Social Science Research Council

In 1999/2000 the Council established a Working Group on Religion, Immigration and Civil Life, with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The group is developing theoretical understandings and supporting research on the role of religion in the incorporation of immigrants into US society. It is a collaborative project of the program on International Migration and the Working Group on Law and Culture.

Despite a respected tradition of social science research and writing about the relation between immigration and religion (Oscar Handlin’s influential chapter on religion in The Uprooted, for example, or Will Herberg’s classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology(both from the 1950s), consideration of the role of religion in immigrant incorporation has been strikingly limited in contemporary scholarship. Three recently published and otherwise comprehensive textbooks on post-1965 immigration, as well as the volume most widely used as an introduction to the subject in college courses, contain only passing reference to religion. Even the volume that the SSRC Program on International Migration has prepared to serve as a comprehensive review and assessment of the state of theory in US immigration studies (The Handbook of International Migration, eds. Charles Hirschman, Josh DeWind and Philip Kasinitz), does not take up religious issues.

One result of the omission of religion from immigration scholarship has been incomplete theoretical explanations of immigrant incorporation into US social life. While single and multigroup ethnographies have illustrated the centrality of churches in particular immigrant communities, the contributions that such studies might make to broader theoretical debates about immigrant incorporation (related to labor market entry, gender adjustment within immigrant families, school performance and so on) have not yet been systematically considered. Likewise, members of the Council’s Working Group on Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law — an interdisciplinary group of legal scholars, political theorists, social psychologists and anthropologists who are investigating and seeking to clarify challenges that multiculturalism (or pluralism) pose within a liberal democracy — have not as yet considered conflicts related to the diverse religious practices of Asian, African, Mexican, Latin American and Caribbean immigrant populations in the US. It is apparent, however, that questions prompted by such practices lie at the intersection of legal and constitutional theory, civic life and the plurality of immigrant groups and family practices that characterize contemporary America.

A primary purpose of this project, then, is to stimulate scholars of immigration to take up neglected questions of religion in immigrant life and scholars of religion to consider how their perspectives might contribute to new interpretations of immigration issues. These goals are being realized through activities that link religion and immigration experts with one another and to other networks of scholars who are examining how immigrants’ diverse ethnic practices intersect with mainstream and minority US institutions.

With the goal of encouraging young scholars to link the study of religion and of migration as a primary focus in their research careers, the SSRC awarded in 2000 six predoctoral and four postdoctoral fellowships for research on various aspects of religion and migration. The finalists were selected from a pool of applicants based at academic institutions across the nation and from a diversity of disciplines, including religion studies and, from the social sciences, sociology, education, anthropology, history, and political science.

In addition to supporting research, the SSRC has organized three research planning groups, each of which has been designed to examine current scholarship on religion and migration and to identify theoretical approaches and analytic questions that can frame future research. The first group adopted an historical comparative perspective ; the second is focusing topically on Islam in America; and the third is exploring relations between transnational aspects of religion and migration. While the efforts of the first group are now coming to fruition, the work of the second and third groups are still in preliminary stages of growth.

Photo credit: Participants kneel in prayer on Madison Avenue in New York before the start of an annual Muslim World Day parade (AP Photo/Lynsey Addario).