Amish

The Amish are a traditionalist Anabaptist Christian religious and cultural community originating from Swiss and South German Mennonite settlers who emigrated to North America beginning in the eighteenth century, distinguished by deliberate limits on the adoption of modern technology (including, in most communities, the private ownership of automobiles and connection to the public electric grid) understood by the community as supporting separation from the wider world (Gelassenheit) rather than as a rejection of technology as such. Amish social life is organized around local church districts, plain dress, and a rite of passage (rumspringa) during which adolescents experience the wider world before choosing baptism into the church as adults, a genuinely optional choice within the community's own theology. Amish communities are among the fastest-growing religious populations in North America by birth rate, owing to large family size and a documented, though not universal, retention rate among those raised in the community.