Structural changes particularly affect tradition based regions, which are located at the outskirt of the large centres driving the changes. In her novels, the German linguist, journalist and writer Dörte Hansen sheds some light on how individuals and collectives in rural regions or villages struggle with these transformations. The novel "Zur See" (2022) offers as a side character a pastor who - though more accustomed to modern lifestyle than the old-established islanders - faces an identity crisis, of which his religious and theological life is a constitutive part. These literary and phenomenological dense descriptions of ambivalent experiences shall be taken as a starting point for some conceptual reflections on how to understand such specific religious identity crises which are produced by social transformation. These reflections shall be socio-philosophically grounded using Rahel Jaeggi's theory of social progress and regress in "Fortschritt und Regression" (2023). Her idea of an enhancing (or blocking) learning process and its criteria of success will be theoretically worked out and brought into conversation with Nancey Murphy's reflections on religious and theological large-scale traditions and their progress and regress in "A Philosophy for the Christian Religion" (2018). Turning back to the starting point the theoretical result will be applied to the literary example of ambivalent experiences in processes of social transformation.