Strictly Observant: Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media

By Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar

The Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities have typically been associated with strict religious observance, a renunciation of worldly things, and an obedience of women to men. Women’s relationship to media in these communities, however, betrays a more nuanced picture of the boundaries at play and women’s roles in negotiating them.
 
Strictly Observant presents a compelling ethnographic study of the complex dynamic between women in both the Pennsylvanian Old Order Amish and Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and contemporary media technologies. These women regularly establish valuable social, cultural, and religious capital through the countless decisions for use and nonuse of media that they make in their daily lives, and in ways that challenge the gender hierarchies of each community. By exhibiting a deep awareness of how media can be managed to increase their social and religious reputations, these women prompt us to reconsider our outmoded understanding of the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, the role that women play in these communities as agents of change, and our own relationship to media today.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781978805231

Book preview

Introduction

THE MIRACLE, CASE STUDIES, AND METHODS

The miracle happened on Thanksgiving Day in 2011, during my stay in the United States as a Fulbright scholar. While traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see the Amish, my family—my spouse, Meir, and our three children, Ora, Shira, and Yonathan Neriya—and I found ourselves following a buggy. Hoping to realize my dream of undertaking an ethnographic study of Amish culture, I recited Psalms and prayed that God would provide an opportunity to connect with someone. When a young Amish woman emerged, I jumped out of the car and ran after her, saying, Hi! My name is Rebecca, like Rebecca from the Bible! I come from Jerusalem, from the Holy Land. Can I talk with you? I knew that my Biblical Hebrew name, Rivka (Isaac’s wife), is written and pronounced in English as Rebecca. She smiled and invited us to see her family’s farm, which, though only a few steps away, constituted a giant leap toward the realization of my dream. Growing up in a small, strict National Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community had led me to write my doctoral thesis on Ultra-Orthodox women, and I had dreamed of doing a comparative study of the Amish. However, I had then not yet been to the United States and was unable to speak fluent English.

After the tour of the farm and a pleasant conversation with the woman’s mother, we left, copying their address from the mailbox. We drove back to Boston, where my spouse and I were spending a year doing our postdoctoral studies, he in Jewish studies at Harvard and I at Brandeis. All the way home, my heart still beating very fast, my head looked for an answer: What could I write to the woman’s mother that would convince her to invite me to come back and conduct my research? My thoughts returned to my childhood, remembering many tired women with eight or more children. I thought about interviews I had conducted in the Ultra-Orthodox community, about my family and friends. The common ground of all of these women seemed to be fatigue, the wish that somebody would take over even a tiny piece of their household chores and help with their children.

Therefore, I wrote the Amish woman a letter, asking her if I could come for a few days to learn from her, without mentioning the word research. I added, I know that you are a very busy mom. I promise you I’ll take part in all of the housework. Even though she told me much later that she had not believed me, she decided to agree and invited me to visit.

Some minutes after my arrival, on a freezing, rainy February day, we sat on the sofa. Both of us were embarrassed. What are your expectations? she asked. Don’t say anything about research, nothing, I thought to myself and then said something to her about my willingness to learn from her. Then I looked at her kitchen and said, smiling, My grandmother used to say: ‘When you see dishes in the sink, never ask what you can do to help,’ so I will not ask. I rolled up my sleeves and began washing mountains of dishes. She cooked, and the ice was broken. After more than an hour, the dishes were clean and dry; I looked for the broom and swept the kitchen. Then I saw the laundry on the sofa and began to fold—the mountains became neat piles of clothes. She thanked me again and again and said she could not believe anyone could be such a help, especially a spoiled woman from Boston. When I suggested driving her to see her family and going shopping, she could not thank me enough. After twenty-five hours of washing dishes, driving, folding laundry, and pleasantly conversing, I carefully and respectfully asked if I could ask a few questions, maybe record her, for my work at the university. She smiled: Ha, you mean research! Of course, you can ask whatever you want!

I smiled to myself. I grew up among families with eight to thirteen children, and when my friends invited me for dinner, I was always welcomed by their tired mothers—they knew I would wash their dishes quickly and efficiently. Now, in Pennsylvania, I very quickly realized that my grandmother’s adage about the dishes remained true at a distance of more than twenty years and thousands of miles and still worked magnificently.

The simple existence of common ground between two religious women living in communities strongly committed to stringent religious rules and working hard to raise many children created a deep connection between me and my Amish hosts. I have visited this wonderful family dozens of times over ten years, residing on their farm and participating as much as possible in their daily activities. I usually washed dishes, folded laundry, worked in the fields, and ran errands with my car. The many hours of working side by side with the women yielded numerous interviews and participant observations and even a willingness to help in the distribution of questionnaires. My experience argues strongly for carrying out research with busy women, especially religious women with many children, by participating in their work. Beyond the practical help I gave them, washing stacks of dishes and picking hundreds of strawberries and peas produced camaraderie and demonstrated to the women that, though a researcher, I was there not to exploit them but rather to understand and to put their experience into conversation with the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox community.

This book documents the realization of my personal and academic dreams. It examines women from two of the most stringently religious communities found in Western society: the Old Order Amish of rural Pennsylvania (hereafter Amish) and the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox Jews of both the Hasidic and the Lithuanian streams living in Israel (hereafter Ultra-Orthodox). And it also benefits from my own unique personal and professional circumstances. I am a feminist scholar who is also an observant Jewish woman raised within the Israeli National Ultra-Orthodox community, and therefore I am both inside and outside of a religious community. This biography gives me relatively easy access to the Ultra-Orthodox communities, enabling me to network with and conduct multiple studies among them. In addition, I have spent a great deal of time studying the Lancaster Amish from within. Finally, as a social worker with a chosen career as a media scholar, I combine theories from psychology, anthropology, sociology, and media communication to derive essential and meaningful insights regarding contemporary relationships between women from strictly religious communities and modern media technologies.

Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women manage multidimensional symbolic boundaries between themselves, their families, their communities, and the surrounding mainstream societies. As active agents in their communal markets, they have a deep awareness of their social, cultural, religious, and symbolic capital. In the social market of these small and close-knit communities, religious stringency functions as credit. The higher their credit in the stringency marketplace, the greater their communal status. The women’s relationships with media function as a lens for understanding these boundaries and capital management. They cleverly use the prohibitions and stringencies around their media use as tools to increase their social status. They build and preserve a complicated mechanism in which time, space, control, and privacy are integral aspects of the boundary and capital management. This book challenges the conception that the men set the limits on media consumption in these communities and pinpoints the multiple ways women preserve and actually set these limits through their innumerable daily decisions.

I recognize that the people of the communities chosen as case studies for this book, specifically the women, lead engaging, carefully planned, though prescriptive, complex lives. Both groups work hard to keep their traditions alive while surrounded by modern Western society and its media technologies. To show how they do it, I present the primary terms, such as agency, boundary management, and social capital, with the insights and theories that will function as the framework for this book. I follow this with the methodologies used for this study, before moving to ethnographic analysis. Using a triangulation of participant observations, interviews, and a survey, I demonstrate how the practices of these women, their attitudes, and their perceptions toward mainstream society and media, both traditional and modern, function. I also survey the challenges involved in gaining access to these communities and collecting data and summarize how I overcame these challenges with the encouragement of my participants.

OLD ORDER AMISH AND ASHKENAZI ULTRA-ORTHODOX JEWS IN ISRAEL: CASE STUDIES

Geertz (1968) taught that instructive comparison is based on two cases that are at once very alike and very different (p. 4). Cross-cultural comparison enables a better understanding of specific cultures, as well as increase[s] the ‘visibility’ of one structure by contrasting it with another (Bendix, 1996, p. 17). This book compares two religious communities. The Amish are an ethnocultural religious community affiliated with the Anabaptist church and reside in the United States and Canada (Kraybill & Bowman, 2001; Kraybill et al., 2013). The Israeli Ultra-Orthodox are a strict religious Jewish community located in various places in Israel (Malach & Cahaner, 2022). The lifestyles of both communities refer back to their historical European origins (Neuberger & Tamam, 2014). Even today, the Ultra-Orthodox are an intellectual society of scholars whose members live their lives based on textual interpretations (M. Friedman, 1991), while, in contrast, the Amish are a society of villagers and laborers whose members’ lives revolve around agriculture and small business.

The two are similar primarily in their rigorous adherence to required religious behaviors and the strictures of their leaders. The spiritual and social lives of the Amish are shaped by the traditions and values of the Anabaptist movement, as dictated by the Ordnung (literally, order), a set of rules emphasizing humility, simplicity, and obedience (Anderson, 2013; Hostetler, 1993; Kraybill, 1989) and a deep commitment to Gelassenheit, the idea of yielding fully to God’s will and forsaking all selfishness (Kraybill et al., 2013, p. 65). Ultra-Orthodox religious and social life is bound by stringent interpretation of Halakha, Jewish religious law; a commitment to studying the Torah; and unquestioning faith in rabbinic authority (El-Or, 1994; M. Friedman, 1991, 1993).

Both communities have deeply religious modes of worship and ritual but very different practices. An Amish family recites short prayers twice daily, and at their church every other Sunday the entire family participates in prayer services that can last more than three hours. Ultra-Orthodox men pray in the synagogue at three set times daily, for 15–45 minutes for each set of prayers, or around 1.5 hours per day. On their Sabbath (Saturdays), the men usually pray for 20–150 minutes for every set of prayers, or around 3.5 hours per Sabbath, while the women are considered exempt from these and certain other commandments. The members of both communities frequently ask themselves, What does God ask of me (a question I often ask myself), with the typical response of Amish women being the plain, simple way of life and hard labor, while that of Ultra-Orthodox women would be the sufficient knowledge to enable stringent practice of the Halakhic rules, such as kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) and Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath).

The Amish live in rural areas of the United States and Canada. The largest Amish populations are in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The Israeli Ultra-Orthodox communities are located primarily in urban areas, particularly in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak (near Tel Aviv), although there are also Ultra-Orthodox communities in the peripheral areas of Israel. The Amish usually live among the English in rural areas, in contrast to the self-imposed isolation of the Ultra-Orthodox, who choose to live in separate neighborhoods, whether in large cities or in the periphery. Both communities are minority groups: the Amish in the United States number close to 367,000, or less than 0.001 percent of the U.S. population (Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, 2022a), while the entire Ultra-Orthodox community of Israel constitutes about 1,280,000—about 13.3 percent of the country’s people (Malach & Cahaner, 2022).

The Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox live among Western, modern, secular populations and have values that differ greatly from those of the communities surrounding them. Both communities encounter similar secular and ideological social structures while navigating the influences of the outside world (Almond et al., 2003; Douglas, 1966), and their ways of life are visibly different from those of the societies that surround them. Both wear unique dress, have complex relationships with their governments and neighboring communities, and maintain separate educational and legal systems (Spinner, 1994). Each community has its own language: the Amish speak Pennsylvania Dutch, and some groups of Ultra-Orthodox speak Yiddish. However, both communities are also versed in the languages of those surrounding them, English and Hebrew, respectively.

The main similarity between the Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women stems from their roles in their communities. Ostensibly, gender roles in both communities are regulated and well defined. In general, in each, men are responsible for the public sphere and women for the private spheres. Both men and women consider men to be spiritually superior than women, although Amish men work on their farms or run small businesses and Ultra-Orthodox men learn in yeshivas. Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women are responsible for the care of their relatively large families (seven children, on average), alongside many other communal needs (Davidman, 1991; Fader, 2009, 2013; Graybill, 2009; Johnson-Weiner, 2001, 2017, 2020; Jolly, 2007, 2014, 2020; Schmidt & Reschly, 2000; Schmidt et al., 2002; Stavisky, 2022; Van Ness, 1995).

However, the reality, though different in each community, is much more complex. Among the Amish, the percentage of farmers has decreased. About two-thirds of the men work for Amish and non-Amish businesses, many of them far away from home. Accordingly, the wives take care of some of the home farm chores and have taken on some of the roles of their husbands in both public and private spaces (Kraybill et al., 2013; Nolt, 2016).

Historical, political, sociological, and economic circumstances have led to a situation where Ultra-Orthodox men are exempt from military service only if they study in yeshiva full-time. Hence, they remain there for many years. As a result, the Ultra-Orthodox male community in Israel has been transformed into a society of scholars. Most men do not work but devote themselves exclusively to their studies (M. Friedman, 1991, 1995). The intense study of the Talmud (a leading series of sacred texts studied by religious Jews, compiled in Babylon and the Land of Israel in late antiquity and containing discussions, halachic files, and stories dealing with Jewish religious laws, ways of life, and beliefs) has become the chief goal and career track for most Ultra-Orthodox men, for decades preventing them from engaging in vocational training and gainful employment (Heilman & Friedman, 1991). These circumstances shift the women to having a very significant presence in the public space. In Israel, 78 percent of Ultra-Orthodox women work outside the home (Malach & Cahaner, 2022), and many are the primary breadwinners (Neriya-Ben Shahar, 2015).

Both the Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox educate their girls and women to fulfill family and communal needs. Amish women (and men) have eight years of schooling. They are educated, both at home and in school, toward the traditional and plain role of a woman’s place being at home, alongside training in basic skills for limited work for which they will be paid (Johnson-Weiner, 2020). In contrast, the fourteen years of education Ultra-Orthodox women receive (on average) is far more paradoxical. The Ultra-Orthodox high school system for girls includes strict traditional indoctrination to obey their husbands, while at the same time teaching them to work hard and appropriately both inside and outside the home. They are trained to cope independently with the challenges they might find in a secular workplace, while maximizing their support of their husbands’ Torah studies. Initially, before they begin work, their fathers and husbands give them instruction and direction, but, ultimately, the decisions these women make are their own. Often, there are relatively few other Ultra-Orthodox women among their co-workers, leaving them to cope daily with choices that they may find to be challenging and demanding.

Another vital aspect of these women’s lives is the religious-gender rules. The members of each of these religious communities live according to an entirely different system of rules pertaining to religion and gender. Amish women are considered to be almost equal to men. Even though they cannot serve as bishops, ministers, or preachers, they have the same religious mandates and an equal voice in church decisions (Johnson-Weiner, 2001). When I asked about their religious status, all the Amish women informed me that men and women are equal in terms of religious commandments and the degree of closeness to God. Ultra-Orthodox women, however, are definitely considered secondary to men in terms of religious issues. They are exempt from many religious commandments because of their housework and function as facilitators for the men (Heschel, 1995). Ultra-Orthodox women are primarily occupied only in areas considered less critical, such as teaching. In contrast, the girls’ schools and the women’s magazines are organized around the understanding that the most important occupation is to be a Torah scholar. This is something to which a woman can never aspire and means that Ultra-Orthodox women will always remain secondary, and they teach their daughters to be secondary while educating their sons to be primary (Davidman, 1991; El-Or, 1994).

Nevertheless, this book follows Mahmood’s (2005, p.18) perception of agency as "not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable." I argue that Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women use various methods to build their own agency within their communities. Johnson-Weiner (2001, 2020) addresses the power of Amish women via their strict conduct and separation from the outside world. Feminist anthropological studies of Ultra-Orthodox women show that they use their religious studies (El-Or, 1994) and mediated popular psychology to create and reinforce their hierarchical positions in their gendered communities (Fader, 2009, 2013), earning superiority through their religious rigor and discipline (Jacobson, 2006). Hervieu-Léger (2000) describes the women’s practices as transmitters of community values, which is one of the primary roles of Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women in their many efforts to educate the next generation. These insights open and expand our understanding of women’s unlimited role as everyday religious educators and actors.

THE MEDIA AS A LENS FOR RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES’ BOUNDARY AND CAPITAL MANAGEMENT

Ginsburg (1991) argues that the media presents a Faustian contract with modern technology among traditional societies and poses a significant threat. The ability of the media to transmit values such as equality and personal freedom is antithetical to the core values that are identified with religious communities—traditionalism, cultural preservation, collective identity, hierarchy, patriarchy, self-discipline, and censorship. The media can shape religious or nonreligious identity by self-location in the social-moral spaces (Almond et al., 2003; Ammerman, 1987, 2007; Hoover, 2006; Lövheim, 2011; Stout & Buddenbaum, 2002).

Nevertheless, the relationships between religious societies and media technologies are not one-dimensional. Campbell (2010) suggests using the religious-social shaping of technology model to better understand this complexity. She describes religious groups whose members believe that new technologies might challenge the core values of their communities, as opposed to others who use media technologies to spread their religious ideologies (Campbell, 2013, 2015). Campbell (2010) also describes the values and priorities of religious communities as reflected in their discourse and decision-making regarding new technologies: The success, failure, or redesign of a given technology by a specific group of users is based, not simply on the innate qualities of the technology, but also on the ability of users to socially construct the technology in line with the moral economy of the user community or context (p. 59). If the technology could have potentially problematic influences on the community, or if it might open the community to the secular world, it would be rejected, mainly if it were to encourage the cultivation of values or practices antithetical to the communities’ prescribed religious life (p. 122).

Since both communities would agree that all consumption involves the consumption of meanings; indeed, all consumption actually involves the production of meanings by the consumer (Morley, 1992, p. 199), they have intense discourses about different aspects of technology, and there is also strong opposition to it among the leadership. However, their relationships with media are not just discursive. Therefore, this book uses the term media uses to illustrate the various processes conducted by active media users—in this case, Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women—not only for decision-making but also for practical uses. Drawing on McQuail (1994), I see these communities as thoughtful audiences, and their uses include aspects of selective, motivated, reactive, critical, interactive, resisting influence, involved, and planned practices.

Ostensibly, the Ultra-Orthodox make practical use of technology, whereas the Amish reject innovation. The reality is actually far more complex for each community. In practice, both communities use various technologies via processes of acceptance, rejection, adaptation, and appropriation (Ems, 2015, 2022; Johnson-Weiner, 2014). For example, I have seen a car battery utilized to run a food processor in an Amish home and in Ultra-Orthodox homes large radio–tape recorders with the radio button deliberately disabled. But while the Amish discuss all new technologies and oppose those that facilitate connection with the outside world (vehicles and electricity), the Ultra-Orthodox discuss and oppose only technologies with content antithetical to their core values.

Innis (1951) used an essential conceptual differentiation regarding the capacity of the media to overcome the bias of space versus the bias of time. Each of these communities prefers printed materials that overcome both biases. I have found in the homes of both communities many shelves of bound religious magazines, which enable them to reread the same magazines long after they were published, overcoming the bias of time. I have also seen them share articles with family members (physically, by sitting together and discussing them) and pass expensive communal magazines among their friends, thus overcoming the bias of space. Printed materials with limited numbers of pages save time and facilitate censorship, enabling them to preserve time and space boundaries and values.

In contrast, nonprint media overcomes time and space but may undermine both imagined and real boundaries. The focus on the medium fosters another comparative aspect. While both communities are similar in their obedience to the limits on forbidden traditional media (especially television and radio), which is primarily for pleasure, their relationship with new media is more complex because it combines pleasure, connections, and business and is difficult to control and undermines both time and space.

Another perspective is the medium aspect, illustrating McLuhan’s (1964) maxim that the medium is the message. My data show that the Amish primarily negotiate the medium by prohibiting the introduction of technologies such as television, radio, computers, and the Internet into the home while concurrently allowing the entry of secular messages via print newspapers (Cooper, 2006; Fishman, 1987, 1988; Hurst & McConnell, 2010; Kraybill et al., 2013; Nolt, 2008, 2015, 2016; Umble, 1992; Umble & Weaver-Zercher, 2008). The Ultra-Orthodox, by contrast, primarily negotiate the message. They bar the entry of mainstream media content into their homes, irrespective of the technology involved, yet simultaneously harness the most modern technologies to facilitate the consumption of their own community’s content and block forbidden material (Barzilai-Nahon & Barzilai, 2005; Blondheim & Rosenberg, 2016; Campbell, 2010, 2015; Caplan, 2007; David & Baden, 2018; Deutsch, 2009; Golan & Mishol-Shauli, 2018; Livio & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2007; Neriya-Ben Shahar & Lev-On, 2011, 2012; Rosenthal & Ribak, 2015).

This book applies the lens of media studies by focusing specifically on the positions and roles of the media technologies in the juncture of religion, gender, and media (Lövheim, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). It explores the key similarities and differences between Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women’s negotiations as reflected in their perceptions, discourse, and media uses. Comparative articles about media among Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women have shown that media technologies are fundamental challenges for Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women (Neriya-Ben Shahar, 2017a, 2017b). These women use their agency to navigate the tension between their roles as change agents and gatekeepers. They cope with the challenges of the Internet, primarily through nonuse, control, and limitations vis-à-vis the Internet, which constitute[s] a valuable currency in the cultural and religious markets of women from devout communities (Neriya-Ben Shahar 2017b, p. 91). Their perceptions and attitudes demonstrate that in the case of the smartphone, they apply their agency differently. In matters of boundary infringement, they address it as gatekeepers and oppose its use (Neriya-Ben Shahar, 2020).

I show that Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women have remarkably similar perceptions and discourses but different practices about media, perhaps because Amish women are mostly stay-at-home mothers. In contrast, Ultra-Orthodox women work outside the home, many outside the community. The following chapters illustrate their similar goals but different strategies and various methods of negotiation and compromise.

Nevertheless, I would like to share one example that shows that even the most traditional media—Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women’s magazines—reflect essential comparative aspects between these communities. Participant observations and many visits to Amish and Ultra-Orthodox homes have enabled me to see the existence of a similar gap between the ideal and the real. The ideal, shared by both groups, is to be a submissive woman. I have found that, in some ways, the titles of the Amish women’s magazines Keepers at Home and Family Life parallel, in translation, the titles of the Ultra-Orthodox women’s magazines Bait Ne’eman (Faithful home) and Bait Shelanu (Our home) or Mishpacha (Family). The names of these women’s and family magazines include the terms home or family, which are pivotal to my argument. These women are facilitators for their husbands, of their homes and families, while, at the same time, they must submit to their husbands to be able to achieve their goals. They believe that this is a part of God’s plan. The reality, however, is different in both groups. On the face of it, Amish women are indeed keepers at home, while the Ultra-Orthodox work full-time outside the home and are the breadwinners. However, many women in both groups navigate and negotiate these ideals, as opposed to simply accepting and living by them. Their voices will be heard in the chapters of this book.

THE WOMEN’S BOUNDARY AND CAPITAL MANAGEMENTS

Amish and Ultra-Orthodox women manage multidimensional symbolic boundaries between themselves, their family, their community, and mainstream society. This navigation enables them to manage multiple boundaries while also enriching themselves, by creating valuable social, cultural, and religious capital. Their performance constitutes the demonstration of virtue as a source of prestige (Douglas, 2006), a valuable currency in the cultural and religious markets used by these women, offering subtle ways to create and build their agency.

Focusing on the confluence of anthropological, sociological, psychological, and media theories allows a deeper, more holistic analysis of the creation and preservation of multiple boundaries. These boundaries are located in the relationship between religious communities and mainstream culture, alongside the relationships between the group, the individual, and the media. ‘Symbolic Boundaries’ are the lines that include and define some people, groups, and things while excluding others (Epstein, 1992, p. 232). Tajfel and Turner (1986/2004) understood this differentiation process as a tool to attain superiority of a specific group over an out-group. Douglas (1970) argued that communities with high social control and cultural rigidity invest great effort to preserve the social boundaries through proper behavior and insulated roles. Indeed, the term boundary work (Gieryn, 1999) includes unlimited endeavors by individuals and communities to protect themselves, especially by marking cultural boundaries such as language, lifestyle, and education. Individuals must differentiate themselves from outside groups through belonging and sharing within their group. Nevertheless, to achieve an objectified collective identity, the internal identification has to be recognized by the outside groups.

The connection between symbolic boundaries and objective boundaries is complex, perhaps because the symbolic boundaries are a necessary but insufficient condition for creating objective boundaries (Lamont et al., 2015, p. 854). Religious communities that live within the secular mainstream use religious boundary methods for their everyday boundary-forming interactions. They create a mechanism of strict categorization of the other side of the limit. The strategies include the continuum from careful engagement to strict disengagement and sometimes negotiation. For many reasons, the Amish and Ultra-Orthodox communities cannot, or perhaps do not want to, create objective boundaries. Therefore, they invest their lives to build and preserve elusive symbolic boundaries to cope with the powers that threaten to undermine them.

A useful term for analyzing the boundaries between religious communities and the mainstream is enclave culture. This concept is derived from cultural theory and refers to an often sectarian, dissenting minority (Douglas, 1992). Almond et al. (2003) developed and deepened the concept, applying it to fundamentalist Muslim, Christian, and Jewish societies: The enclave … is usually the response to a community’s problem with its boundary. Its future seems to be at the mercy of members likely to slip away. For some reason, usually the appeal of the neighboring central community, it cannot stop its members from deserting.… The only control to be deployed in order to shore up the boundary is moral persuasion. The interpretation developed by this type of community thus stands in opposition to outside society (p. 32). Enclave communities maintain segregationist patterns, high levels of community control over their members, and moral purity (Almond et al., 2003; Douglas, 2005, 2006). By drawing a binary distinction between themselves and mainstream society, religious enclave communities create meaning for their members as they face the free, open, outside world, highlighting the fence and boundaries that are primarily spiritual between themselves—the threatened pure community—and others, the impure surrounding society (Ammerman, 1987, 2007; Douglas, 1966; Marty & Appleby, 1991). One method of preserving a community’s boundaries is monitoring mainstream media and its content that might breach the walls (Almond et al.,