art because they feel it isn’t important.” And at her first glimpse of the beach she says: “It has been in my dreams for such a long time and I love it.”

Mostly, however, one is left gawping at how ignorant and obnoxious the city kids are. They are breathtakingly rude to the Amish. “You think you are going to be partying, hooking up — then Amish people turn up,” moans one air-head blonde.

At the start of the show the city dwellers are shocked when they realise they will have to live with five Amish. Nick, a Bostonian, runs in terror when he opens the front door and greets the Amish, four of whom are in traditional garb. “Absolutely not!” he shouts. One city girl says: “Oh my God! These are our roommates! They’re gonna be living with us!”

Nick stomps around the room in astonishment. Eventually one obviously impatient young Amish, Jonas, turns to him and says: “Look man, we’re just people.” Kevan, one of the city boys, stays in the house to chat to the Amish, but the others run out on to the patio to escape — and one of them, Reese, runs straight into a sliding glass door. “I was running from the Amish people,” he says. Later Nick and Miriam, an Amish girl, are eating in a pavement café when a beggar approaches them for spare change. Nick starts to brush him off but Miriam offers him a piece of her chicken. The man just turns and walks away. “The Amish won’t let anyone go homeless,” she says. “It just wouldn’t happen. Someone would take them in.”

There is humour too. City girl Meagan asks if any of them have heard any reggae at all. “Reggae?” replies Amish boy Mose. “Never heard of the dude.” As the city kids erupt in peals of laughter he adds: “He sounds like an interesting guy though.”

“Are there any black Amish people?” asks Whitney, a black girl who grew up in South Central LA. “I have a friend who gets pretty dark in the summertime,” Miriam replies.

David Weaver-Zercher, a professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and an expert on the Amish, condemns the show as exploitative. And the notion that young Amish would use a TV reality show as a way of reaching the biggest life decision they will ever make — whether to join the church — is, according to one Amish bishop, “kind of hilarious”. One 34-year-old man in Intercourse, who went through rumspringa and thought long and hard before deciding not to enter the church, says the show “made me sick to my stomach. It’s all about money. People that are going to be Amish wouldn’t do something like that.”

But is it fake? Many Amish are quick to dismiss media accounts of their activities. The Lancaster Intelligencer Journal ran a series of articles about sexual abuse of women and children in Amish communities. “Much exaggerated,” I was told by one senior member of the Old Order Amish. Accounts of rumspringa and the behaviour of Amish youths are also brushed off or denied; similarly, the thorny issue of how far the modern world is encroaching into their lives. In 1988 two young Amish men were jailed for dealing cocaine to other Amish youths at hoedowns. The case lifted the lid on a culture of partying and drug taking among some Amish. “As far as I am concerned those were boys who weren’t Amish,” the bishop told me.

As he gives a tour of his 60-acre farm, the bishop, himself a father of ten, uses that “e” word again. Most of the stories about wild rumspringas are “exaggerated”. He dismisses the popular notion that drinking, drugs and partying are sanctioned by parents. Only “a very small minority believe that it is acceptable for sinful activity and negative conduct. There is dysfunction in certain families. Most people who are wayward, their behaviour is not accepted by parents or anyone else.”

To him rumspringa is simply a “courtship period”. Around “20-30 per cent of young people live rampantly. Probably 5-10 per cent experiment with drugs and are into drinking. They have their sprees, their binge drinking. They are noticed. They are the ones that are arrested.”

Amish go to school only until the age of 15. Then they go to work. “God made us to work,” says my driving companion, whose own teenage children were busy building gazebo roofs out of plastic slate while we talked. But there is plenty of evidence of errant youthful behaviour at the end of the working day. In an off-licence car park I find two Amish men in their early twenties loading a pick-up truck with crates of beer for a Saturday night party. They are wearing jeans. The one who has rented the truck is living in a trailer a few miles away from his family during his rumspringa. The other still lives with his parents. Both say they plan to enter the church. “I will. That’s my future,” says the truck driver. “Right now is just a good time before all that.” He says he knows people who know the Amish in the reality show. “They are not as naive as they make out on the show.”

Richard Stevick, another Messiah College professor who is one of the world’s leading experts on Amish youth culture, recalls living in Lancaster County in the 1960s and seeing young Amish in buggies careening around the streets and throwing up in public. “I predicted that the Amish would be dead as a culture by the end of the century,” he says.

The opposite is true. The Amish are thriving. The population doubles every 20 years and by the middle of this century there could be as many as a million. There are some 40,000 Old Order Amish and the more liberal New Order Amish in Pennsylvania, the second highest concentration after Ohio, where there are about 50,000 in total. They have large familes, of eight, ten, 12 children. Furthermore, the more traditional the group, the higher the percentage of young people who undertake adult baptism and join the church. Weaver-Zercher suggests that this is because there is a “greater cultural chasm” for young people to cross in order to leave conservative groups. As the population has grown, the land — even the spectacularly fertile and productive soil of Lancaster County — has no longer been able to support everybody. So the Amish set up micro-enterprises; everything from cabinet making to shops serving tourists.

Many Amish believe that this is far from ideal because “the work ethic disintegrates when people are away from the land”. But with their low overheads and labour costs, 95 per cent of Amish businesses survive, compared with a 50 per cent failure rate for American start-ups in general.

The other solution to the population explosion is migration to other farming areas. There are now Amish settlements in 23 states. Some have migrated for social rather than economic reasons. “The youth culture in some of the larger settlements frightens people,” says Weaver-Zercher. “They want a place where the parents are more important in shaping activities than peers.”

He says that rumspringa is seen by others in the community as a form of inoculation that preserves the church. In the same way that you would inoculate someone with a vaccine to protect against polio, rumspringa provides a small dose of the world without them being fully infected by it. Thus protected, they are less likely to abandon the Amish life.

As technological advancements have arrived in the English world the Amish have made a series of elaborate compromises. Electricity is seen as an infection from the outside world, so they use their own generators in limited ways, as well as gas for heating water, cooking and fridges, and hydraulic and air pressure to power machinery.

As I drive my Amish passenger back to his farm he professes confidence that the motor car will not replace the horse-drawn buggy. “As long as we keep our buggies, our identity won’t disappear so fast. There will be changes here and there but that is all.” Nevertheless, he is clearly drawn to modern temptations. Before I leave he goes to get something from a small hut, situated just beyond the border of his land, in a neighbour’s field. This is where he keeps his telephone. “A necessary evil,” he explains. Like most Amish he adheres to the rule that bans phones in homes for fear that they might interfere with social interaction. But this intriguing deal allows him to make calls.

Earlier he had said that the problem with mains electricty was that it “brings in computers and other things”. Now he shows me a piece of paper with web addresses. “I have a confession to make,” he says. “I like to get fresh stuff from the internet.” He asks me to print off a sermon and some speeches by President Bush (few Amish vote but most who do are Republicans).

Amish in the City may say more about our view of the Amish than it does about their present condition. But as I was searching the web archives of a Swiss Christian organisation on behalf of my new Amish friend the other night, I began to wonder how long it will be before one of his 25 grandchildren is doing this sort of research for him — and sneaking a peak at the odd reality TV website while they are at it.