I grew up in Lancaster, PA. My dad's side of the family is Amish and Mennonite.
It's not true that they refuse to use any technology at all. It's more like, they are extremely judicious about use of technology, and take the attitude, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." A horse and buggy works better for them because repairing modern cars is a lot harder than fixing a broken buggy wheel. And they are extremely frugal. We have old farming implements in our family that are identical to displays that you'll see in museums--except ours are still in use, because they still work and we took care of them over the centuries. They do use modern medicine.
Socially, it very much resembles Communist Russia, in the sense that there is little incentive to excel at anything; in fact, if you excel or are very creative at any particular thing, you'll be accused of "breaking up the community" because your success makes other people feel bad if they are not also successful. Also, they have had many centuries of experience in being self-sufficient and they don't like to mess with a method that works for maintaining a society. Conformity is the rule.
Economically, the large families provide lots of cheap labor, and if you have cheap labor and plenty of good farmland, then it's far less expensive to run a farm self-sufficiently and without electricity or diesel.
They don't marry outside of their religion--that would mean leaving the entire community, and few people want to leave all their families and friends. So they have a much higher rate of genetic disorders due to inbreeding: polydactyly, deafness, metabolic disorders, autism, MR/DD, etc. Some are so rare that only two or three people in the whole world have ever had those genetic disorders. There's a clinic in Strasburg PA for helping the families cope with such disorders, and they work with geneticists to figure out what gene exactly is causing the problem.
The Anabaptists (Amish & Mennonite) came to the US in the early 1700s after confirming with William Penn that land was available. They paid the local Native Americans (Delaware and Susquehannock) and William Penn for the land in cattle, processed fiber, some metal goods. They originally left their homes in South Germany and Switzerland because they refused to join the army or serve a turn in the canton government. They don't take any oaths for religious reasons, believing that the Bible forbids it, so they refused to take the citizenship oaths to the Swiss cantons and the loyalty oaths to the South German kings. A few religious leaders were beheaded, and they emigrated to tolerant Holland before leaving for Pennsylvania.
If you have any other questions, I will do my best to answer them, but since my dad quit the community in favor of college and modern technology, I don't know as much as someone raised in it. They do use the internet, believe it or not--it's great for farm sales of Amish-made gift baskets and so forth--so maybe someone here will be of more help.
