RROMANIPE IN TRANSITION: PROTESTANTIZATION OF ROMA
RROMANIPE IN TRANSITION: PROTESTANTIZATION OF ROMA

Summary/Abstract: The expansion of Protestant teaching among Roma in southeastern Serbia, more intensely in the last decade and a half, has initiated the process of reshaping their collective identity. Traditional components of Rromanipe are being reconceptualized and adapted to modernity. The former belonging to a unified and homogenous ethnic group is today raised to the level of religious identification, and the cultural identity is equated with the proclaimed values of religious communities, whose new members they are. The primary division into “Us, Roma” and “Them, Gadže” has evolved into “Us, believers” and “Them, Non-believers”. When choosing a partner, the “purity of blood” is no longer crucial, now it is the “purity in Christ”: the preferred choice of partner exclusively founded on the endogamic basis is substituted by a choice with a confessional basis, leading to a richer ethnic palette. The paper analyzes the replies of baptized believers of Romani nationality in several Protestant religious communities on the territory of southeastern Serbia (Christian Baptist Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Adventist Church and Evangelical Pentecostal Church) concerning the differences between the world of Protestant Roma and non-Roma and the world of non-believing Roma and non-Roma, as well as the possibility of entering friendly relationships and marriages with Roma and non-Roma who do not belong to a selected Protestant church.

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