Religion and Immigration

Migrant Faiths in North America and Western Europe

Peter Kivisto

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745686660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie de la religion

This concise book provides readers with a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of the key issues and varied strands of research relating to immigration and religion that have been produced during the past two decades. Religion, once a neglected topic in migration studies, is today seen as a crucially important aspect of the immigrant experience. For some - particularly those focusing on religion in North America - religion has been portrayed as a vital resource for many immigrants engaged in the essential identity work required in adjusting to the receiving society. For others - particularly those who have focused on Muslim immigrants in Western Europe - religion tends to be depicted as a source of conflict rather than one of comfort and consolation.

In a judicious, engaging, and highly readable account, this book sorts through these contrasting viewpoints, pointing to an approach that will assist upper-level students and scholars alike in putting these competing analyses into perspective.

1

Introduction: Religion on the Move

The Brick Lane Jamme Masjid is located in London’s East End on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street. A fifteen-minute walk from Liverpool Street Station, the mosque serves the large Bangladeshi population that began to flock into the surrounding neighborhood in the 1970s. The world these immigrants have created in this urban enclave was vividly depicted in Monica Ali’s acclaimed and controversial novel, Brick Lane (2003). The listed Georgian building officially opened as a mosque in 1976 and since then a number of improvements to the interior and exterior of the building have been completed, including the construction of what has been described as a minaret-like public sculpture, a 90-foot-high, brightly lit stainless steel tower.

Reflecting the area’s long history of ethnic succession, Jamme Masjid represents the fourth distinct religious identity of the building. Originally built in 1743, La Neuve Eglise served as a chapel for Huguenot refugees who fled persecution in France and soon became the dominant group in the silk-weaving industry of Spitalfields. By the early nineteenth century, considerable assimilation had occurred, along with a movement out of the neighborhood for more affluent parts of London. Very quickly, Huguenots were replaced by Jews. In 1809, Wesleyans leased the building with the idea of having it serve as the institutional hub of the London Society for Promoting Christianity. This was an evangelical group founded by Joseph Fry, a Jewish-born convert to Christianity, which was devoted to missionary work within the Jewish community. This relatively short-lived and rather fruitless effort was abandoned in 1819, when the facility became a Methodist Church whose outreach work no longer extended to Jews. It remained a Methodist house of worship until 1897, when a group of Orthodox Jews from Lithuania known as the Mahzikei Hadas (Strengtheners of the Faith) purchased the property and established the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, modeled after the major synagogues of Eastern Europe. With the arrival of large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, the congregation grew and thrived, becoming one of the most important institutions serving the needs of the immigrant population in East London.

As with the Huguenots earlier, Jews over time gained an economic foothold in the London economy, permitting over the course of the twentieth century the entry of many into the middle class. With upward mobility came geographic mobility. By World War II, large numbers of Jews had exited East London for more affluent London environs, such as Golders Green in North London. Attendance at the Great Synagogue declined precipitously in the post-war era, forcing the board to close operations in 1952. Some decades later, the Machzikei Hadath Synagogue was built in Golders Green. Meanwhile as Bangladeshis moved into the Brick Lane area, a group from within that community arranged to purchase the property and thus began the fourth and current religious use of the structure 233 years after it had been built.

59 Brick Lane, the official address of the site, has thus been home to all three of what are increasingly referred to as the Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The first immigrants who were responsible for the building’s construction were refugees fleeing religious persecution. Such was also true of Eastern European Jews, though political and religious oppression were mixed with economic factors in contributing to this infusion of newcomers. Finally, the postcolonial migrants from Bangladesh were a much clearer instance of labor migrants. Meanwhile the presence of a Methodist chapel for much of the nineteenth century is a reminder that ethnic enclaves usually contain a far more heterogeneous population than is often appreciated, and this means that immigrants invariably confront not only fellow ethnics, but also both members of other immigrant groups and members of the native-born population.

Not only did the three immigrant groups arrive in East London for somewhat different reasons, but arriving as they did at different historical moments, they entered a host society that was subject to profound and ongoing transformations brought about by the impact over time of industry and empire (Hobsbawm 1968). The Huguenots arrived before the Industrial Revolution had mechanized the textile industry. As silk weavers, they were part of a craft tradition that was under assault by the forces of technological transformation, leading to considerable conflict. This immigrant group was involved in militant actions that led to the passage of the Spitalfield Act of 1765, which for a time made silk weaving a protected industry with regulated wages. As the classic histories of the English working class make clear, these actions were incapable of stopping the juggernaut of industrial capitalism (Thompson 1963; Hobsbawm 1964).

Jews entered East London after capitalism’s triumph and thus inhabited a different world of work. At the same time, they arrived when, beginning with the Chartist movement and extending to the creation of the Labour Party, the working class was acquiring a political voice and efforts were made to forge worker solidarity by overcoming ethnic divides within the ranks. This is not to overlook the fact that Jews confronted considerable anti-Semitic hostility during this time. That being said, the growing middle-class prosperity of the Jewish community over the course of the twentieth century took place during the creation and expansion of the British welfare state and the attempt to shape citizenship along the lines described by T.H. Marshall (1964) in which the status of citizenship and the three rights associated with it – civic, political, and social – in combination served to mitigate against the excessive inequality generated by an unbridled capitalism (see Kivisto and Faist 2007: 54–6 for a discussion of what Marshall refers to as “class abatement”).

Finally, by the time Bangladeshis arrived in London, somewhat after their Indian and Pakistani counterparts from the Indian subcontinent, the era of postcolonialism was well underway and deindustrialization had begun to take hold with a vengeance. Instead of jobs in the manufacturing sector serving as transmission belts for upward mobility, newcomers entering Britain with low levels of human capital found themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the labor market. Timing played a role, for the large influx of approximately 330,000 Bangladeshis arrived at precisely that point when the British economy reached its nadir. As the Winter of Discontent gave way to the economic restructuring defined by the neoliberal policies of the Thatcher government, a new postindustrial society emerged. By the turn of the century, Bangladeshis had the highest unemployment level of any group in the UK, at nearly 20 percent. Reflective of a changing economy, only 12 percent found employment in the manufacturing sector, while 55 percent found work in the hotel and restaurant sector – as Brick Lane become a major tourist destination, akin to Chinatown.

Nevertheless, just before the economic crisis of 2008, the Economist magazine (2007) reported that there were measurable improvements in educational achievement of the second generation and that a growing number of workers were entering skilled and professional occupations. At the same time, as with Jews, the new immigrants experienced the hostile reaction of the receiving society, which was shaped in terms of both racial and religious otherness. This occurred, however, in a somewhat different context than earlier in the twentieth century, for despite limitations, British society today is more amenable to multiculturalism than it was only a few decades ago (Kivisto 2002: 138–54; Modood 2005, 2010). This is not to deny the backlash or the temptation toward what Paul Gilroy (2006) has called “postcolonial melancholia.” Rather, it is to note that in the struggle over multiculturalism as a mode of incorporation, there are more proponents today than in the past (Alexander 2013).

From the eighteenth to the twenty-first century Brick Lane has experienced major economic changes. Its various immigrant populations have confronted different economic prospects and challenges, and with them an array of issues concerning their well-being such as housing conditions, health care, educational opportunities, and the prevalence of crime and other social problems in their environments. At the same time, they have had to deal with and confront obstacles that have prevented their political empowerment and stymied their efforts to become something other than second-class citizens. All of this takes place within social worlds shaped by gender, race, class, age, and generation. As anyone familiar with the already huge and ever-expanding literature on contemporary immigration to the developed nations can attest, social scientists have expended considerable time, energy, and resources addressing these issues. And increasingly, this has been done with an appreciation of the virtues of comparative analyses, be they comparisons between the past and present or between different contemporary contexts, or whether they are posed at the national or subnational level.

Brick Lane is, of course, a microcosm of a larger phenomenon. Although a paradigmatic example of neighborhoods characterized by the ethnic succession of ever-changing immigrant populations, one could find countless other examples from the cities of North America and Western Europe. Moreover, Brick Lane is a neighborhood located within the context of a larger urban conglomeration, which in turn is located in a region and ultimately a nation. Immigration research should of necessity concern itself with all of these levels, with an awareness of the dialectical relations between and among levels of analysis. Furthermore, as those who have advanced what has become known as a transnational optic have persuasively revealed, it is equally important to locate that which occurs within the containers of nation-states in terms of the larger parameters of transnational ties, networks, and fields (Glick Schiller 1997; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007).

For their part, the individuals who move across borders bring multiple aspects of their identities with them. Immigration studies concerned with the Great Migration to the United States between 1880 and 1924 have been particularly interested in the salience of ethnic identity as a factor contributing to the ease or difficulty of transition to a new environment. And reciprocally other studies have explored the varied reactions of the established residents of receiving societies to the presence of newcomers whose ethnic identities made them stand out from the larger national culture. Ultimately the two strands of research have in combination teased out the implications of the presence of newcomers in redefining what it means to be a member of a societal community. This has been a hallmark of scholarship from the Chicago School of Sociology to the work of social historians since the 1970s (Kivisto 1990). Although the significance of religion for these immigrants was not ignored, religion received considerably less attention than other aspects of ethnicity. This was particularly true of the major works produced by social historians, for a majority of them came to their topics from the vantage of class, race/ethnicity, and gender. Religion was not accorded anywhere near the same level of attention. A cursory examination of John Bodnar’s The Transplanted (1985), the major work devoted to offering a synthetic account of the body of scholarship produced by social historians and historical sociologists, reflects this relative lack of attention.

At the same time that this work was being produced, social scientists were turning their attention to the new migratory wave flowing into all of the developing nations. Building on a tradition of research defined by the preceding major migratory wave, the empirical foci of the work on contemporary immigrants paralleled that devoted to the previous epoch. From the 1970s forward, a vast and ever-expanding body of research has been produced. Taking stock in the early 1990s of the portion of that work that was devoted to religion, I concluded that although one could point to a number of significant contributions to the topic, in fact overall religion as a topic of inquiry was characterized by relative neglect (Kivisto 1992). This neglect can be seen in Sylvia PedrazaBailey’s conceptual map of immigration research published two years earlier. In her effort to summarize the major themes structuring what she called the recent “veritable boom in immigration research,” religion does not appear as one of those themes, not even as – to use her metaphor – a blue highway, by which she means an unpaved road (Pedraza-Bailey 1990: 43).

Since the early 1990s, a lot has changed. A substantial body of research on religion and immigration has been published, with the result being that much has been done to redress the earlier marginalization of the religious factor in immigration studies (Warner 1998a; Yang and Ebaugh 2001; Cadge and Ecklund 2007; Massey and Higgins 2011). Within sociology proper, within the sociology of religion subfield, immigrant religion is today a hot topic, the way that the study of new religious movements was two decades earlier. Meanwhile, many established sociologists of immigration who have not previously focused on religion are doing so (e.g., Foner and Alba 2008; Massey and Espinoza 2011), while younger colleagues have picked up on the topic early in their careers. When they revised their best-selling Immigrant America: A Portrait for a third edition, Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut (2006: xvii) included a lengthy and in their word “overdue” chapter on religion. A relatively short time ago one could bemoan the lack of attention paid to religion and immigration, and proffer possible explanations for why this might be the case (e.g., the secular biases of sociologists). Today one is left with the daunting task of sifting through a very large body of research in order to: (1) discern the lessons learned from it; (2) distill central themes shaping the agenda; and (3) point to current shortcomings and lacunae. All this would be essential if one wants to distill a synthetic account of the state of the field.

Outline of Major Themes

The goal I have set out in this book is to provide such an account. In so doing, I have identified four topics that can be found running through the literature, sometimes intertwined, often not. Each of these topics will be taken up in subsequent chapters, beginning with chapter 2, where we address whether or not religion functions to promote immigrant adjustment. Here we are concerned with determining if, when, and how religion plays a role in facilitating an individual immigrant’s ability to come to terms with his or her new home. Is religion a source of solace? Does it offer spiritual compensation for earthly distress? Is it a vehicle for incorporation? Is religious affiliation a means for making claims directed at the receiving society about moral worthiness? On the other hand, do inherited religious traditions inhibit an immigrant’s ability to become a full societal member? These and related questions concerning the impact of religious belief, practice, and affiliation on immigrants will be explored through an explication of the literature. An intriguing – though at this point rather speculative question – concerns differences in adjustment patterns between immigrants involved in institutional religion and those who are not.

Chapter 3 is concerned with institutional reframing. One aspect of reframing involves the form that religious organizations take in the new homeland. R. Stephen Warner (1994, 1998a) has argued that in the United States the religions of immigrants have tended to take on a congregati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Religion on the Move
• 2 Immigrant Identity Work and Religion
• 3 Reframing Religious Organizations and Practices
• 4 Immigrants and Transnational Religious Networks
• 5 Church–State Relations and the Public Sphere
• 6 Epilogue
• References
• Index