Chapter 1
Religion, Immigration and Civic Engagement
Alex Stepick, Terry Rey and Sarah J. Mahler
On a typical Sunday in Miami, a Haitian pastor from Port-au-Prince lays hands on the afflicted in a storefront Pentecostal church in Little Haiti, while a few miles west a Catholic priest from Nicaragua says Mass in Spanish to his diverse Latino flock. A few blocks further west, a group of elderly Cuban Catholics plans a fundraising event for the Diocese of Guantánamo-Baracoa in eastern Cuba. Meanwhile, in Miami’s southern suburbs, another Catholic church is receiving the Bishop of Trinidad, and further south still, Mexican fieldworkers busily prepare for the feast of their patron saint, our Lady of Guadalupe. Nearby, tucked away in a large church on a side street, African-American Protestants, most of Bahamian descent, respond enthusiastically to their pastors’ sermon on the importance of preserving God’s land, the good earth that the Lord bequeathed to them.
Miami’s diverse religious landscape stretches not only across Miami-Dade County, but throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Indeed, many of these religious activities may appear to be more foreign than “American,” not of the U.S. Are they? Do they focus exclusively or even primarily on immigrants’ home countries and perhaps isolate the immigrants from U.S. society? Do they impede rather than assist in immigrant integration into Miami and the U.S.? Are the immigrant churches somehow fundamentally different from “American” houses of worship?
Based upon ethnographies of immigrant and African American congregations in Miami complemented by a survey of local youth, this book addresses these questions. Each ethnographic chapter provides in-depth detail of the congregation’s activities, both those that are focused inwardly and those that reach out to the broader civil society. The survey provides a broader examination of the relationship between religion and civic engagement among Miami youth. This first chapter reviews previous work on immigrant religion and civic engagement and provides the theoretical framework for the subsequent ethnographic chapters and the discussion of the survey results.
With more than 35 million foreign-born people, the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century is home to more immigrants than ever in its history. The vast majority of these immigrants are racial or ethnic minorities in their new country; i.e. Latinos, Asians, and Blacks. They contribute to the nation’s increasing cultural diversity and to the concomitant decline in the majority status of non-Hispanic whites. Indeed, in many larger cities, particularly those receiving immigrants, native minorities and immigrants are now a majority of the population, a trend that appears destined to become national. Many, if not most, of these immigrants, and many of the native minorities that they encounter while settling in the U.S., are highly religious, making religion an essential issue toward understanding the multifaceted and far-reaching influence that recent immigrants are having and will have on American social life.
Driven both by the abiding faith of its native born and its immigrant populations, the U.S. itself is an extraordinarily religious country, with over 90 percent of its people professing belief in God.[1] In spite of a seemingly apparent trend of secularization in modern western society, which is assailed by many right-wing Christians, and despite infamous sociological predictions that religion was on the decline in human life (Greeley 2001), there is strong evidence that faith continues to play a key role in American society. For example, a greater fraction of U.S. adults believed in life after death in the 1990s than in the 1970s (Greeley and Hout 1999). Nearly two-thirds of Americans identified with a particular church in the early 1990s,[2] and between 30 and 40 percent of Americans attend church services during any given week. So, whereas formal church affiliations may be in statistical remission in the U.S., religious belief clearly is not. As we detail below, it is safe to add that immigrants will contribute to a strengthening of this trend.
Church and Civic Engagement
Against this backdrop, it should not be surprising that religion influences the broader civic agenda even at the highest level of American politics. President George W. Bush, who professes to strong evangelical Christian beliefs himself, advocated and implemented policies, generally referred to as the Faith-Based Initiative, to more deeply involve religious institutions in civic society (Farris, Nathan, and Wright 2004; Milbank 2001; Pipes and Ebaugh 2002). More generally, contemporary American politics are thoroughly infused with religion, including religious interpretations in the debates on abortion, homosexuality, the “war on terror,” school vouchers, and prayer in schools. While the separation of church and state has been a central tenet of U.S. society since its very inception, many religious organizations are deeply concerned with social and political issues and, inspired by this concern, pursue civic agendas that stretch far beyond the pastoral realm. Many American churches actively promote civic engagement through soup kitchens, Habitat for Humanity, and myriad other charitable works. African American churches, in particular, have been a focal point of leadership development and civic organization. The civil rights movement, for example, was largely church-based and its key leaders were mostly religious clerics. Meanwhile, at the end of the 20th century, the Christian Right catapulted issues like abortion and prayer in schools to the forefront of American political debate. Indeed, humanitarianism has always been one of the central ethical concerns of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, embodied forcefully in the Golden Rule around which each of these major religions centers its social ethics.
It is thus wholly unsurprising that faith communities are at the vanguard of charitable initiatives in the United States, as reflected in a Hartford Theological Seminary survey that found “more than 200,000 congregations supporting thrift shops and more than 120,000 congregations helping to tutor children and youth.” They “are making major contributions to the welfare of their communities through a combination of social and spiritual ministries” (Dudley and Roozen 2001).
At the same time, some religious groups more strongly emphasize direct engagement with civil society beyond their immediate membership. Some congregations and their associated denominations create nonprofit organizations or directly engage in community politics (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b; Guest 2003; McRoberts 2003; Mooney 2007; Wuthnow 2004). Others focus on individual salvation with either no connections outside their church or only connect with outsiders in their efforts to evangelize.
At the level of individuals, in general, the more people attend church the more likely they are to engage in civic activities, both inside and outside the church (Brooks and Lewis 2001; Smidt 1999: 187). Wuthnow (1999) found that those who attend church are twice as likely to volunteer as those who do not attend.[3] Similarly, Park and Smith (2002) determined that among Protestants, those who frequently participate in church activities are more likely to volunteer in both their churches and their communities. More specifically, Wilson and Musick (1997) found that church attendance exerts a consistent positive influence on formal volunteering; that is, in activities such as working with a local food bank or with Habitat for Humanity. However, church attendance does not appear to affect rates of informal volunteering, such as helping a neighbor or a family member.
While regular church attendees are more likely to volunteer, denominational affiliation appears to help determine the kinds of activities in which they engage, although precisely how remains unsettled. Brooks and Lewis (2001) maintain that Catholics place a heavy rhetorical emphasis on volunteering, but actually volunteer less for religious organizations, although they still may volunteer for secular organizations. The research on Protestants appears to be contradictory. Wilson and Janoski (1997) found that conservative Protestants are more likely to volunteer for activities within their church as opposed to secular volunteer activities, while Uslaner (2002) claimed that those with more fundamentalist values were more likely to participate in secular causes (also see Regnerus, Smith, and Sikkink 1998). Among white evangelical Protestants, meanwhile, Wuthnow (1999) found no relationship between church attendance and participation in larger outreach efforts. American evangelicals are often believed to be more concerned with their own church communities than about wider societal participation (Bellah 1996; Wilson and Janoski 1995; Wuthnow 1999), especially as compared to Catholic or mainline Protestant congregations (Chaves and Tsitsos 2001).
Research appears similarly contradictory for African Americans. Brooks and Lewis (2001) found African Americans less likely than whites to volunteer or donate money to non-religious causes, while Greenberg (2000) cites a number of sources that support a “strong link between church attendance and voter turnout, politics in church and political knowledge, and among African Americans, church involvement and collective action.” Smith, Fabricatore and Peyrot (1999) found that among African American Catholics in Baltimore, attending mass demonstrated a strong association with hours volunteered. Moreover, African Americans were more likely than whites to devote one to five hours of volunteering a month to their parishes.
The data for Latinos is sparse, but appears to be more consistent. According to the 1989-90 Latino National Political Survey and the 1990 American National Election Studies, church is often the primary, if not only, civic association to which Latinos belong (Jones-Correa and Leal 2001). Unfortunately, we do not know if the church prompts them to volunteer or not.
How do immigrants and immigrant congregations fit into this dynamic? Are they as likely as established residents in the U.S. to incorporate civic engagement into their religion or are their religious practices more focused on individual spiritual concerns or perhaps their home countries? Although numerous scholars have addressed the social and economic adaptation of immigrants and some studies have focused on immigrant religion, the relationship between immigrant religion and “civic life” in the U.S. has largely been missed by academic radar. This book emerged from the first systematic effort to examine immigrant religion and civic engagement as part of the Pew Charitable Trusts Gateway Cities research initiative, which funded research in Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., along with this one in Miami. Although each project was planned and implemented independently, they were all designed to “document how religion contributes to or impedes the civic incorporation of new immigrants” (Sargeant 1998).
Religion and Immigration
There is no doubt that immigration, religion, and civic engagement are themes of rising importance in the U.S. Immigration has been on the increase ever since the mid-1960s. The current wave is generally referred to as the “new immigration” in contrast to the “old immigration” that peaked 100 years ago and was severely curtailed by restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s. While the proportion of immigrants was higher during the last great wave of immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. presently has more total immigrants than at any point in its history. Immigrants today, much like one hundred years ago, still tend to concentrate in a few gateway cities (e.g., Miami, New York, and Los Angeles), but they are increasingly spreading out to smaller cities and rural areas. Immigrant gateway cities such as Miami thus portend the impact of this demographic change that will happen, and is happening throughout the U.S. on a smaller scale so far.
Immigration has assuredly affected the U.S. religious landscape. Most visible are the seeming differences between immigrant and traditional US religions. Not only are signs, texts, and messages in different languages, but non-Western religions from non-Judeo-Christian traditions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and others have emerged.[4] Perhaps because these religions are so visibly different, and certainly in the case of Muslims because of 9/11, they receive public attention disproportionate to their numbers. Yet, immigrants in the United States, approximately two-thirds of them, in fact, are primarily Christian, while 15 percent claim no religious affiliation (Jasso et al. 2003).[5] Given these percentages, the impact of immigrants on the U.S. religious landscape will be primarily among Christians.
Studies of recent immigrants and religion have only recently begun to emerge. Yet, there is no doubt that religion is central to immigrants’ personal and communal identity and their social orientation in a new land.[6] Nationwide surveys of Presbyterians reveal that Koreans attend church much more frequently than native-born Americans (Kim and Kim 2001: 82). About 70 percent of first-generation Koreans in Los Angeles reported affiliation with Korean ethnic churches in the United States (Hurh and Kim 1984:130). There was also an extraordinarily high level of religious participation among Korean-American Christians, with 83 percent of the church affiliated attending church once a week or more (see also Min 1992:1371). Bankston and Zhou (2000) have likewise observed similarly high church attendance among Vietnamese Catholics in New Orleans. And, Stepick (1998) has documented the extremely high church attendance rates among Haitians in South Florida, while Richman (2005) indicates that for most Haitian immigrants in South Florida the church is central to life in America, perhaps even more so than it was in the homeland.
While certainly not all immigrants are religious, many are.[7] Some even claim that the immigrant experience itself is “theologizing’ (see also Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b; Hirschman 2004; Kniss and Numrich 2007; Smith 1978), that the process of uprooting and transplanting oneself can be traumatic and religion often provides familiar reassurances and meaning (Herberg 1960). Cadge and Ecklund (2006) argue specifically that migrants who are less integrated into American society are more likely than others to regularly attend religious services.
Why is faith so central to immigrants’ lives? Most studies of immigrant faith practices and religion demonstrate its role in reinforcing and perpetuating ties to the homeland culture as a mechanism for both easing the psychological distress occasioned by immigration, and providing a community of co-ethnics who can assist each other in adjusting to life in the U.S. while retaining ties to those they left behind (Chou 1991; Legge 1997; Min 2005). Dolan (1992), for example, found that 19th century letters of immigrants reflected an “understanding of the afterlife as a place of reunion” that mirrored immigrants’ separation from their loved ones in the homeland. Socially, religion thus tied immigrants to each other and symbolically to the homeland (e.g. DeMarinis and Grzymala-Moszczynska 1995), and helped provide a meaningful social identity that reinforced the immigrant ethnic and national home country identities (Al-Ahmary 2000; Tiryakian 1991).