Amish vidéo

« I think most Amish communities have recognised that this is a world of technology and we all have choices.

We all choose where we want to live and how we want to live.

how does a community figure out what technology is okay to use? Some of the communities are actually having a difficult time deciding what's okay and what's not.

Half the church might say, Well, I don't have a problem with this, and the other half may say, Oh, no, we're staying with our traditional beliefs and we're not going to ever go outside them.

We have this image of the Amish as being frozen in time, stuck somewhere around 1850, completely abstaining from technology and anything else that belongs to the modern world. But that's not quite right, because new economic pressures are leading to new debates within Amish churches about just how much to let the outside world in.

Here's something that may surprise you.

By some estimates, the Amish are the fastest growing faith community in America. The Amish number over 300,000, and that number is predicted to hit 1 million by 2050.

At the same time, Amish families are picking up and moving across state lines.

now and then, you're going to get what some people would call seekers.

A lot of people come in with a romantic notion of how much fun it's going to be to dress in more old fashioned clothes. Let's dress like they do on the prairie.

We're just going to live like they did, you know, 100 years ago.

Well, that wears off awful quick. Cherry spends part of her year in Pennsylvania, the beating heart of Amish country.

The Amish live what's called a plain life, but the boundaries of plain can be blurry., like within 10 to 15 miles, you can have electricity and an automatic washing machine.

You could go 10 to 15 miles away and you're going to have solar, kerosene lamps and batteries.

And then you could go over the hill and there's not even going to be so much as a refrigerator.

With communities like that, the more old order communities kind of judge a community like yours or a lifestyle. Absolutely, they would judge.

some areas that friction is becoming more acute as Amish communities grow and American farmland becomes expensive and scarce.

More Amish people have to find work off the farm in the big technological world. Leaving our land..... »