The Choice at the End of It

Sociological surveys of Amish communities consistently find that a large majority of young people who go through rumspringa choose baptism into the church, commonly cited at figures upward of eighty to ninety percent depending on the specific community and period studied, a retention rate scholars of Amish society regard as evidence that the community's religious and social bonds remain genuinely persuasive to those raised within them rather than merely coercive, even though the whole structure of rumspringa is designed to allow a real alternative. Those who choose baptism accept, from that point on, the full authority of the ordnung and become subject to the possibility of shunning, meidung, should they later seriously violate the community's discipline, a consequence that gives the earlier, unbaptised period of rumspringa its particular theological weight, since leaving before baptism carries no such religious penalty while leaving after it does. Those who do not choose baptism generally leave the Amish community for a broader Anabaptist or non Amish life, sometimes maintaining family ties and sometimes experiencing more significant estrangement depending on the individual family and community, and the custom as a whole has drawn outsized media and popular attention, including reality television portrayals many Amish and scholars of Amish life regard as sensationalised and unrepresentative of the ordinary, comparatively low key experience of most Amish youth during this period.