A few months ago, the New York Times Book Review featured an alphabetical dictionary of phrases and tropes describing varieties of romance novels. I was surprised to find one facet of the genre missing from the list: conservative religious romance. For odd reasons, I found myself browsing several novels that introduced me to this hidden niche.
I download e-books from my local library, filtering my preferences: adult; English; literature. A while ago when I opened the link, my screen became a checkerboard of women in long dresses and little white caps, their eyes cast down; sometimes a smile crimped an upper lip. No he-man shared the cover of these Amish romances, a subgenre I was suddenly submerged in by the Minuteman Library algorithm. After wondering, “Why me?” I started wondering, “Then, who?” How many Anabaptists homestead in Boston Metrowest? Via Google I learned that Amish romance is a thing, that evangelical women read them because they’re blanched of sex (the books, not the women) and weld love to religion. Like cozy mysteries, they’re comfort food. And like the cozies, food is always in the foreground––women constantly churning and baking for extended families in a swirl of kinder, kuche, kirche.
I sampled three of these chaste romances. In the first, a twentysomething single seeks to join a strict Amish order. She sits through 2-hour sermons on backless benches, learns the sect’s German dialect and how to hitch a buggy––and discovers her mentor secretly visiting a daughter who’s been shunned. It’s not a potential husband but commitment to God that complicates the plot.
He––definitely He–– gets little more than lip service in my second foray. Visiting her Amish kin for the summer, an older teen is attracted to a visitor while her parents focus on her wayward brother. The third is the only book I’ve read where the heroine is herself one of the Plain, not a Fancy suburbanite nostalgic for a time without cell phones.
Love is straightforward in books that feature simplicity. The conflict in the first is whether a postulant will stay the course necessary for baptism. In the second, romance with an older stranger is a little spicier ––couples date! It’s assumed they might kiss!––while gossip spread by the swain causes others to doubt him while his crush never does. In the third, a widow expecting a posthumous child falls for an old friend; her late husband’s sister blocks the way (apparently pregnant-Amish-widow is a subgenre; Amazon advertised two more for my inspection). These lovers don’t quarrel––men are meant to be listened to, not contradicted. Jane Austen it’s not.
Which brought me to an even narrower tranche of religious romances. After all, another sect hews to 19th century tradition, limits education, adheres to strict rules about dress, and speaks a dialect of German––Ultra-orthodox Jews. I read two U. O. J. romances based on the outsider-coming-to-join motif, each more nuanced than their Amish counterparts. Those born to an insular Brooklyn community don’t want to accept secular Jews who repent and become fully observant. The novels don’t hide hypocrisy and suffering in these closed enclaves, including matters as serious as child sexual abuse. The Ultra-Orthodox are depicted as flawed and joyous, compassionate and snobbish, suspicious and prone to feuds. The characters feel more human than the near-saints in the Amish world.
But it’s not a popular trope. Maybe because romance is scarce when “dates” must be brokered by a matchmaker, maybe because Jews make up such a small percentage of the U.S. population. And maybe because it’s not pastoral. Farm life is part of the Amish romantic glow, burnished by apple orchards without migrants to harvest them, spring lambs immune to autumn butchering, and little historical sense that as early as the 1820s women were leaving those lives for the comparative freedom of New England factories.
What’s common to Amish and Ultra-Orthodox romance––besides the never-ending smorgasbord of labor and food prep––is the need to submit to God, and to men who interpret God’s will. I searched “Islamic romance” on Amazon and came up empty, though the site features a marriage manual for Sunnah newlyweds. But in all the conservative, orthodox romances I sampled, the focus is on the joys of submission––for women. Is it any wonder that young men are joining Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical-style churches that assure them God thinks they ought to be the boss?