Reconceptualizing religious change: ethno-apostasy and change in religion among American Jews

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2006 by Benjamin T. Phillips, Shaul Kelner

Issues of power and minority status lead us back to the question of status-climbing, raised by Stark and Glock (1968b). Religious switching in Jewish history has not always occurred by choice (Klausner 1997), the Spanish Inquisition being only the most well-known instance. While we exclude forced conversion from the rest of our discussion as it has no parallels in the contemporary United States, it should be noted that these cases are a clear instance of weighing this-worldly benefit against supernatural compensators (Stark and Bainbridge 1987). In cases where switching has occurred by choice, choices were typically made in a societal context suffused with formal and informal social pressure to abandon the low-status minority community in favor of the religious communities of the majority (Endelman 1994, 1997). In either case, the transition from Judaism to the religion of surrounding society was associated with the desired or imposed movement from a low-status community to a higher status one.

How are we to integrate this with the prediction that cross-cutting social ties foster religious switching by weakening the grip of the ethnic community? The historical situation of Jewish communities having heavily consolidated social relations as a result of nonporous internal and external boundaries suggests that the critical cross-cutting ties that produce an incentive to switch faiths would be economic. Describing the situation of the Jews of Warsaw in the 1800s, Endelman declared that "conversion was a rational choice" (1997:52), speaking of rationality in a purely economic sense. The paradigmatic statement of such 19th century conversions was Daniel Chwolson's reported rejoinder when asked whether he had converted out of conviction; he felt convinced that it was better to be a professor in St. Petersburg than a melamed (a teacher in Jewish schools) in Eishyshok. If we were searching for the cross-cutting social ties to which we might impute a measure of causality, we might look to relationships with non-Jewish colleagues, customers and power brokers. But in the face of state-imposed limitations on Jews' activities (Endelman 1997), one might argue that incentives are present irrespective of cross-cutting ties, and that a more convincing account of the historical record would adopt a status based approach similar to Stark and Glock's (1968b), but more cognizant of the power relationships in operation.

Still, even if one accepts the proposition that the experience of history directs us to look toward extracommunal economic ties to predict religious switching out of Judaism, the notion that the situation of the Jews in twenty-first century America can be understood with concepts appropriate for explaining nineteenth century Warsaw is ludicrous on its face. In the contemporary American situation, state pressure to abandon Jewish affiliation is nonexistent, status distinctions between Jews and non-Jews have become much more fluid, Jewish occupational niches include fields notable for their prestige (Hartman and Hartman 1996), and Jews and non-Jews are tied together by deeply rooted social relationships that transcend the pure instrumentality of economic relations, including historically high rates of intermarriage (Phillips and Fishman in this issue). In such circumstances, the cross-cutting social ties that would be most relevant to religious switching would not be the ties of business, but the ties of community, friendship, and love.