"Highly Recommended" - CHOICE Reviews - Worship across the Racial Divide

More feedback continues to come from Worship across the Racial Divide. This one comes from CHOICE Reviews:

49-5448	ML3921	2011-18782 CIP
Humanities \ General
Marti, Gerardo.  Worship across the racial divide: religious music and the multiracial congregation.  Oxford, 2012.  266p bibl index afp ISBN 0-19-539297-3, $29.95; ISBN9780195392975, $29.95. Reviewed in 2012jun CHOICE.
This book is more scientifically grounded in research and study than the title suggests. Marti (sociology, Davidson College) spent more than two years studying the hypothesis that music and worship play an essential role in stimulating diversity in congregations. He found that the hypothesis is incorrect, and that though music and worship are important in multiethnic/multiracial congregations, what is important is not the performance of the service but rather the practices that surround the congregation in the absorption and production of the music. The author devotes a great deal of space to examining the sociological perspective of worship from a practice-based application. He tears down preconceived notions in contemporary worship scholarship about achieving racial diversity and a universal worship experience and about how churches need to focus on their structural practices if they wish to achieve diversity and ethnicity in their congregations. A scholarly, thought-provoking examination of this topic. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. -- B. L. Eden, Valparaiso University

Research on Multiracial Congregations that Does Not Yet Exist

I recently revisited an article I wrote published in 2010.  It struck me that the title of this brief article does not anticipate that nearly one-third describes the type of research we need on multiracial congregations that does not yet exist. 

Research on Multiracial Congregations that Does Not Yet Exist

First, we should expand more widely the scope of “diversity” examined in diverse congregations to more actively incorporate a broader scope of cultural experiences and ancestral backgrounds.

Second, we should pursue a more inclusive range of diverse congregations and avoid treating “multiracial churches” as a homogenous category; clearly, they are not.

Third, we should focus more attention on non-Christian congregations. 

St. Martin's Episcopal Church (Photo credit: joseph a)

Fourth, we should isolate significant arenas of diversification and investigate contemporary initiatives for diversification (and rigorous research will likely identify intriguing ironies and contradictions).

Fifth, we should exercise greater caution in our use of racial and ethnic categories as well as become better prepared for working through new and changing “multiracial identities.”

Finally, we should expand the use of multiracial churches as strategic arenas for data collection to address other interesting and important social dynamics.   

These suggestions--with expanded discussion and a number of relevant citations from research research--can be found here.

The Diverse Church as Musical Production

Reviews are beginning to come in for my new book Worship across the Racial Divide. The latest one is right here.

Review of Worship across the Racial Divide by Franklin Golden

A very special thanks to Franklin Golden, co-pastor of Durham Presbyterian Church who posted a very nice, very concise summary and response to my new book at the Faith and Leadership Blog at Duke Divinity.

Author Reading: Worship across the Racial Divide ~ Ch 2

I'm continuing a series of readings from my new book "Worship across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation." These feature short previews of each chapter and introduce you to some of the insights from the book.

From Part 1 "Confronting Popular Notions of Race and Worship", here's the beginning of Chapter 2.

listen to ‘Worship across the Racial Divide ~ excerpt Ch 2’ on Audioboo

The reading from the beginning of the book, Chapter 1, is here.

Enjoy!

Worship across the Racial Divide: An Interview with Gerardo Marti

Historian and friend Paul Harvey posted at the Religion and American History blog a nice little interview with me about my book Worship across the Racial Divide.

Between Tuesday and Wednesday, it will be divided into a set of two posts.

The exchange includes a brief reflection on the relationship between the disciplines of history and sociology. Even more, these brief exchanges provide a glimpse into the core arguments of the book.

Author Reading: Worship across the Racial Divide

Starting today, I'm going to do a series of readings from my new book "Worship across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation." These will feature short previews of each chapter and introduce you to some of the insights from the book.

So, here's the beginning of the book, from Chapter 1.

listen to ‘Worship across the Racial Divide ~ excerpt Ch 1’ on Audioboo

Enjoy!

Worship across the Racial Divide: A Response from Three Practitioners

My new book on the dynamics of worship and music in diverse congregations has been out for just a few short weeks, but thanks to Art Lucero the first reviews are now in.

Last week, three Christian music leaders, Josh Davis, Nikki Lerner, and Jeff McCourt, took time to write their own reactions to the book. I am so pleased with how carefully they read the book and the responses they gave:

Josh Davis wrote, "Marti clearly states that no one knows 'what manner of worship is best for stimulating and accelerating racial and ethnic diversity in churches.' Absolutely. There is no one-size-fits-all method or approach to multicultural worship."

Nikki Lerner wrote, "I could not agree more with his conclusions at the end of this book: As I continued to pursue my research, I came to understand that it is not the acoustics of musical style but rather the visible presence of diversity—a racialized ritual inclusion—that stimulates integration of different racial and ethnic groups into their churches [pg. 198]."

Jeff McCourt wrote, "Honestly, I argued with Dr. Marti most of the way through the book but was beginning to feel an openness to his perspective due to the thoroughness of his research..."

Each of them wrote much more, and they're worth reading for yourself. I also provided a brief response that you can see at the bottom of the page.

Cover - Worship across the Racial Divide (Jan 2012) Oxford University Press

Oxford just shared with me the image for the cover of my forthcoming book, due out January 2012. 

Oxford University Press (January 2012)

Worship across the Racial Divide: Order Your Exam Copy Now!

Colleagues,

My new book Worship across the Racial Divide is now listed at the Oxford University Press site. At the right side is a blue link to "Request Examination Copy" ~ 

I invite all instructors, college professors, seminary professors, and periodical reviewers to click on that link and request their copy today!

Best,

Gerardo

Worship across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Church

Here's a draft blurb for my forthcoming book (Oxford University Press, 2012):

Worship across the Racial Divide:

Religious Music and the Multiracial Church

Oxford University Press. In press, expected 2012.

"This book will surprise many readers." -- From the Introduction

Church leaders believe worship is key to congregational diversity, and the demand for music that appeals across racial and ethnic cultures has prompted great speculation.

But misguided worship practices based on faulty racial assumptions accentuate rather than relieve the pervasive racial tensions.

Through stories and vignettes from a wide variety of Protestant multiracial churches and interviews with over 170 of their members – including church leaders, church musicians, and regular attendees – Marti's book moves away from assumption and speculation to examine how music and worship actually ‘works’ in diverse congregations.

The book provides an intriguing lens for how race continues to affect religion, even when religion attempts to overcome it.

http://www.oup.com/us/

African American Integration into Diverse, Multiethnic, Multiracial Churches

This month, a set of articles appeared in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the leading journal in the social scientific approach to understanding religion. It seems I've placed myself in the middle of a controversy on how best to understand cross-racial integration in American churches.

PART I: African American Integration into Diverse Churches

The lead article is one I originally wrote about two years ago, which went through two sets of revisions with very extensive, and very helpful, comments by other scholars:

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 49 Issue 2 (June 2010)

The Religious Racial Integration of African Americans into Diverse Churches

The unique history of African Americans in the United States fuels much of the discussion on the relationship between religion and race in diverse congregations. The impetus for much of the current research on multiracial churches began with Emerson and Smith's bestselling book Divided by Faith (2000), an overall pessimistic assessment of the potential for black-white integration within American Protestant Christianity.

The article distinguishes "Ethnic Reinforcement" from "Ethnic Transcendence," processes that are believed to be necessary for achieving racial integration of distinct ethnic-racial groups. However, these are often seen as contradictory. So the article asks weighs one versus the other and asks if one is more important than the other. Or perhaps there is a more nuanced interaction between the two?

You'll find much more information (including background, quotes, references, and explanations). The article greatly expands ideas first found in A Mosaic of Believers and then touched in the "race" parts of my book Hollywood Faith. Here's a bit from the conclusion:

I find that the intentional focus on diversity and programs of churches do promote intergroup contact to foster an "inclusive identity" that indicate processes of ethnic transcendence (as I describe in earlier articles also published in JSSR in 2008 and 2009). At the same time, African-American members in the church I studied recognize and appreciate the markers that affirm a distinctive African-American experience. In other words, "ethnic reinforcement" is achieved in the church by recognizing blacks up front in lay and staff roles, by race-specific practices in church life (e.g., musical styles), and by preaching racial awareness from the pulpit.

The distinctives of the African-American experience in white-dominant American society appears to require multiracial congregations to construct relational havens in such a way that blacks are affirmed, protected, and perhaps even entertained. Such racial affirmation is good enough for most blacks, yet the church does not appeal equally to all. For other African Americans, the church is "not black enough," and this failure to adequately incorporate a much higher degree of black prominence (which further indicates the importance of ethnic reinforcement). So, while other studies have argued for the importance of mixing musical and preaching styles as well as providing an awareness of racial issues from the pulpit to keep a multiracial congregation together, this case study suggests that the exceptionalism of African Americans plays itself out in the interaction between reinforcement and transcendent and prompts a closer understanding of the importance of these practices.

In achieving diversity, the congregation does not merely invoke ethnic reinforcement; rather, the congregation places the value of diversity at the center of the congregation in a way that recognizes the unique experience of African Americans.

PART II: Scholars Response to My Approach to Understanding Diversity

Well, the article almost didn't get published. One reviewer very much disagreed with my approach and made several insightful comments. The editor decided to put the article forward, inviting the scholar to print his objections, and allow me to respond.

This led to an exchange. My reply is found here:

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 49 Issue 2 (June 2010)

When Does Religious Racial Integration "Count?" A Caution About Seeking Ideal Ethnographic Cases

In my reply article, I urge caution for scholars who have not studied particular cases to not base critiques in supposed "ideal" situations:

"Ethnographers take a risk whenever they select a case for study. We immerse ourselves among people in the hope of yielding significant findings, yet none of us can predict the outcome of our research. The commitment of time, energy, and professional status is enormous, but ultimately we cannot tell ahead of time the exact dynamics in play or the manner of their operation. It reminds me of the "mystery bag" game we played as children. Each of us would reach into a large sack without knowing what was inside and try to guess the contents based on the touch of our hands. Ethnographic sites are mystery bags; researchers have some sense that there is indeed 'something' to be found but cannot entirely be sure what it is until a much greater degree of access, observation, and interpretation is achieved."

In writing a long response -- I'll encourage you to read it yourself as it deals with several current issues in the study of congregational diversity -- I talked about how to move the study of diverse congregations forward.

For example, we should isolate significant arenas of diversification and investigate contemporary initiatives for diversification. Michael Emerson recently suggested that megachurches are diversifying more quickly than other congregations. Such an observation is provocative and potentially important, but we lack the systematic research to state this more confidently. Can we identify processes of diversification that differ by the size of congregations?

I would also agree with Michael that there is great enthusiasm among church leaders to catalyze and sustain diversification. New conferences and pastoral networks as well as new publications and program initiatives are aggressively advocating diversity as a missional cause. Research is required to identify the nature and scope of this broad movement. I suspect that rigorous research will identify intriguing ironies and contradictions, and I expect to articulate some of them through my own research on music and worship in successfully diverse churches

In the end, this was a very fruitful exchange. Scholars wrestling with ideas and sharpening each other's work. I hope this one gets the attention it deserves and accelerates a much-needed sophistication on these issues.

Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church - Book Review

Many thanks to Kathleen Hladky at Florida State University (her recent article) who provided a review of my book Hollywood Faith for the H-Pentecostalism thread of Humanities and Social Sciences (H-Net) Reviews Online, a powerful consortium of scholars attempting to provide timely updates of new research.

In the review, she concludes:

Throughout Hollywood Faith, Marti contributes to the study of Pentecostalism and contemporary Christianity by drawing attention to topics too often overlooked by scholars of religion: the relationship between religion and work, multiracial Christian congregations, and the Word of Faith movement.

Overall, her reading of my book shows great sensitivity to the layered themes on religion, economics, and race found there.

You can read the full review here.

Brazilian Evangelicals - New National Religion?

According to UK's Guardian, Brazil's evangelical churches are booming, but for all their marketing savvy they don't have the status of Catholicism.

A fascinating article from the UK pits Evangelicals versus Catholics in the battle for Brazil's religious self-identity. Pictures from the story show young, enthusiastic worshipers pouring their hearts out in worship.

This ain't your grandma's Sunday school.

The vibrancy of commitment seen here can be excused as being "Brazilian" - the Latin passion manifesting itself through worship. Except this same style of worship can be seen in the contemporary Evangelical churches in the American mid-west.

It's not an ethnic religion, but a charismatic worship that's being seen here.

Instead, we are seeing continued evidence of the Global South embracing forms of ecstatic Christianity. From the article:

In the past 20 years or so, Brazil, cited as the country with the biggest catholic population in the world, has witnessed a migration from Rome to the booming evangelical churches. According to IBGE (the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the Catholic population in the country was 91.8% of the total in 1970. But the most recent survey, in 2000, revealed that the number of Catholics had fallen to 73. 8% with the number of evangelicals up from 5.2% to 15.6%.

The shift is accompanied by new methodologies of "doing church" similar to things we've seen in the United States. According to the article, "Rock concerts, fighting events and surfer rituals are some of the activities laid on by new churches that are garnering increasing numbers of followers."

But can we explain away this spiritual vitality by approaching it as savvy marketing?

I don't think so.

According to Antonio Flávio Pierucci, professor at the department of sociology of the University of São Paulo and a specialist in the sociology of religion, "the new Pentecostal churches [are good at] media and marketing..." BUT "analysing the statistical data shows that older evangelical churches have grown too."

For Pierucci, "It means that Catholicism is struggling against older Pentecostalism as well as the new varieties."

Pierucci says a key reason for churchgoers' change in allegiance is the development of the religious freedom, a process which began at the end of the 19th century. With the end of the empire and the advent of the republic in Brazil, the Roman Catholic church lost much of its power. And although the article does not explain how this works, Pierucci also states that the military dictatorship (1964-1984) also helped sow the seeds of the evangelical "boom".

We've got to look at the bundle of social changes that stimulate new religious developments. Media push and marketing "tricks" are simply not enough to sustain broad growth in any religious orientation.

And the new wave in Brazil is experiencing it's own challenge in how people understand the new movement. "It is really rare to find a student who is brave enough to say that he is a new Pentecostalist. There is still some prejudice."

"It is not just about class, but about the status of the new Pentecostalism."

Religion and Culture Conference in Indianapolis

I'm just getting ready to leave tomorrow morning for a major conference, the first of a projected bi-annual event hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The center publishes a leading journal, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation (which is among the highest-ranked academic journals in the nation), and active at working the various "lines" of dialogue and inquiry at the intersection of religion and culture.

Anyhow, what makes a conference like this so great is that it brings together important people and conversations at various places from various disciplines. In case you don't already know this, academics spend an enormous amount of time all by themselves. Even in a big university, a scholar may be the only person who cares about their particular subject for miles around. So conferences become important for relationships and mutual engagement.

For this conference, people are coming from departments of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science, as well as from various teaching backgrounds, including divinity schools, law schools, schools of government, and schools of public policy. In addition, I anticipate this conference to be a bit more "cozy" (in comparison with the thousands at the major annual disciplinary conferences), so I hope to get a chance to make a few new friends while catching up with a few "old" ones.

The schedule is below - gives you a taste of what's up. All of these people have published interesting, important work in American religion. Worth looking up a few names.

Thursday, June 4


3:00-7:00 p.m. Registration


6:00-7:30 p.m. Reception, Severin Ballroom

Friday, June 5


9:15-11:15
 How did we get here? A discussion of disciplinary lines, how we in American religious studies are divided into groups and subgroups, the forces that keep us separated or encourage interdisciplinarity, the role of funding in all of this.

Welcome: Philip Goff, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Department of Religious Studies, IUPUI

Host: Stephen Stein, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington
Panel: Jon Butler, American Studies, History, and Religious Studies, Yale University; Jay Demerath, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Paula Kane, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Image via Wikipedia

1:15-3:00
 Competing and complementary approaches in American religious history. How seriously do historians take religion, or religious studies scholars take history? Whence goeth monographs? The rise of ethnography. What about grand narratives?

Host: Peter Thuesen, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Department of Religious Studies, IUPUI
Panel: John Corrigan, Department of Religious Studies, Florida State University; Dennis Dickerson, Department of History, Vanderbilt University; Robert Orsi, Department of Religious Studies, Northwestern University

3:30-5:15
 Competing and complementary approaches in social scientific studies of religion in America. Are the important divisions less those between social scientists and humanists and instead those that divide social scientists into quantitative and qualitative? What role do non-sociological social sciences play in the larger picture?

Host: Arthur E. Farnsley II, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, IUPUI
Panel: Penny Edgell, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota; Rhys Williams, Department of Sociology, University of Cincinnati; Jerry Park, Department of Sociology, Baylor University

Saturday, June 6


8:30-10:00
 Explaining Religion in America: What can we learn from each other? What can those working in the humanities learn from social scientists, and vice-versa? How do we view one another? What do we consider the other to be doing right and wrong?

Host: Brian Steensland, Department of Sociology, Indiana University-Bloomington
Panel: Courtney Bender, Department of Religion, Columbia University; Carol B. Duncan, Department of Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University; David Hall, Harvard Divinity School

10:30-12:15
 Politics, Secularization, and the Public Square

Host: Sheila Suess Kennedy, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, IUPUI
Panel: Daniel Walker Howe, Department of History, UCLA and Oxford University; Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, University at Buffalo Law School; and Mark Silk, Department of Religion, Trinity College

2:00-3:45
 Race, Ethnicity, and Religious Pluralism

Host: Edward Curtis IV, Department of Religious Studies, IUPUI
Panel: Helen Rose Ebaugh, Department of Sociology, University of Houston; Rudy Busto, Department of Religious Studies, UCSB; David Wills, Department of History, Amherst College

4:15-5:15
 Where do we go from here?

Host: Sylvester Johnson, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington
Panel: James Lewis, Louisville Institute, Louisville Theological Seminary; Amanda Porterfield, Florida State University

6:00-7:00 Reception

7:00-8:30 Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture hosted dinner, Severin Ballroom
Guest speaker: Daniel Walker Howe, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner

Sunday, June 7

Go Home!

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Reviews Hollywood Faith

It's been about eight months since my book Hollywood Faithhas been out, and that means the academic reviews are only just beginning to appear.  

Today I am grateful to professor Kathleen Jenkins, sociologist at The College of William and Mary, whose articulate review of my book is available in this month's Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.  Jenkins authored her own fascinating book Awesome Families: The Promise of Healing Relationships in the International Churches of Christ.  

Here are snippets from her review. 

Book Review of Hollywood Faith

From Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion June 2009 

Hollywood Faith is an engaging ethnography that makes multiple contributions to the sociology of contemporary U.S. religion. 

Oasis is the epitome of what scholars have recently named "new paradigm" churches, especially in its creative use of contemporary culture. 

Drawing from current studies in work and occupations, Marti locates the majority of Oasis members as creative workers whose occupations leave their employment contingent and often exploitative. 

Members are offered a new purpose and fresh identity; through worship and church relationships, individuals come to believe that they are not alone as they engage in self promotion. Instead, personal fame takes a back seat to a common Christian moral purpose. 

We feel the power of collective worship, music especially, as rejuvenating ritual. 

Hollywood Faith...is provocative in suggesting how contemporary religious organizations might help members negotiate and manage uncertain and exploitative labor markets. 

Additionally, the chapters on Hollywood and evangelicalism will certainly be of importance to anyone interested in media and religion. 

Finally, the careful attention to congregational dynamics and how they support a multiracial congregation make this a valuable addition to literature on religion, race, and ethnicity.

 
-- Kathleen E. Jenkins, The College of William and Mary

Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

Quick post: Nice review of a new book on Billy Graham by historian Steven P. Miller.

The New York Times Book Review includes a nice review of Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, described by the publisher as a book that "considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South."

The book wonderfully weaves politics, religion, and racial relations together around the emerging career of evangelist Billy Graham and the important election of Richard Nixon.

According to the article:

Image via Wikipedia

Graham’s rise to prominence as an evangelist coincided with the turbulent years between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964, and throughout that decade he wrote and sermonized in favor of racial harmony, staged desegregated rallies in balkanized cities, and counseled obedience to court rulings and legislation that many of his fellow Southerners were determined to resist. As a voice for both Christian conservatism and racial progress, he served as a bridge between the Old South and the New, and as a model for a region struggling to shed its worst baggage without losing its identity.

That’s one story. But there’s another story as well, one that paints Graham as a coward and an apologist for racial backlash. He supported desegregation but took few risks on its behalf; he cultivated a studied moderation in a time that cried out for moral clarity; he was more interested in flattering the white South’s self-regard than in calling his region to true repentance. As a steadfast supporter of Richard Nixon’s career, from the 1950s down through Watergate, he simultaneously enabled and embodied Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which shut civil rights liberalism out of power and turned the region Republican for a generation.

Image via Wikipedia

Neither story is the whole truth, but both are true. And it’s a credit to Steven P. Miller that his “Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South,” a study of the evangelist’s relationship to the cause of civil rights on the one hand and the cause of conservatism on the other, does justice to the tensions and complexities involved — for Graham, for the South and for the country.

The book is good, just out (I got my own copy this past week), and a textured historical analysis of the recent, American past we are still learning to understand.

Kosuke Koyama's Water Buffalo Theology

The esteemed and accomplished Kosuke Koyama, an Ecumenical Theologian born in Tokyo, passed away last week, and here's an opportunity to learn about his work.

According to the New York Times,

Dr. Koyama, who taught at the Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, strove to make the teachings of Christ culturally meaningful to Asians, without sacrificing the essential Gospel message. His 1974 book, “Water Buffalo Theology,” was “one of the first books truly to do theology out of the setting of Asian villages,” Donald Shriver, president emeritus of Union, said in an interview on Tuesday.

Directed at the concerns of peasants, the book points out that Christianity and Buddhism do not communicate; rather, Christians and Buddhists do. Dr. Koyama advocated seeing God “in the faces of people” to achieve good neighborliness among religions. He spoke of trying to “season” the Aristotelian roots of Western theology with Buddhist “salt.”

The book favored communicating about Jesus in culturally comforting words but urged missionaries to criticize and reform a given culture if it was found to be against Christian values.

Dr. Koyama made the book’s case in poetic, not academic, language. As a missionary in northern Thailand, he said, he was inspired to write it as he listened to the “fugue of the bullfrogs” while watching farmers working with buffaloes in the rice fields.

“The water buffaloes tell me that I must preach to these farmers in the simplest sentence structure,” he wrote. “They remind me to discard all the abstract ideas and to use exclusively objects that are immediately tangible. ‘Sticky rice,’ ‘banana,’ ‘pepper,’ ‘dog,’ ‘cat,’ ‘bicycle,’ ‘rainy season,’ ‘leaking house,’ ‘fishing,’ ‘cockfighting,’ ‘lottery,’ ‘stomachache’ — these are meaningful words for them.”

At the end of the article, The Times notes this -

Once, in discussing death, Dr. Koyama recalled the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

He said Jesus would be with others the same way:“Looking into our eyes and heart, Jesus will say: ‘You’ve had a difficult journey. You must be tired, and dirty. Let me wash your feet. The banquet’s ready.’ ”

Latinos Take Immigration Reform to Evangelical Churches

Quick Post: Latino activists urge churches to provoke broad immigration reform.

Stories and quotes in an interesting article originally from the Chicago Tribune describes the effort by Latino immigration activists to bring families together.

From the article:

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Two years after a sweeping immigration reform bill failed in Congress, Latino leaders have revitalized the effort, positioning children who were left behind when their parents were deported as the new face of the movement. 

The campaign is designed to place pressure on President Barack Obama to make comprehensive immigration reform a priority.

Borrowing a page from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Latinos have taken their cause to churches, drawing upon the growing population of evangelical Latinos, who like their white counterparts, are strong advocates of family values.

While Hispanics overwhelmingly remain Roman Catholics, nearly one in six in the U.S. identify as evangelicals, the second largest religious group in the Latino community, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

"Our families are the cornerstone of our society, and we want to protect those families." Packing a large evangelical church in suburban Atlanta, the mostly Latino audience shouted "amen" and waved as ministers preached about how God would protect them.

Image via Wikipedia

For more than three hours, they prayed, sang spirituals in Spanish and listened to the testimonies of families torn apart at the hands of federal immigration agents.

The stories are designed to tug at the heartstrings of Americans and focus attention on what community leaders said is the most tragic consequence of the federal government's crackdown on illegal immigration -- the breakup of families, a problem they said affects up to 5 million children, most of whom were born in the U.S. and automatically are citizens.

Turban Week in Texas

In Texas, students agree to wear bright colored turbans - as long as they don't drink or smoke while it's on. Almost everyone who wears a turban in the United States is Sikh, and Sikhism is the fifth-largest religion in the world.

As an exercise in religious tolerance, Texas college students were urged to wear blood-red, neon orange, or aquamarine cloth around the heads, symbols of Sikh religion.

Billed as "Sikh Turban Week," Sikh students at colleges including University of Texas at Arlington and Southern Methodist University tied turbans and debunked myths for their classmates during spring break.

Jaipreet Singh Suri, president of Southern Methodist University's Sikh Student Association, decided to host a "turban day" at SMU because of continuing questions and accusations surrounding his turban. He offerred $10 gift cards for Subway, Starbucks, and Chipotle to the first 100 students to wear the turban for three hours and tell others why they were doing so. The participants signed a paper that said they wouldn't smoke, drink alcohol or take off the turban during their assigned time.

Students continued to sign up long after the gift cards were gone. After 170 turbans were tied by himself and volunteers, he had to send people away. They'd run out of cloth.

Rajinder Singh, a software engineer from Allen who teaches Sikh history at the Richardson gurdwara, said, "If you are asked to strip, it's the same as asking me to take off my turban," he said. "It's a form of identity" and a reminder of faith. Even in India, Sikhs have long been persecuted.

Almost everyone who wears a turban in the United States is Sikh.

Sikh symbols of faith. Image via Wikipedia

Sikhism, whose origins date back only to the 15th century, draws on aspects of Hinduism and Islam but is a separate religion. Guru Nanak, the first of 10 Gurus, or holy teachers, pushed the faith's principles of egalitarianism, community service and moral purity. Along with the turban, the religion has five other tangible symbols of faith: uncut hair and beard, a wooden comb worn in the hair, an iron bracelet, a small ceremonial sword and a special type of underwear.

The most distinguishable article of faith – the turban – ends up conjuring notions of Islamic fundamentalism for many Americans, who have difficulty distinguishing the range of cultures from Egypt to India, said Robert Hunt, the director of global theological education at SMU.

About 5,000 Sikhs live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and most Sikhs come from the Punjab region in northwest India. Overall, about a half-million Sikhs live in the United States, with the largest population in California.

Sikhism is the fifth-largest religion in the world and has at least 24 million followers worldwide.

Señor Herberg and the Complexity of American Latino Religious Identity

Will Herberg framed much of our approach to understanding immigrant religion across the generations. But does his framework apply to the experience of American Latinos?


I was asked to contribute to a proposed book of essays on second-generation immigration -- specifically on Latinos, and specifically on their racial and religious identity. I submitted my draft this week. Looking back at the process, I found that in putting my thoughts together I was quickly overwhelmed with the complexity of the subject.

What to say in 25 pages??

Immigrants at Ellis Island. Image via Wikipedia

Well, my quick review of the research on immigrant religion suggests to me a general assumption. From Will Herberg's analysis of immigrant religion until now, scholars of immigrant religion in America generally assume that congregations are ethnically-based social structures that seal themselves off from the inter-ethnic, cross-racial interactions.

Everywhere else in daily life we expect to encounter cross-ethnic diversity like going to school, shopping at the mall, or working at a job for pay. But churches are “ethnic islands” that protect and preserve ethnically based religious cultures, even if younger generations accentuate more of their lives and identities outside of their religious commitments in comparison with their parents and grandparents.

This presents an overarching "mono-ethnic" assumption of church life. And the assumption leads us to a set of “either-or” categories. Younger generations either continue their ethnically-specific religious commitments in particular ways (often with modifications) or they abandon these religious commitments in favor of more general, more assimilated (meaning more “white”) ways of living in society—with our without a religious adherence.

As an ethnographer, I try to pay close attention to the actual context of people's lives. I want to be around ordinary people doing ordinary things to understand their ordinary actions and attitudes. And then I try to understand how their "ordinary" lives fit into "extraordinary" circumstances that allow thier lives to happen. This is part of what's been called a “lived religion” approach. It's an approach that pays close attention to history and context and provides opportunity to see the variety of ways race, ethnicity, and identity co-mingle.

Image via Wikipedia

Because of this approach, I find it difficult to say "Latino religion" or "Latino congregation" because it homogenizes the variety of Latino religions and Latino congregations that exist in the world. For example, for this chapter I returned to Mosaic, a multiethnic church in Los Angeles, to describe a congregation of Latinos who practice their religion alongside members of other ethno-racial groups. The Latinos at Mosaic regularly live out their religious commitments in constant interaction with church members who have non-Latino backgrounds including Asian, Caucasian, African-American, and other ancestral heritages.

The second-generation Latinos in this integrated congregation identify themselves as “Hispanic” yet understand come to understand their religious identities in non-ethnic ways.

Add to this the general dynamic faced by immigrants in American society. Immigrants often struggle to define their particular cultural identity in an increasingly diverse society that tries to lump them in often “unwanted and crude” categories—even among social scientists.

The Hispanic World. Image via Wikipedia

Despite the racialized climate of the United States that often force people into categories, the second generation may not seek to affirm their ethnic identity through forming “pan-Latino” designations as much as remain subject to them. While other pan-Latino groups claim individuals as their own for social or political reasons, other groups may simply label these second generations as “Hispanic” because of their ancestral heritage—even when language and other behavior move decisively away from their parent’s culture.

In day-to-day life, many Latinos simply learn to “code switch” between being “Hispanic” at home and being “non-Hispanic” and church, school, or work.

I think we all need to pay more attention to the complexity and paradox so often found within specific ethno-racial communities. By incorporating ethnographic studies of Latino congregations and adding the experience of Latino members from Mosaic in Los Angeles, I want this chapter to underscore the nuances available to those willing to grasp the diverse ways in which religion intertwines with race and ethnicity. The highly contextual nature of ethnic-designations, racial relations, and the process of forming religious identities encourages us all to attend more closely to the multiple identities that inevitably impinge on American Latinos and, in turn, to the variable reconstructions of racial, ethnic, and religious categories among all American ethnic groups across the generations.