Rocking Their Religious Identities

Intrigue, Turmoil Can Come With the Truth

Christine Axsmith was raised 100 percent Lutheran, with a lineage going back about 500 years on her mother's side. To Axsmith, Lutherans are "plain, simple, hardworking people" -- people like the German Americans she grew up around in the small, rural Pennsylvania Appalachian community of Strausstown.

Which is why it came as a surprise last year when she and her family, gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to bury her grandmother, heard the officiant say he would be reading Jewish prayers, the deceased's "favorites from her childhood."

"We all looked at one another and said, 'What?' " recalled Axsmith, 42, a software tester who lives in Columbia Heights.

Until that day, only Axsmith's aunt-- the deceased's daughter who had arranged for the graveside prayers--knew that Axsmith's father's mother had grown up Jewish in the small town of Pottstown, Pa. Although Axsmith was stunned to discover that her religious heritage had been partly hidden, a few things resonated: a curious affinity with Jews that began in college, a fascination with pre-Christian biblical archaeology, something that had been missing in her faith identity.

That something, she thinks, might be her Jewish roots. Last month, she began taking Judaism classes at a D.C. temple, and she attended her first Jewish service last week, on Yom Kippur.

"When I found out my grandmother was Jewish, I could understand what was going on within me," she said. "I wish I had known this decades ago."

Even as pundits debate the veracity and political implications of the revelation that the mother of U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) is Jewish, a disclosure that came during his reelection campaign, there are thousands of Americans like him, people who know what it's like to have a Jewish heritage unearthed.

The issue of veiled identity has a particular resonance with Jews: Scholars of U.S. religious history say that no other group experienced the phenomenon of having to change names and fabricate backgrounds to assimilate during the genocidal anti-Semitism of World War II and the bias that persisted.

"It's hard for me to think of any instances in which [another group of] people hid their religious identities," said E. Brooks Holifield, a professor of American religious history at Emory University. "And in part, that's simply because of the force of anti-Semitism."

Yet there is a broader story line: the changing role of religion in Americans' identities. In a time when people browse for churches, adopt religious customs from differing faiths and marry across faiths -- all at high rates -- the story of Henrietta "Etty" Allen coming clean to her son at the dining room table can seem almost quaint.

"Religion and spirituality are incredibly fluid today. To some lesser extent, that's always been true, but now we understand religious identity less as a fixed identity and more as something that is achieved," said Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a columnist for the Web site http://www.beliefnet.com/ .

The role that religion plays in shaping identity, however, remains potent.