“There is no Power Except for God”: Locality, Global Christianity, and Immigrant Transnational Incorporation
Nina Glick Schiller
Published 2009 in Permutations of Order Burtrand Turner and Thomas Kirsch eds. Ashgate Press.
Despite the German December chill, Ruby[1] was dressed in summery beige clothing, from her hat down to her high-heeled beige short boots with very pointed toes. In her posture, as well as her carefully styled outfit, she exuded a sense of confidence and determination as she strode up to the front of the assembled congregation. As usual, the final portion of the Sunday service of the Miracle Healing Church God’s Gospel Church was devoted to testimonial. This particular service had strayed beyond the scheduled 13:00 closing time and members of the congregation seemed restless. However, soon as she began to testify, she held the attention of the congregation.
“I have found a German man who wants to marry me. The problem is the paper. I have been told that I have to send to Nigeria for a paper. But there has been a two-month strike of public workers there, and no one is filling out any papers…. I went to speak to the lady in that office [in charge of papers] about the strike.[2] The woman refused to listen and said that the marriage could not happen without the paper…
I told the lady that I believed in God and I did not need that paper. She said, “Who is this God?” I said, “He is all I need and not you or your paper” and I left.
I went back to my man and said, “I have had enough of you. You don’t believe in God. And when I pray, you say, “Who is this God you are always talking to? I don’t see anyone there and I can’t talk to someone who is not there.” And when I pray and want you to say “Amen,” you say “nein” [German for “no”]. And so I am packing because I will not marry you unless you believe in God. The reason why we have no paper to get married is because of you, because you don’t believe in God. And my man said, “Ruby, don’t leave me.”
So I got him a German Bible but he still did not believe. But now he seems to be changing. If I wake up and don’t pray, he reminds me, “Ruby, you forgot to pray.” ... Finally, praise the Lord, he began to pray. So I am here today to talk about how God changed the heart of the man. And now he must begin to come to church because I am sure when he comes to church, the paper will come and we will be married. Because I know that there is no power except for God.
I begin this chapter with a vignette that reflects on the understanding of God and power that is embraced by Christian migrants in two small-scale cities, one in Germany and one in the United States. It is an understanding that reflects migrant strategies of local and transnational incorporation that have often been bypassed in discussions of immigrant religion. Emphasizing the universal power of God, the migrants with whom I worked legitimated their rights to belong to a locality by situating their religious identity and practices within transnational networks and the Christianity’s claim to globality. In this chapter I examine use of religion as a non-ethnic form of migrant local and transnational incorporation. I argue that the ethnic approach to migration studies has tended to keep migration scholars from examining the way in which migrants may embrace a global religion and its transnational networks as a charter for settlement and a claim to rights in a new land. Religion provides migrants with a simultaneously local and transnational mode of incorporation that may configure them not as ethnics but as citizens of both their locality of settlement and of the world. By universalistic I mean a belief system that claims to apply to all people, governments, places, and times. I suggest that the universalistic claims of global religions can in certain cases facilitate the local and transnational incorporation of migrants.
Please note that I see non-ethnically organized religious practices and identities as just one of multiple pathways of migrant incorporation. In other cases, it is through the structure and solace of ethnically organized institutions that migrants may find a way of settling, maintaining transnational social fields, and sometimes accessing more universalistic identities and incorporations (van der Veer 2001, Levitt 2003). My chapter comes with another caveat: Islam as well as Christianity makes claims that God knows no nationality, and that the basis of government should be divine law. Currently there is increased research and police surveillance of Islamic transnational networks and concern in both Europe and the United States that Islamic theology and the mosques, which teach universalistic Islam, place migrants in opposition to the states in which they have settled (Allievi and Nielson 2003, Eckert 2005).[3] In this juncture, it is useful to highlight that Christianity also teaches a universalism that places the word of God as interpreted through religious doctrine about the law of any state.[4] I have decided to use the term fundamentalist for those churches that believe that the Bible should be interpreted literally and applied to every day life; maintain that God’s law must be the foundation of all states and politics; and assert that the basic dividing line among the peoples of the world is not that of nations but between those who are on the side of Jesus and all others who stand with the devil. I have adopted the term to facilitate drawing parallels between those practitioners of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism who ground their politics on a literal and exclusive interpretation of their religious texts. Currently––unlike the reception of Muslim migrants—Christian migrants find acceptance within their states of settlement when they embrace a universalistic Christianity. These Christians are accorded this acceptance, despite the fact that, as do some Muslims, they believe that God’s laws supersede state authority.
Theories of Mirant Religious and Ethnic Affiliation
The study of immigrant religion has a long history within US migration studies. Initially assimilationist theorists and historians of different immigrant nationalities emphasized the role of religious institutions in the settlement of newcomers (Park and Miller 1921, Schermerhorn 1949, Gordon 1964, Handlin 1972).[5]
Beginning in the 1960s, scholars of migration focused their attention on ethnicity and identity politics. They explored ethnogenesis and the construction of ethnic groups first within the new land of settlement and then, beginning in the 1990s, transnationally (Glazer and Moynihan 1963, Glick Schiller 1977, Sollors 1989, Pessar 1995, Lessinger 1996). More recently, along with global trends away from secularism, migration studies have once again found religion, and the topic has produced a new and vibrant scholarship wherever there are significant migrations.
However, there remains an often unexamined separation between the scholarship that describes migrants as members of ethnic groups or diasporic populations and the discussion of global religions such as Christianity. This is because, reflecting an ingrained methodological nationalism, many migration scholars and scholars of immigrant religion tend to see migrants as primarily identified by their nationality or ethnicity. R. Stephen Warner for example, one of the scholars who revived an interest in migrant religion in the United States, focused on “what new ethnic and immigrant groups are doing together religiously and what manner of religious institutions they were developing of, by, and for themselves” (1998: 9). Those scholars who assume that migrants’ religion is shaped by their cultural background leave no conceptual space in which to analyze the implications of migrants’ non-ethnic religious institutions and identities. Yet in some cases Christianity’s claims to universalism not only are central to migrants’ local and transnational incorporation.
Even when migration scholars moved to study migrants’ transnational religious ties, they often stayed within the ethnic or pan-ethnic group as a mode of analysis (Adogame 2002, Chafetz and Ebaugh 2002). Cecilia Menjívar’s excellent discussion of “Religious Institutions and Transnationalism” is a case in point. She reminds us that
immigrant churches have always played an important role linking the immigrant’s communities of origin and the new communities they enter. … What needs to be investigated is how religious institutions respond to the efforts of today’s immigrants to sustain ties with their homelands and the challenges and opportunities that increasing trends of globalization pose (1999: 593).
Here Menjívar highlights immigrant churches that link homeland and new land. Yet, Menjívar own data reveals a more globe spanning Christian identity among some of her respondents. Salvadorians in Emmanuel’s Temple, one of the evangelical churches Menjívar studied in Washington DC, don’t pray only with Salvadorians or emphasize an ethnic based identity.
Emmanuel’s Temple was only half Salvadoran and included Guatemalans, Dominicans and Haitians (whose national language is not Spanish). The leader of the church, Pastor Mario, united people around a Christian identity. He stated that God “doesn’t recognize nationalities ... Our new identity is simply being Christian.” Menjívar notes that “Behind the altar are two flags, the US flag and what the pastor called the Christian flag.” Pastor Mario stressed that “the moment you become a Christian, this is your flag, this is what you owe allegiance to. Your country becomes the Christian world” (Menjívar 1999: 606).
Peggy Levitt (2003: 855) takes a somewhat different analytical approach in her work on transnational religion, although she continues to approach migrants through ethnic or national categories, referring to the “Brazilian, Dominican and Irish communities of the Boston metropolitan area”. Focusing on the organizational levels of migrant religious practice from the individual to the nation of a “transnational religious field” Levitt (2003: 864) notes that some of her informants such as a Pastor she interviewed insisted that there are “ways of being in the world that have nothing to do with whether you are Brazilian or whether you are from the US but whether you have faith in Christ. ... We live in a world where Christ is king, not George Bush or Frenando Calor.”
Both Menjívar’s and Levitt’s ethnography challenge scholars to further research and theorize the use of global Christian identities as a pathway of migrant local and transnational incorporation.
Until very recently, those scholars who have looked at universalistic Christian identities and organizations have tended to argue that these religious beliefs lead to political quietism (Robbins 2004). However, it has become increasingly clear that many evangelizing Christian groups bring their universalistic stand in local and national politics, taking stands on political issues and providing funds and voting to support political leaders who promise to “put God in command”. Their clearly stated goals are to convert the entire world and so end all other religions. In other words, they cast all other sets of beliefs as “religions” and maintain that what they believe is not “religion” but the Truth (Gifford 1991).
Recognizing the political claims of members of this movement, Vásquez and Marquardt (2003) in their book Globalizing the Sacred argue that in a globalized economy where local identities are at risk, Pentecostal and other churches with transnational religious networks offer migrants and non-migrants alike alternative systems of meaning. They ask the following set of questions about migrant participation in transborder fundamentalist networks: If migrants are not ethno-nationalists in their religious practice, but instead espouse of a global Christian identity, is the nation-state irrelevant in an analysis of their identities and practices? Should we abandon the term “transnational” when analyzing Christian networks and speak only of the global Christian “cosmopolitans”?
This chapter responds to these questions by rejecting the dichotomy Vásquez and Marquardt pose between a global Christian identity and loyalty to a nation-state and its localities. I argue that migrants who participate in a universalistic fundamentalist Christianity wield their faith as a biblical charter that entitles them to simultaneous membership in the locality in which they are settling, the nation-state they have entered, and the transnational networks connecting them to other Christians. The Christian universalism of these migrants allows them to breach native-migrant divides by identifying migrants as social citizens who contribute to their new home (Glick Schiller 2005b; 2008a). At the same time, the universalism of fundamentalist Christian migrants, while globe-spanning and transnational, is not cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism can be defined as “openness to otherness” or “openness to human commonality on the basis of difference” (Beck 2000, van der Veer 2001, Glick Schiller 2008a or b). Even as it unites Christian migrants with natives the universalism of migrant fundamentalism divides Christians from all others (Gifford 1991).
To illustrate my argument, in this chapter I shall examine migrants’ participation in born-again Christianity in two small cities, namely Manchester (New Hampshire, United States) and Halle an der Saale (Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany). Research in several churches and church organizations in these cities was conducted between 2001 and 2005.[6] Much of research on immigrant religion has been conducted in cities that are either considered global, such as New York, Paris, or London, or gateways—Berlin, Chicago, Manchester (UK), Marseilles—that serve as historic entry points of migrant settlement. Manchester, US, and Halle/Saale, Germany were chosen because they are small-scale cities, that is to say they are competitively at a disadvantage in the global competition for financial and cultural capital. The term small-scale refers not to size but to the relative positioning of the cities within global hierarchies of power (Glick Schiller, Çaglar and Guldbrandsen 2006, Glick Schiller and Çalgar 2009).
I have argued elsewhere that small-scale cities are useful for studying migrants local and transnational pathways of incorporation because the modes of incorporation may well differ from global and gateway cities, ethnic pathways may be less significant or lacking, and non-ethnic pathways may be more prevalent (Glick Schiller, Çaglar and Guldbrandsen 2006, Glick Schiller and Çaglar 2009).
Halle an der Saale is an eastern German city which, broadly speaking, has experienced the permanent settlement of migrants only since the reunification of Germany in 1990.[7] I include in the category migrant the handful of naturalized citizens, persons with rights to permanent residents in Germany (through refugee status or intermarriage), students, many of whom were looking for ways to remain in Germany, and asylum seekers. When legal status matters for the analysis, I will specify. Most of these migrants were actually members of the European Union––Italians and Greeks for example––who were accepted without contestation. It was the migrants from numerous African countries, Vietnamese, Kurds, and Russians (many of whom are actually legally not considered foreigners but ethnic Germans) who some natives saw as bringing a culturally uncomfortable strangeness to the city and taking social benefits that are needed by the native population. Foreigners numbered only about 4 per cent of the 230,000 people of the city in 2000 (Commission on Foreigners 2000, Brinkhoff 2004).[8] The unemployment rate among natives was over 20 per cent. Very few migrants from outside the EU, whether or not they had permanent resident status, were able to obtain regular employment unless they began their own businesses.
Manchester had a similar number of people in its metropolitan area (207,000) and about the same percentage of new migrants (Manchester Economic Development Office 2004). Most of the new migration occurred since the 1980s, although there was a Hispanic settlement of growing proportions that began in the 1950s and there was also an aging European and French Canadian foreign born population, most of whom arrived before World War II. In Manchester recent migrants held a variety of legal statuses including naturalized citizen, legal permanent residence, refugee or student (most of whom wished to stay), and persons with irregular status who had crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas.[9] Newcomers, who have come from various African countries, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, and throughout Latin America, found work in small factories. The unemployment rate was about 4 per cent; employment was available but even migrants with postgraduate educations at New Hampshire universities could only find unskilled work.
While there are significant differences in the migrants’ economic insertion in the two cities, the political and economic leadership of both cities have greeted newcomers with a welcome that was shaped by the similarities of these cities positioning within national and global flows of economic and cultural capital at the time of the research. On the one hand, the political and economic leadership understood that in the increasing competition between cities for investment capital—both national and foreign—and for tourists, it was important for a city to be seen as “ethnically diverse”, “cosmopolitan”, and “welcoming”. From this perspective, migrants were officially welcome and invited to participate in various public rituals to mark the multicultural nature of the city. On the other hand, both cities had minimal degrees of economic or political power or cultural prominence. Because of this, they had access to little tax revenue or other sources of funding to provide public services, and both provided very little in the way of resources and programs to facilitate the incorporation of foreigners.[10] In point of fact, both cities provide few opportunities for social or economic advancement for migrants or natives.