Approaching religious diversity: barriers, byways, and beginnings - 1997 Presidential Address

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1998 by R. Stephen Warner

When we met in San Francisco in 1978, I presented my first paper to this association (published as Warner 1979), and in it I complained of theoretical barriers sociologists had erected that made it difficult to understand evangelical Christianity. Nineteen years later, I still have a complaint, but today I also want to offer some words of appreciation. In 1978, my complaint was about a misleading literature, and in the intervening years our understanding of evangelicalism has been enormously advanced through the efforts of such scholars as Nancy Ammerman (1987) and Randall Balmer (1993). Today, my complaint is about a mostly nonexistent literature on new religious diversity in the United States,(1) but I will report significant beginnings to fill that lacuna.

My topic - the form of diversity I've been most concerned with over the past five years - is the religious institutions of new immigrant and ethnic groups, a provisional category that might be roughly defined as people from what we in the US used to call the Third World. I include people from east, southeast, and south Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America; Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, Arabs, North Africans, Nigerians, Jamaicans, Haitians, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Mexicans, to name some of the most numerous groups. I also include Puerto Ricans in this category despite the fact that they are US citizens, because, to quote the late Joseph Fitzpatrick (1980:858), "the island language and culture are foreign to most of the mainland [and thus] migration involves a cultural transition differing little from that experienced by immigrants coming from Europe or Asia." As I shall show, very little attention has been given by social scientists to the religious institutions of Latinos (or Hispanics, if you prefer), and so I include all these ethnic groups within the "new ethnic and immigrant" category. What unites this heterogeneous category is simply that "they" are "new" to "us," social scientists of religion.

One of many ways that the religious landscape has changed dramatically since 1965 (aside from the decline of mainline Protestantism and the growth of Pentecostalism) is the mushrooming of religious communities of such new ethnic and immigrant people. There are thousands of such sites, and we have some reasonably solid estimates of the more formal of them. There are some 3,500 Catholic parishes today where mass is celebrated in Spanish, and 7,000 Hispanic/Latino Protestant congregations, most of them Pentecostal or evangelical in theology. By actual count in 1988, there were 2018 Korean-American churches, and in 1994 there were an estimated 700 Chinese Protestant churches in the US. Two different research projects in the early 1990s counted between 1000 and 1200 mosques and other Islamic centers, and at the same time Buddhist temples and meditation centers (many of the latter having white American constituencies) numbered between 1500 and 2000. Hindus could worship in some 400 temples (for documentation, see Warner 1998a). Less formal sites - house churches, paraliturgical groups, Bible and Qur'an study groups, neighborhood and regional seasonal festivals - are literally countless.

My search for a literature on such institutions began ten years ago, inspired by first-hand impressions of mosques and Islamic centers, Buddhist wats, Hindu temples, and Korean Presbyterian and Indian Mar Thoma churches, which my students and I had visited in Chicago. I wanted to feature such sites in a book-chapter on immigrant religion, but working on the chapter - intended as an interpretive summary of other scholars' first-hand research - I found that such researches were extremely few. Another chapter was to deal with Latino evangelical churches, which also abound in Chicago. Finding an even greater dearth of studies there - and suspecting that such churches also serve largely immigrant populations - I decided to combine the two efforts. Eventually, with generous funding (from the Lilly Endowment and the Pew Charitable Trusts), with wise counsel (especially from James Wind), and with the now five-year colleagueship of Judith Wittner, I developed the New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project (NEICP), which has just been concluded. Our book, Gatherings in diaspora: Religious communities and the new immigration (Warner and Wittner 1998), will have been published by Temple University Press when this address appears in print. Gatherings in diaspora is one of the "beginnings" of my title. A big book, it will add measurably to a small shelf.

Of course it is not the case that no one had written about new ethnic and immigrant religious institutions before we came along. There were pioneers in the 1980s: Raymond Williams (1988) and John Fenton (1988), Yvonne Haddad and Adair Lummis (1987), Frederick Denny (1987) and Earle Waugh (Waugh et al. 1983), Joseph Fitzpatrick (1992) and Anthony Stevens-Arroyo (1987), Won Moo Hurh and Kwang Chung Kim (1990), Eui Hang Shin and Hyung Park (1988), Eui-Young Yu (1988), Tetsuden Kashima (1977, 1990) and Mark Mullins (1988). Some years ago, Kevin Christiano (1991) and Peter Kivisto (1992) saw the need for research.