Last month, the leader of the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews banned all smartphones for women. It was another step in a crackdown on technology use among Hasidic leaders that also included a huge, men's only anti-internet rally at Citi Field in New York last month — which was tweeted about by some in attendance.

But Hasidic Jews aren't the only religious group in America that's trying to regulate what they see as the corrupting influence of information technology, especially on women. And their efforts may be emblematic of a larger pattern: as religious leaders try to restrict the internet and smartphones, these technologies grow ever more powerful and ubiquitous.

Shortly after the Citi Field rally, the Satmar Rebbe, leader of the community of Kiryas Yoel in upstate New York, decreed that while men could use smartphones for work, with internet filtering in place, women couldn't use the technology at all — they'd be restricted to older, basic models. His followers have until the end of June to make sure they have an appropriate phone. For many Hasidic young people, this may be a big adjustment. Ayala Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, attended the women's version of the Citi Field rally, held at a remote location in Brooklyn to comply with gender-mixing rules. She tells BuzzFeed, "Every woman and girl had her cell phone out" at the gathering. Most had BlackBerries or flip-phones, but she noticed iPhones in the mix as well.

Not all Hasidic Jews follow the dictates of the Satmar Rebbe — the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, which actively recruits non-religious Jews, has a popular website and a generally more open attitude toward technology. But Fader believes the Hasidic community in general has reached a "turning point" with respect to smartphones and the internet — even as leaders try to regulate them, they permeate the lives of most Hasids, male and female.

Cell phones have also become commonplace among a group long known for its resistance to technology: the Amish. The most conservative Amish groups, known as "old order," don't allow power lines or telephone lines to enter their homes — their goal is to remain separate from the larger power grid and thus from the outside world. However, many of these groups do allow cell phones. The logic, says John Roth, author of Beliefs: Mennonite Faith and Practice, is that you can turn a cell phone off: "There's a greater sense that you are controlling the technology."

But that view, he says, may be somewhat naive, as cell phones can quickly come to control their users. "The impulse to glance at a text when you get that little buzz," he says, "is overwhelming." Whether cell phones are really a good idea remains "a contested area," says Roth — but in practice, most Amish communities now use them.

Even the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, a fringe Mormon group known for the restrictive (and sometimes abusive) rules of its leader Warren Jeffs, has seen a rise in cell phone use. Stuart A. Wright, author of Saints Under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, says that internet use is closely regulated by FLDS leadership, and individual fathers and husbands have the authority to circumscribe their wives' and daughters' technology use. Nonetheless, women and girls do have cell phones — some of the only documentation of paramilitary groups raiding an FLDS compound in Texas in 2008 came from girls' cameraphone photos. Says Wright, "I assume that there are restrictions on what the girls can do with these phones, but I was surprised to learn they had cell phones at all." At least in 2008, what they ended up doing with them was very influential.