America's Amish EXPLOSION: Why the buggy-riding population that doesn't use ... trends now
America's low-technology Amish sect has doubled in size since 2000 and will hit 1 million members this century as it spreads far beyond its Pennsylvania heartland, new research shows.
Steven Nolt, an expert on the Amish, told DailyMail.com that its 378,000-strong US population was doubling every 20 years, thanks to families with lots of children who most often stick to the faith.
Amish communities have spread beyond their traditional areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, with fledgling outposts as far afield as Maine, Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and Idaho, said Nolt.
The expansion underscores the tightness of a group that eschews technology to focus on family time, even as modern America grapples with cell phones and social media that may harm kids' mental health.
Members of the Amish Brenneman family head home to Iowa after a vacation in Maine
The Amish are spreading far beyond their established homes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana
Still, the group remains dogged by revelations from runaways about an ultra-conservative Christian lifestyle, most recently including the adherent-turned stripper Naomi Swartzentruber, 43.
'We can anticipate 1 million Amish well before the end of the century,' Nolt, a history and Anabaptist studies professor and director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, told DailyMail.com.
Steven Nolt says the Amish are heading West
He foresaw further Amish expansion across rural parts of the Mountain West and Southeast.
'There will be more Amish living in more places, with new neighbors,' he said.
'That does pose the possibility of potential misunderstanding. But also the possibility of keeping some rural areas alive and populated in the face of otherwise predicted rural depopulation in the next 50 years.'
The Amish, a Christian sect that migrated to the US from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, typically refuse to drive cars, use computers or connect to a public electricity supply.
They speak a German dialect and travel through their mostly rural villages in horse-drawn buggies.
At a time when some other ethnic and religious groups fear dilution through mixed marriages, the Amish have boosted their numbers by marrying within the group and teaching their kids at Amish-only schools.
Their population growth rate has accelerated in the past 20 years because they have an average of five or six children per family, and have done a better job of retaining their young people, and are having longer, healthier lives.
America's Amish population doubles every 20 years and is headed toward 1 million this century
Amish children are seen on an Amish horse in the community's heartland of central Pennsylvania
A tenth of Amish families in the Pennsylvania heartland have 10 or more children — far above the 1.9 children of the average US family.
Birth control and abortion are frowned upon.
Unlike other religious groups, the Amish don't convert, so population growth comes from children.
According to Nolt, nearly 90 percent of Amish children
