Back in 2010, when Christina Cortez was in 11th grade, all her friends would have been discussing their boyfriends, grades, and dream careers.
But Christina, 16, had other plans.
Sitting in the car with her mom, she was asked almost offhandedly where she might want to go to college.
‘I don’t think I want to go to college,’ Christina told her surprised mom. ‘I think I want to look into the Amish.’
Her mom may have swerved the car a little as she looked back at her daughter in shock.
‘You’re joking, right?’ she asked.
She wasn’t.
Now 28, Christina lives in a small house attached to a larger Amish farm in Maryland with her two foster sons, Cairo, 2, and Brooklyn, 13.
She wears traditional Amish clothing – a plain, ankle-length, dress and a scarf or white bonnet covering her hair – and shuns most modern luxuries.
She doesn’t listen to music or watch TV. She will likely never fly in a plane or drive a car, and social media is a mystery to her.
Christina Cortez wears traditional Amish clothing – a plain, ankle-length dress and a scarf or white bonnet covering her hair – and shuns most modern luxuries.
Christina lived with an Amish family to get a feel for the rhythms of the household: ‘Rising early, tending to hydroponic tomatoes, learning to sew with the help of the family’s teenage daughters, and milking cows’
Christina even gave up her education when she was baptized into the church as a teenager. She never achieved the PhD her mom dreamed for her – or the career as a special education teacher she’d imagined from a young age.
What could have prompted this completely normal teenager to shun the modern world and embrace a life of simplicity, wonders Kelsey Osgood in her new book, Godstruck.
Born in Bakersfield, California, Christina’s childhood was fairly typical – with lots of biking, swimming, playing tennis, and hanging out with her large, ‘rambunctious’ family.
Her parents divorced when she was young enough not to remember, and when her mom remarried, they moved to Maryland.
‘Not long after relocating,’ writes Osgood, ‘Christina noticed Amish people shopping in town or navigating their tractors or buggies down the long country roads. She’d never seen anything like them before, and wondered to herself if they might be a little like the Catholic nuns she’d seen in church as a child.’
She was also a history buff, and had adored watching Little House on the Prairie.
That moment in the car with her mom might have seemed like it was coming out of nowhere.
But in reality, Christina had been obsessively researching her strangely dressed neighbors – reading history books about the Amish, studying the Bible for the first time, and cross-referencing how their beliefs compare with other Christian religions.
Reluctantly, her mom agreed to let her attend some youth activities arranged by the local community, thinking it was just a passing phase.
But gradually, Christina started changing the way she dressed. Ordinarily a tomboy, wearing shorts and sports gear, she started to opt instead for long skirts and pulled her hair back into a bun or ponytail.
Sherry Gore gave up her fast-paced California lifestyle for a simple life writing Amish cookbooks
Matthew Secich left his job as a chef at Michelin-starred restaurant Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago to join the Amish in Unity, Maine
Retired Ohio science teacher Mark Curtis was baptized into the Amish at age 51, after their care for his cancer-stricken mother convinced him to join
Onetime high school majorette Marlene Miller wrote about joining the Amish when she was 23
By her final semester in high school, she was wearing Amish gear full-time and her friends couldn’t help but notice – leading to some bullying.
‘I remember some of them mooing at me and saying, like, “Where’s the barn?” Christina tells Osgood. ‘But it only made me more firm in my resolve to keep it up. Because to me, if someone is okay with being martyred for their faith, what is a little teasing compared to that?’
Realizing their young newcomer was serious, the Amish community started to bring Christina into their world.
‘They decided first to give her a crash course in Anabaptist theology in advance of the standard “instruction class” Amish teens take before baptism,’ writes Osgood.
‘Beginning in the late spring of 2011, they walked her through the 18 articles of faith, a list of core beliefs including not swearing oaths, partaking of communion (which the Amish do biannually, in conjunction with washing each other’s feet), and practicing nonresistance.’
Christina also started learning Pennsylvania Dutch. Though she’d been taking German classes at school specifically for this reason, ‘Pennsylvania Dutch is not a written language, so there were no textbooks or Rosetta Stone programs she could use to further supplement her learning.’
‘It was basically going back to school again and learning everything all over,’ Christina recalls.
As she prepared to graduate high school, she lived with a family ‘to get a feel for the rhythms of an Amish household: rising early, tending to hydroponic tomatoes, learning to sew with the help of the family’s teenage daughters, and milking cows.’
Amish converts are extremely unusual, but Christina is not the only one.
Retired Ohio science teacher Mark Curtis was baptized into the Amish at age 51, after their care for his cancer-stricken mother convinced him to join.
Matthew Secich left his job as a chef at Michelin-starred restaurant Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago to join the Amish in Unity, Maine.
Sherry Gore gave up her fast-paced California lifestyle for a simple life writing Amish cookbooks.
And onetime high school majorette Marlene Miller wrote about joining the Amish at age 23. She fell in love with an Amish boy, married in the community and had 10 children.
Christina has two foster sons, as ‘adoption is… one way for unmarried women to take part in an intensely pro-familial culture’
While ‘old order’ Amish refuse to use mechanical devices of any kind, Christina’s community in Maryland is part of the ‘new order’ that has access to electricity and a phone line
On March 18, 2012, Christina ‘gave her life over to Jesus’ and was officially received into the Amish community.
‘Her mom and her stepdad’s mother and sister were there, as well as a couple she knew from the Methodist church and a handful of friends from high school,’ writes Osgood, adding that most of those friends have ‘all lost touch by now, the gulf between their worlds widening ever more over the ensuing years.’
More than a decade later, her life is dramatically different to the one she might have imagined as a teenager.
‘Even at a young age, she’d wanted to be a special education teacher… but she assumed she had to forgo that dream when she was baptized,’ writes Osgood.
‘She regrets not going further with her education, both because she always loved learning and because, as the most studious child in her family, she worries she let them down.
‘”Mom had always felt that I would be the one to get a PhD,” she told me.’
Christina also had to give up listening to music and playing the trumpet, which she had loved in high school.
‘The Amish generally discourage playing musical instruments, worrying that prowess in individual activities might lead to pride, though occasionally people will play harmonicas or accordions,’ Osgood writes.
‘She’d listened to music across genres, everything from Panic! at the Disco to Linkin Park to classic rock like AC/DC and the Eagles. Her iPod was a “big, huge, random mix” of songs and bands.
‘Now, she does play the harmonica, but it’s a pale imitation of her first musical love. “It’s just not the same as a trumpet,” she says, just a touch forlornly.’
While ‘old order’ Amish refuse to use mechanical devices of any kind, Christina’s community in Maryland is part of the ‘new order’ that has access to electricity and a phone line (though using the internet is frowned upon).
Their humble home is filled with canned produce, ‘a smattering of novels… next to religious books, like one called The Gospel in Tolstoy, and a cassette tape story version of Toy Story, the movie of which, presumably, they never watched.’
Christina ‘read all the Twilight series books and saw the first two movies but was baptized before the third was released: for her, Edward and Bella’s relationship remains chaste’
Christina’s home has a ‘cassette tape version of Toy Story – the movie of which, presumably, they never watched’
Christina remembers reading The Hunger Games books, but by the time the film was released, she had sworn off movies
‘In high school, she’d had a computer and a phone,’ writes Osgood, ‘and had gotten close to getting her driver’s license, but then she got baptized before she took the test, so obviously that ended that.’
She had to get a smartphone when she started fostering her boys – to access various apps and communicate with social workers via Zoom – but it mainly sits idle. Even if she wanted to use it, service is patchy, at best.
‘Fostering and adoption,’ writes Osgood, ‘is… a fairly common pursuit in the Plain world, and one way for unmarried women to take part in an intensely pro-familial culture.’
Both of her boys have complex medical needs.
Despite her ‘modernized’ outlook, Christina is remarkably cushioned from the outside world.
When Osgood mentions Twitter, she replies, timidly: ‘Is that like a text-messaging service or something?’
‘In a few ways, Christina’s life can seem to have paused in 2012’ when she converted, the author writes. ‘She remembers reading The Hunger Games series and the young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, and wishing she could have seen how the filmmakers chose to adapt those stories, but both films came out after her baptism, by which point she’d already sworn off movies.
‘She read all the Twilight series books and saw the first two movies but was baptized before the third was released: for her, Edward and Bella’s relationship remains chaste, their half-vampiric daughter forever unborn.
‘At the end of the day, though, she didn’t find it very difficult to give up most of the content you might lump under the heading of “media.”
‘”It didn’t really matter to me. Like, I like TV. I could easily watch it, growing up,” she said.
‘”But obviously it’s not necessary to have these things in my life, and if anyone can live without them, so can I. It wasn’t really a martyr mentality though. I just think I was kind of like, eh, I can do without them too. It’ll be okay. I’ll get over it.”‘
Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion by Kelsey Osgood is published by Viking