Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2010 - Cokesbury

The New Immigrant Church
Rev. Eileen W. Lindner, Ph.D.
THE NEW IMMIGRANT
CHURCH
No phrase is more deeply ingrained in the American psyche than our self-understanding
as an “immigrant people.” Among the most persistent of our communal myths is that
of a great melting pot, a polyglot of peoples and religious traditions living in a diverse
community, which protects religious freedoms regarding each without fear or favor. As
with many cultural myths, the truth of our ethnicity and religious traditions—and the freedom
accorded to each—is far more complex and nuanced than our cherished collective
memory. To be sure, the American religious landscape has long been replete with religiously
diverse topographical features but protestant Christianity long dwarfed all other
topographical aspects and has exercised cultural hegemony within the society. For the last
twenty years the scholarly work of Diana Eck, Robert Wuthnow and others has called
attention to America’s growing religious pluralism driven by new patterns of immigration.
Until recently focused efforts to understand the scope and variety of this religious pluralism
have tended to obscure the larger influx of Christian immigrants and their churches.
In our annual quest to offer a snapshot of churches in the United States and Canada, the
Yearbook this year examines the state of present research and analysis of the New
Immigrant Church.
Because the U.S. Census data famously avoids the whole realm of religious affiliation
and thereby limits easy access to reliable measures of the religious composition of new
arrivals and the General Social Survey (GSS) provides an inadequate measure of smaller
religious communities quantitative measures of new immigrants by religious affiliation is
difficult to assess. Yet, it can be safely asserted that the largest plurality of immigrants to
the U.S. in the last half century and perhaps even the majority, have been Christian in their
religious affiliation. A majority of those immigrants have come from nations that are predominately
Christian such as Mexico, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, and
the Caribbean (see chart on p. 17). Even immigrants from religiously plural nations are
more apt, for a variety of reasons, to be Christian such as those immigrants from the
Philippines, Korea, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Contributing to this immigration
pattern are factors in the countries of origin of immigrants that constrain the life
and witness of Christian communities and thus serve as a motivational factor to emigration.
Christians in religiously plural nations of origin often maintain networks and relationships
with Christian institutions within the United States, which sometimes provide
greater opportunities for immigration. Further evidence of Christian in-migration to the
United States has been reflected in the number and diverse traditions that over the last half
century have been added to “Religious Bodies” chapter of this Yearbook. Such churches
as the Korean Presbyterian Church Abroad, the Mar Thoma Church, the Malankara
churches, and a variety of Pentecostal churches of Latin American or African origins have
been recorded as their institutional presence within the nation stabilized.
The “newness” of New Immigrant Churches is generally demarcated from the passage
of Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished national quotas that had
been enforced since 1924 and effectively shifted the ethnic balance of émigrés from
Western Europe to Eastern Europe and Asia. The 1965 law, for example, provided for
300,000 annual visas with 120,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere and limiting immigration
to a total of 20,000 from any one country. The implications of such a shift in immigration
policy has altered the Christian landscape within the United States and Canada in
ways that we are just beginning to understand. Seen from the perspective of new immigrants,
religious institutions and practices which accompanied them to North America
have adapted in, and been adapted by, their new cultural context. Thus, the in-migration
of Christian individuals and their churches has altered not only the demographic composition
of Christianity in America but, perhaps more important, has expanded the variety
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