The New Yorker:

Two recent books follow young religious converts down the winding back roads of belief.

By Lauren Boersma Harris

In 2010, Christina Cortez was a high-school junior. She enjoyed reading the “Twilight” series, playing softball, and listening to Linkin Park and the Eagles on her iPod. One day, she was in the car with her mother, who asked, offhand, what colleges she might want to consider as her senior year approached. “I don’t think I want to go to college,” Christina told her. “I think I want to look into the Amish.”

Christina spent her early childhood in Bakersfield, California. She moved, at age eight, to live with her mother in Maryland, where a small group of local New Order Amish dotted the road with their tractors and buggies. Her mother sometimes took their family to a Baptist church, then a Methodist one, but religion mostly remained an abstract, impersonal part of Christina’s life. Then, in her freshman year, she developed a secret obsession with her quaintly dressed neighbors, spurred, in part, by her love of old things, like the “Little House on the Prairie” books. She began reading Amish history alongside the Bible, which she had cracked open in earnest for the first time; she went online to order “Martyr’s Mirror,” a multivolume account of the persecution of the early Anabaptists, and read it hungrily.

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