Religious Seekers’ Attraction to the Plain Mennonites and Amish

Abstract

For all the liberties granted Westerners, a small stream of seekers is looking into the seemingly austere plain Anabaptist sects (Amish, Mennonites, etc.). What are they seeking? Using theories of modernity, secularization, and gender as guides, this study analyzes survey data from a web-based convenience sample of 1074 seekers. Females, young adults, and evangelicals are overrepresented. Chief attractions include religious seriousness, strong community, and modesty. A factor analysis of all 21 attractions produced six latent attraction variables. Seekers characteristic of: (1) the “family” factor seek to consolidate social domains around the family, granting parents greater control in offspring socialization, (2) the “femininity” factor reject an increasingly change-minded, sexualized mainstream youth culture, (3) the “personal conviction” factor tend towards evangelical fundamentalism, mistakenly viewing plain people as a sweeping statement against secularization, (4) the “primitivism” factor are seeking to demodernize in tangible ways, (5) the “stability” factor desire a stabilizing social system to address psychological stresses, and (6) the “returnees” factor are looking to rejoin, either after having left earlier in life or having discovered plain ancestry. Depending on changes in broader society, characteristics of religions may incidentally correspond with era-specific stresses, triggering a generation of seekers, as is the case here with plain Anabaptists.