Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries

10. Religious Diversity and Social Integration among Asian Americans in Houston

10 Religious Diversity and Social Integration among Asian Americans in Houston Stephen L. Klineberg There is a new way of doing religion in Houston.1 The demographic revolution has transformed this Anglo-dominated biracial city into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse metropolitan areas in the country. This diversity is vividly displayed in the Asian American houses of worship from the Houston Chinese Protestant megachurch to a little bit of Saigon at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Drawing on the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken in all four of Houston’s major ethnic communities, this chapter explores the distinctiveness of the Asian experience in urban America. It documents the striking religious, socioeconomic, and political differences among Asian Americans . Religious institutions have a seemingly paradoxical role in facilitating the integration of Asian immigrants into their coethnic communities while also integrating them into the wider Houston and American society. The Houston Context During most of the twentieth century, and particularly in the years after World War II, Houston was America’s quintessential “boomtown.” Hand in hand, up went the petroleum skyscrapers along with the traditional mainline church colonial edifices, the kettledrum Baptist churches, the modernistic synagogues, and old world-styled Catholic churches. While the rest of the country was languishing in the long national recession known as the “stagflating seventies,” this city’s prime industrial products 247 were becoming several times more valuable with no lessening of world demand. The price of a barrel of Texas oil rose from $3.39 in 1971 to $31.77 in 1981. Local bank deposits tripled in value, and Houston led the nation in housing starts and the growth of manufacturing (Feagin 1998). The traditional American religious organizations had overflowing coffers and blueprints for new buildings tacked up in the sanctuaries. Oil and religion business was good. Between 1970 and 1982, almost one million people moved into the greater metropolitan area. They were coming at the rate of some thirteen hundred per week. Few suspected that the end would arrive so abruptly and definitely. The era of “Boomtown Houston” suddenly ended. Global recession was reducing the demand for oil just as new supplies were coming onto world markets, and in May 1982 the oil boom collapsed . Buildings emptied out and religious leaders pulled in their belts to keep their doors open for the stricken. The price of Texas crude fell to less than $28 per barrel at the end of 1983, but Houston had been borrowing in the expectation of $50 oil. By late 1986, with the price of oil falling to less than $12 per barrel, the recession had spread from the energy sector to the entire economy (Smith 1989). One out of every seven jobs that were in Houston in 1982 had disappeared by early 1987, making this the worst regional recession in any part of the country at any time since World War II. The city recovered by the early 1990s, only to find itself in the midst of a restructured economy and a demographic revolution. Houston’s Ethnic Transformations After economic collapse in 1982, the number of Anglos in the county declined . In 1980 the population of Harris County (Houston) was still almost two-thirds Anglo. Only 2 percent were Asian. Yet, as Harris County’s total population expanded, the Asian numbers grew much faster, by 76 percent in the 1990s. By the year 2000, Houston had joined New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago to become one of the nation’s premier “multiethnic melting pots” (Frey, Abresch, and Yeasting 2001). All four of America’s largest cities now have majority minority populations. The 2000 census counted 3.4 million people in Harris County, of whom just 42 percent were European Americans. The county’s population now included 7 percent Asian or other: 174,626 residents of Harris County checked an Asian nationality on the “race” question, and an additional 18,433 checked 248 S t e p h e n L. K l i n e b e r g “Asian” in combination with one or more other races, for a total of 193,059 Asian-origin Harris County residents. A 1990 cover story in Time Magazine (Henry 1990) portrayed Houston as the new America; it is even more true now. “At the Sesame Hut restaurant in Houston,” the author wrote, “a Korean immigrant owner trains Hispanic immigrant workers to prepare Chinese-style food for a largely black...