Thee TikToks I Love
This summer, I stumbled across news of a recent survey claiming that almost 50 percent of Gen Z now use TikTok rather than Instagram or Twitter to receive information. Gen Xer that I am, I did some googling, and found other news stories sharing similar statistics.
In a pique of curiosity or maybe boredom, I wondered what information TikTok might give me about my people, the Anabaptists, believing that—given what some Anabaptist think about technology—I wouldn’t find much. Instead, I found a trove of TikToks, by Mennonites and by Amish, the insular people who eschew most modern technology except, apparently, smart phones and social media platforms. (Okay, to be fair, most Amish eschew smart phones, too. They just happen to know about “workarounds,” something David Weaver-Zercher explains in this month’s Anabaptist World.)
No big deal, but in the span of a few months, I seem to have become a preeminent scholar in Amish TikTok. (No really, not a big deal; and also, there may be others.) After talking about TikTok and storytelling at a Mennonite writing conference in September, I was invited to share my vast (not-so-vast) knowledge about Amish TikTok on the Just Plain Wrong podcast.
If you haven’t heard the Just Plain Wrong podcast yet, you should, especially if you are Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent. The podcast stars three Mennonite librarians who talk about how popular culture tends to get the details about Mennonites and Amish just plain wrong.
The women started their project by reviewing Amish romances (the books, that is, not the actually romances of Amish people), but quickly branched out to consider other aspects of Mennonite and Amish representation in culture. Their popularity is growing, as far as podcasts go, and of the three million podcasts now available, they are in the top three percent of shows. Quite a feat, though don’t worry: as Mennonites, they are truly humble about their success.
Podcast topics have included the Mennonite game (this has somehow been made into a *real* card game); the 1980s movie Witness, and the hotness of Harrison Ford, aka John Book); and Jello salads from Mennonite cookbooks, as well as the controversy over whether raisins should be in a carrot/orange Jello all the rage at Mennonite potlucks of my youth. (Raisins shouldn’t be in this salad, of course. Though more pressingly, that particular salad should not exist.)
The interview on Amish TikTok will drop in January, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you might want to check out some Amish TikToks for yourself. The hashtag #amishgirlsgonewild would be a good place to start, though #Mennogirlsgonewild might also yield interesting results, including an entire series of videos featuring Mennonite women, making carrot salads with raisins. Wild at heart, we Mennonites are.
You can pre-order Finding Our Way Forward from your local bookstore; from a corporate book seller; or directly from Herald Press. You can also read more at Publisher’s Weekly, which featured my book.