Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgment
- Part One Religion as a Field of Sociological Knowledge
- Part Two Religion and Social Change
- Part Three Religion and the Life Course
- Part Four Religion and Social Identity
- 16 Religious Identities and Religious Institutions
- 17 Religion and the New Immigrants
- 18 A Journey of the “Straight Way” or the “Roundabout Path”
- 19 Beyond the Synagogue Walls
- 20 Dis/location
- Part Five Religion, Political Behavior, and Public Culture
- Part Six Religion and Socioeconomic Inequality
- References
- Index
17 - Religion and the New Immigrants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgment
- Part One Religion as a Field of Sociological Knowledge
- Part Two Religion and Social Change
- Part Three Religion and the Life Course
- Part Four Religion and Social Identity
- 16 Religious Identities and Religious Institutions
- 17 Religion and the New Immigrants
- 18 A Journey of the “Straight Way” or the “Roundabout Path”
- 19 Beyond the Synagogue Walls
- 20 Dis/location
- Part Five Religion, Political Behavior, and Public Culture
- Part Six Religion and Socioeconomic Inequality
- References
- Index
Summary
Changes in U.S. immigration laws in the past four decades have had far-reaching consequences for American religion. Even though the majority of the new immigrants are Christian (Warner and Wittner 1998; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b), the practices, symbols, languages, sounds, and smells that accompany the ethnically and racially diverse forms of practicing Christianity, brought by immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, India, Africa, and elsewhere challenge the various European practices of Christianity that have predominated in the United States since its founding. As Maffy-Kipp (1997) argues, rather than immigrants “de-Christianizing” religion in America, they have, in fact, “de-Europeanized” American Christianity. In addition, the new immigrants have brought religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Vodou, and Rastafarianism, that were unfamiliar to Americans prior to the mid-1960s. Today many American neighborhoods are dotted with temples, mosques, shrines, storefront churches, Christian churches with foreign names, guadwaras, and botannicas.
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The “new immigrants” refer to those who entered the United States after the passage of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. The abolition of the country-of-origin quotas established in 1924, and the dramatic increase in immigration visas provided to people from Asia and Latin America, in particular, significantly altered the racial and ethnic backgrounds of immigrants. For example, the number of Asian immigrants living in the United States rose from about 150,000 in the 1950s to more than 2.7 million in the 1980s, while the number of European immigrants fell by more than one-third.
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- Information
- Handbook of the Sociology of Religion , pp. 225 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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