RELATED:<\/strong> Amid protests at Delaney Hall, a Catholic nun has been offering \u2018radical hospitality\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI answered so many comments those first several days,\u201d Zook said. \u201cThat was on a Saturday. By Tuesday, I had over 300,000 followers.\u201d<\/p>\n When Zook left home in 2021, she greased the hinges on the door of her family\u2019s house with vegetable oil so as not to wake her mother, hid behind a bale of hay and fled. She eventually connected with her older brother, who had left the family years earlier. She remembers weighing the decision.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I leave the Amish, I\u2019m giving up my chance at heaven,\u201d Zook said she recalls thinking. \u201cI\u2019m never going to go to heaven. I am going to live an evil life, but at least I can live a life where I get to make my own choices.\u201d<\/p>\n Lovina Zook took her first photo in non-Amish clothes a week after leaving the Amish. Photo courtesy of Zook<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Zook has become an unlikely TikTok star, using technology once forbidden to her and building an audience of 3.4 million followers<\/a>. Now in her second trimester of pregnancy with her first child and living in North Texas with her husband, Eli Zook, who is also ex-Amish, Zook films herself cooking Amish food and reinterpreting a tradition she fled, while complicating the internet\u2019s \u201ctrad wife\u201d fantasies and outsiders\u2019 romantic ideas about the Amish.<\/p>\n \u201cThat dress now does not symbolize hurt,\u201d Zook said. \u201cNow that dress symbolizes freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n Karen Johnson-Weiner, a scholar of Amish women, said that in many Amish communities, which practice forms of Anabaptist Christianity, baptism typically occurs around age 17 or 18. It signifies not only induction into the church, she said, but also a lifelong promise to God to live according to the church\u2019s ordinances.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you commit to baptism, you\u2019re saying that you\u2019re going to defend with your life the church and its ordinances, its guidelines,\u201d Johnson-Weiner said.<\/p>\n Zook, who left her family months shy of being baptized, said she felt the pressure building as the date grew closer.<\/p>\n \u201cThings were very, very much piling up. I didn\u2019t want to get baptized, but it was the right thing to do, and because I followed all the rules, I was like, well, I don\u2019t have a choice,\u201d she said. \u201cOnce you start instructions, you\u2019re basically a member of the church. And once you\u2019re a member of the church, if you do not follow every rule to a T, you get shunned.\u201d<\/p>\n After leaving the Amish, Zook spent years cleaning houses and traveling with other ex-Amish young adults in Minnesota. She later moved to Texas with Eli Zook, who had left an Amish community in Nebraska at 17.<\/p>\n The two were working long hours \u2014 he in construction, she cleaning houses \u2014 and expected to keep taking work where they could. But as Zook\u2019s audience grew, she said, she began spending hours going live, answering questions and making videos.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were like, you need to cook, you need to make Amish content, like Amish food,\u201d said Zook, who already loved cooking.<\/p>\n One of her first popular cooking videos shows her making \u201ccoffee soup,\u201d a common Amish dish made with boiled milk, instant coffee, brown sugar and crushed saltine crackers. On TikTok, she shows how to prepare dishes like poor man\u2019s steak, raisin pie filling and Amish-style fruit pizza. Sometimes, she posts videos answering questions about Amish life and her experiences growing up. Her videos have collectively drawn nearly 100 million views.<\/p>\n She has also published a cookbook, \u201cLovina\u2019s Amish Cooking<\/a>,\u201d with more than 200 recipes, some with Amish recipes and others with recipes she developed herself.<\/p>\n Much of the response has been positive, with followers expressing curiosity about the Amish lifestyle and commenting on her cooking methods, her attitude, her direct eye contact with the camera, her accent.<\/p>\n \u201cNever heard her accent,\u201d one TikTok user wrote. Zook grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch.<\/p>\n As her pregnancy progresses, she said, she may need to order more green fabric to adjust her traditional dress for comfort.<\/p>\n \u201cWe won\u2019t judge or leave if you want to wear comfy regular clothes right now,\u201d one TikTok user wrote.<\/p>\n There is a popular social media genre known as \u201ctrad wife,\u201d in which women often share videos of cooking, homemaking, traditional dress and a simpler domestic life. Despite the similarity of Zook\u2019s content, she said she does not identify with the label. She sees it as an unnecessary online category applied to behavior, cooking, cleaning and domestic work \u2014 and one that often gets a negative spin.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can do trad wife things and not be a trad wife,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Eli Zook, who works alongside his wife to help produce her books, said she also does not fit the stereotype because she leads much of the business.<\/p>\n \u201cWith her business, she has made most of the money that we have, and so, you know, she makes decisions on the front of the business,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/webRNS-Amish-Influencers-1-20260616-253x369.jpg\")
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