Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America's Newest Immigrants

4. The Moral Projects of Immigrant Congregations

54 4 The Moral Projects of Immigrant Congregations From the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century onward, canon law stressed that the parish served all of the souls living within its boundaries. . . . The term had a geographical as well as religious meaning . . . . [I]n each instance a society no more than two or three generations away from a culture on the margins of industrial Europe used the parish to define community in a new environment. —John McGreevy (1996) In his Sunday morning sermon, Ray Castro, the pastor of Victory Outreach Church, was discussing the problems his congregants faced as they navigated their everyday life in a blighted urban neighborhood. “The prisons can’t deal with the streets,” Pastor Castro declared. “The police can’t deal with the streets. The courts can’t deal with the streets. The government can’t deal with the streets. Only Jesus can.” Victory Outreach is a neo-Pentecostal Hispanic congregation affiliated with a larger international organization of the same name. It focuses on the rehabilitation of drug addicts, gang members, and prostitutes in its southwest Chicago neighborhood. Victory Outreach sees its primary moral project as the rescue, reform, and rehabilitation of individuals, accomplished by introducing each one to faith in Jesus and a personal encounter with the power of the Holy Spirit. As a consequence of how it defines its moral project, Victory Outreach has a deep distrust of collectivist solutions or action and develops citizens who are engaged in public life as individuals confronting other individuals in parks and on street corners. A few miles to the north sits Maternity BVM, a Catholic parish in a similar Hispanic neighborhood, Humboldt Park. Maternity BVM’s ministries also serve primarily poor or working-class Hispanics. Although their socioeconomic contexts and the class composition of their congregations are similar, there are signi ficant religious differences between the two congregations—most importantly in how they define their primary moral project. Maternity BVM views its moral project in more collectivist terms, pursuing community development and structural change aimed at the improvement of its neighborhood as a whole. This Moral Projects of Immigrant Congregations 55 congregation is more optimistic than Victory Outreach about the role of government and the courts. Maternity BVM is particularly involved in promoting the economic and legal rights of day laborers and attempting to influence legislation on amnesty for undocumented immigrants. It offers its building as a safe space for immigrants to meet and mobilize around these issues without fear of Homeland Security. U.S. Congressman Luis Gutierrez regularly uses the church’s facilities to meet with constituents, documented and undocumented alike. Thus, while both Victory Outreach and Maternity BVM offer their space as a safe haven for the development of individuals as empowered agents who act in the public sphere, the content of the consequent acts of citizenship is strikingly different. Defining the Moral Project We draw the notion of moral project from the heuristic map of the religious or moral order in the United States introduced in the previous chapter (see also Maternity BVM Catholic Church involves itself in neighborhood social concerns. Photo by Jerry Berndt. Kniss 2003). Recall that the map consists of two dimensions representing two central issues in any moral order. One is the locus of moral authority and the other is the content of the moral project. The moral project dimension addresses the question of where moral action or influence should be targeted. At one end of the continuum, the moral project seeks the maximization of individual utility, while at the other, the maximization of the (collective) public good. Figure 3.1 provides a graphic representation of this idea. Note that at one end of the moral project continuum religious groups focus primarily on the individual . Groups located near this pole of the dimension hold much in common with the libertarian notion in U.S. political culture that champions the maximization of individual utility as the primary moral project. Libertarianism applies individualism to questions of economic and political relationships, valuing a free market where free individuals act in their own rational self-interest in the competition for valued goods and resources. Networks formed by the individual pursuit of self-interest in a free market are the bases of the social bond. The religious counterpart to libertarianism holds that the primary moral project is the individual’s salvation and moral improvement. The...