208 Nancy T. Ammerman
maintain or recreate immigrant religious identities.^4 Circumstances and demands in a
new culture inevitably reshape the beliefs and practices that were taken for granted in
a home country. Thrown together both with “anglo” hosts and with more proximal,
yet often strange, ethnic compatriots, immigrants use religious gatherings as places
to sustain old cultural ways, but also as places where new ways are hammered out
(Warner and Wittner 1998). The clash of cultures is across generations, as well, as sec-
ond and third generations arrive at their own relationships to ethnic and religious
traditions.
Two earlier sets of immigrants now fuel another stream of writing about religious
identity. Both American Catholics and American Jews have, in the last generation,
passed into the mainstream of culture, have begun to experience high rates of inter-
marriage, and have consequently generated a good deal of identity anxiety among their
leaders. Can religious institutions support distinct ways of life that are both ethnic and
religious in American middle class society? Researchers have attempted to disentangle
the beliefs, practices, relationships, institutions, and conscious self-identity that may or
may not be essential to perpetuating community and tradition. Whether the object of
study is independent-minded post–Vatican-II Catholics or intermarried nonreligious
Jews, questions of religious identity have emerged in both practical and theoretical
discussions.^5
Another set of questions about religious identity is raised by seemingly incongru-
ous religiosocial pairings (Warner 1997). Where significant collective identities stand in
opposition to one another, individuals who find themselves in both warring camps at
the same time must engage in active identity work. Thumma (1991) examines, for in-
stance, the case of gays who are also evangelical. He demonstrates that special purpose
organizations can engender both the rationale and the practices by which a “gay evan-
gelical” identity can be built and sustained, but such practices take intentional work. By
replicating much of evangelical culture, but within a gay environment, people create
and try out new religious solidarities.
Equally interesting has been the attempt to understand conversion. Especially at
the height of sociology’s attention to new religious movements, we had opportunities
to see actions and affiliations transformed in ways that brought identity construction
visibly to the fore (e.g., Bromley and Hammond 1987; Robbins 1988). Here were people
who chose, in a thoroughly modern way, a seemingly pre-modern absorption in a
religious community, trading a multilayered and complicated modern identity for one
organized around a single set of core religious beliefs, practices, and associations.^6
Among the most helpful of the work on conversion that emerged from that era
was Mary Jo Neitz’s portrayal of the process by which charismatic Catholics gained
that new identity (Neitz 1987). She describes conversion as the gradual building up
of a new “root reality” (Heirich 1977) at the same time that the old one is being dis-
carded. The change is made as people engage in a kind of practical/rational process
(^4) See, for example, Chong 1998; Kim 2000; Lawson 1999; Pena and Frehill 1998; Yang 1999. ̃
(^5) Hoge (2000) has recently made this argument. Among the key recent studies of Jewish identity
are Davidman (1990), Heilman (1996), and Goldstein and Goldstein (1996). For Catholics, see
Dillon (1999a) and McNamara (1992).
(^6) Even that construal is, of course, more “ideal typical” than real. Even the most tightly bounded
new religious movement still retained complex layers of involvement and dissent and therefore
complex versions of identity. See, for example, Barker (1984).