Identity Change Among Ethno-Religious Border Crossers: The Case of the Former Amish

The present study explores identity among the former Amish. While sociologists of religion have long been interested in religious identity, there has been less attention to religious identities among those who cross religious borders. Much of the literature suggests that individuals abandon former religious identities, including ethno-religious ones, when they join a new religious denomination (e.g., Sandomirsky and Wilson in Soc Forces 68:1211–1229, 1990; Sherkat and Wilson in Soc Forces 73:993–1026, 1995). While scholarship on the Jewish case challenges this assumption (e.g., Phillips and Kelner in Soc Relig 67:507–524, 2006; Sharot in Contemp Jew 18:25–43, 1997), research on other religious groups has largely overlooked these insights. This study extend insights from the Jewish case by examining holdover identities among the former Amish and comparing them with the former Ultra-Orthodox Jewish case, making use of Davidman’s (Becoming un-orthodox: stories of ex-Hasidic Jews, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014) research. Analysis of in-depth interviews with 59 former Amish adults reveals that, while those who have left the Amish no longer define themselves as religiously Amish, they do not abandon their Amish identities entirely. Instead, they reconstruct the meanings of their Amishness in varied ways in their non-Amish contexts. Comparison of these patterns with former Ultra-Orthodox Jews illuminates contextual factors, including the Amish practice of adult baptism and differing normative conceptions of Amish and Jewish identities, that contribute to variation in holdover identities across these cases. Altogether, these results suggest that ethno-religious identities are not mutually exclusive of other denominational identities and support the conceptualization of religious identities as complex, multilayered, and constructed in particular contexts in interaction with existing notions about religious groups.