We all acquiesce, don't we?

"Is the choice of returning to the sect made in an entirely free manner?" This is the overarching question to muse on when considering what makes these youth resolve on remaining Amish. Why would a youth want to continue living a life of suppression after they have reveled in their basest desires? It is indeed perplexing to think of why a sixteen year old chooses a rigid, stifling life after a liberating rumspringa experience. But an experience is exactly what rumspringa is. These youth are ensconced in a hegemonic culture of “moral imperatives, biblical precepts, and complex sets of rules that the sect has imparted to them in their homes, at church, and in school.” They spend sixteen years of captivity within their conservative communes before they are turned loose for a few days. How does rumspringa allow Amish youth to make a choice of freewill? Is it possible to reconcile sin with purity? I would argue that it doesn’t allow for choice but rather ensures docility.
A taste of American mainstream culture is as much exhilarating as it is harrowing. The youth have taken in our mainstream culture’s propaganda and they are disenchanted when they experience this culture. There is freedom attached to mainstream culture, but there is also individualism, loneliness, confusion, coldness, and despondency. These characteristics of our mainstream culture are stirred together and youth are left sedated with fear. Illuminating this fear is the unfathomable suicide rate among American youth. Life is to daunting and messy for a youth to navigate and understand on their own. They need guidance from someone who has turned the bends and trekked the winding path. Americans dump youth onto this shrouded and ominous road, whereas the Amish keep a hand, albeit forceful, on their youths’ backs. The Amish live childhoods that “are far more sheltered (and structured) than those of our own children” and isn’t this what all children want? Don’t educators foster warmth and order, not coldness and chaos in their classrooms? Even that youth don’t explicitly ask for help don’t we instinctively know they are always in need? Why would the Amish youth want to leave this refuge? They trade freedom for security, like we trade love for financial security (open marriages). I would certainly contend the “free choice” a sixteen year old has in regard to returning to the Amish church, but I do see their logic. After all, acquiescence is not a foreign concept to any American.