My dissertation explores the ascribed social meanings and processes of conversion among contemporary American converts to Eastern Orthodoxy in Greek and Russian Orthodox churches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Employing ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviewing, I examine how converts, as choice-makers using consumer-like strategies and print/electronic media to study and compare religious options, affect local communities commonly regarded in the United States as preserving the languages and customs of various East European/Middle Eastern immigrants. My project focuses on how convert choice-making reflects and/or changes meanings of American Orthodox identity, often premised on essentialized notions of tradition and ethnicity, categorizations seemingly transcending subjective sensibilities. Yet, Orthodoxy appears in informant narratives as one choice among many available on the American religious landscape and provides a powerful ground of individual decision-making potential for persons in their post-conversion lives. From this, I argue tradition and even ethnicity to be fluid, strategic, context-specific and influenced by the vocabularies of choice so prevalent in American culture at large. Not only does this dissertation broaden understandings of a Christian church long marginalized in American academic and social life, but it provides a case study of religious transformation under conditions of (post) modernity more generally.