The Doubling Community: Why the Amish Population Keeps Growing
Near Berlin, Ohio
One of the most striking demographic facts about the Amish community in North America is that it has been growing rapidly for generations, at a pace that surprises most outside observers. Demographers who study the community estimate that the North American Amish population doubles approximately every twenty years. In the year two thousand the total Amish population in North America was estimated at roughly one hundred sixty five thousand people.
By two thousand twenty that figure had grown to approximately three hundred sixty thousand. The Holmes County community alone numbered close to forty thousand people as of two thousand twenty three. Two factors drive the growth.
Amish families are large, averaging five to seven children. And despite widespread assumptions that young Amish people routinely leave the community after Rumspringa, the period of relative freedom granted to adolescents before baptism, studies suggest that roughly eighty five percent of young people in most communities choose to be baptized and remain. That retention rate is remarkable for a faith that requires a genuine, voluntary, adult commitment.
Baptism is not inherited in the Amish tradition. Each member chooses it, as the original Anabaptists insisted it must be chosen. No one is born Amish the way one might be born into a family religion.
The decision is real, and the fact that most young people make it is what sustains the extraordinary growth of a community that the outside world has been predicting will eventually dissolve.
