The Amish, a Christian denomination and a three-centuries old German ethnic migrant group known for its strict lifestyle standards, are one of the fastest growing minority populations in the U.S. For more than a century, the number of Amish people — whose American lineage traces back to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s and the Midwest by the mid-1800s — has grown rapidly, from several thousand in 1910 to a quarter million one century later.
This population is easy to overlook but their demographic shifts could reshape economic development, land use, health and public services in rural communities, according to Cory Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher at SSRI's Population Research Institute at Penn State.
“It might be difficult for people to realize how quickly the Amish population is growing because you don’t see them in the most visible spaces in our country like urban areas,” said Anderson, who studies the demographics, population dynamics and population health of distinctive ethnic religions like the Amish. He recently published a study in the journal Population Studies that drew on detailed data on over 263,000 Amish individuals in approximately 50,000 households — roughly 90% of the Amish population — to map out the group’s population structure.
“I want to understand what explains the persistence of large family sizes within this population when there are so many social, economic and spatial factors that incentivize smaller families among most populations in America,” Anderson said.
In this Q&A, Anderson, who will join Penn State College of Medicine as assistant professor of public health sciences on Sept. 1, discussed the factors that explain Amish population growth, how those forces interact to influence family size and what the changing demographics of the Amish means for rural communities.
Q: What explains population growth among the Amish?
Anderson: To understand population change, there’s a simple equation: Factors that increase population — births and in-migration, that is, people who weren’t born Amish but convert — minus factors that decrease population — deaths and out-migration, that is, people who were born Amish but decide to leave.
The answer seems to be a very high total fertility rate. We found that the typical Amish woman has on average 6.1 children, which is much higher than the national average of 1.5 children. When considering only married Amish women, this rises to 7.2 children on average by age 50.
Adding to this is an average Amish life expectancy of 81.2 years old, which is a few years older than the average American. People also rarely leave the Amish community. Approximately 85% of people who are born Amish remain, and it seems even fewer have left in recent years. That's an enviable retention rate for any minority religious or ethnic group. Even those who leave tend to stay closely adjacent to Amish populations.
However, not many people are migrating in. Over the past 70 or 80 years, we found only 154 people joined the Amish. They don’t turn people away, and their strictness isn’t a deterrent, but there’s a lot of cultural norms for those interested in converting to absorb. Becoming Amish means entering an entirely new way of life. It’s possible the people who join are already strongly motivated by the religion.
Q: How do these dynamics influence the structure of the Amish?
Anderson: Because they’re marrying relatively young — around age 21 — and having children, the generations turn over much more quickly than the typical American population. For example, if the average Amish woman and an American woman are born in the same year, by the time the Amish woman is done having her 6.1 children, her firstborn child has finished with school while the typical American women’s first child has just started learning basic math.
The age distribution of the Amish resembles a true population pyramid — many more younger people at the base than older people at the narrow top — whereas the age distribution of the American population looks basically even across each age category. When half of your population is under the age of around 20 versus half being under 40, the way you think about generations changes quite a bit. For example, there are lots of Amish children and therefore fewer elderly people in proportion. That could create a bit more of a reverence or respect for older generations in comparison to populations where the age distribution is more even, where we find that generations keep more to themselves.
Q: What does the changing dynamics of the Amish mean for rural communities?
Anderson: Much of rural America is somewhere between very slightly growing to slightly declining in population, yet here is a rapidly growing population that only wants to live in rural areas. They have the most immediate potential to transform rural American areas in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and Upper South but will be migrating to other areas as well.
This demographic shift will play out at an economic, neighborhood, political and policy level. For example, younger people may move into new areas and start new small businesses, which generates new economic activity.
Misunderstandings and differences may also come with rapid growth. In many respects, Amish people aren’t extremely different from their rural neighbors, but because of their lifestyle practices such as dress norms and in-group orientation, it can be intimidating for service providers or neighbors to engage with this group, at least at first.
Q: What motivates such high fertility rates among the Amish?
Anderson: Historically, nearly all other American populations experienced fertility declines, first bottoming out in the 1930s at just over two children per woman. Only Ultra-Orthodox Jews and perhaps several other U.S. ethnic religions have maintained high fertility rates through the past 100 years. We have some hypotheses and preliminary ideas from the literature, to explain the decline in fertility in some populations but not others, but no rigorous statistical models benefiting from data across time periods currently exist. I’m building these models and hope to have better answers to this nagging question before long.
This work is supported by a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Pathway-to-Independence K99/R00 grant (K99HD111665-01A1); an NICHD Population Health and Social Environments training grant (T32HD007514); and pilot project funding from the Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging, which is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging (R24-AG065159). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The Social Science Research Institute's Population Research Institute at Penn State also supported this work.