Social Science Research Council

Under the title Immigrants and Religion in America, Past and Present (this volume consists of conference working papers that are to be submitted to a publisher for publication review) scholars of religion and immigration studies have compared the religious and migratory experiences of four pairs of migrant groups. With scholars of religion and migration collaborating in writing about each case, each comparison focused on an aspect of religion shared by a past and present group—respectively, Italians and Mexicans, Japanese and Koreans, Jews and Arab Muslims, and African-Americans and Haitians. The co-chairs of this project are Dr. Richard Alba, SUNY Albany, and Dr. Albert Raboteau, Princeton University. For a complete list of current project members and their paper topics, Click Here.


Italian and Mexican Immigrants

The comparison of Italian and Mexican immigrants focuses on the processes by which newcomers are included and excluded in relation to a mainstream American religion—in this case, Catholicism—and how these processes are related to the migrants' marginalization or acceptance in other cultural, social, and economic aspects of American life. Both Italian and Mexican immigrants approached the American Catholic Church as minorities, defined not only by their national origin and language, but also their rural origins, limited education, and lower class employment within the United States. The project members focusing on this pair of migrant groups compare how both immigrant groups have adapted to an ambivalent welcome by the church hierarchy—developing popular religious practices that have, to varying degrees over time, been rejected or incorporated by the church—and how their changing access to church resources, such as education, affected the immigrants' socio-economic mobility.


Japanese and Korean Immigrants

Japanese and Korean immigrants are both noted for their high levels of conversion from non-Western religions dominant in their home countries to Christianity, following settlement in the United States. The comparison of these groups' conversion focuses on the motivations and outcomes for group members—immigrants as well as their children raised in the United States—who have sustained their religious traditions and who have chosen to adopt new religious identities and affiliations. One of the questions examined is how ethnic group identity persists, albeit in new cultural forms, through the conversion process.


Jewish and Arab Muslim Immigrants

Eastern European Jews at the beginning of the last century and Arab Muslims today are both adherents of major world religions that are minority religions within American society. Comparisons between the two groups consider whether the process by which Judaism became accepted as a mainstream American faith, along with Protestantism and Catholicism, and the methods by which Jews have retained and elaborated upon their religious identities and practices within the American context provide a useful model with which to understand the incorporation of Muslims—both native and foreign-born—now and in the future.


African-American Migrants and Haitian Immigrants

Although African-Americans who relocated from the South to the North are internal migrants rather than international immigrants like the Haitians, with whom they are being compared, the migratory origins, processes and outcomes of both groups are parallel in many significant respects, some of which derive from the groups' shared racial identities and receptions at the places of destination. With these commonalities in mind, the groups are being compared with regard to their employment of religious beliefs and values in order to give meaning to their changing relations with their places of origin and their migratory goals. In cutting ties with the South and heading North to "The Promised Land," African-American migrants made sense of their search for freedom, experimenting with their access to a greater diversity of churches than were found back home. This search for meaning is being contrasted with Haitians' experimentation with Pentecostalism to make sense of how their remittance of migrant dollars leads them to reinterpret their relations with the Voudoun spirits who inhabit their ancestral homelands.

Each of these thematic comparisons—focused on immigrants' incorporation into an existing religion, conversion, establishment of a new religion, or religious interpretation of their migratory experiences—will be presented with regard to their broader contributions for framing the future investigations and analyses of other immigrant groups as they seek to fit into American public life.