Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora (review)

Faith Makes Us Live is the result of a carefully designed and exhaustively executed internationally comparative ethnography of the everyday lives, struggles and religious beliefs of Haitian immigrants. Wanting to understand the ways that the Roman Catholic Church is helped or hindered by its relationship with the state in its attempts to minister to Haitians, author Margarita Mooney learned Creole and French and then spent four to six months in Miami, Montreal and Paris attending religious services, singing in the parish choir, interviewing and participating in the daily routines of immigrants and community and Church leaders in each location.

Mooney found that the Church and state collaborate in Miami to create a vigorous ministry that provides a host of essential social and spiritual services to Haitians. In comparison, the Church and state conflict in Montreal and Paris in ways that continually stymie the Church's efforts in both places.

As a result of its comparative design, Faith Makes Us Live provides a number of contributions. First, as a study of the resources and struggles of the dually disadvantaged Haitians, who must deal with the stigma of African descent and having among the lowest education attainment and occupational skills of most immigrants today, the book provides an original and compelling account of an often over-looked group. Furthermore, the book contributes to scholarship on immigration more generally by emphasizing the advantages provided by a cooperative relationship between religions institutions and the state and by underlining religion's importance, not just in terms of material resources, but also in terms of emotional and spiritual support, for immigrants.

Overall, Faith Makes Us Live is impressive in both its breadth and depth. Mooney succeeds at painting rich and compelling pictures of Haitians in each location while never losing sight of the ways in which they are differently enabled or constrained by the broader social and political environments in which they are embedded.

However, as with any book that is really path breaking, it leaves the reader with many questions, most of which have to do with Mooney's conclusion that Haitian immigrants in Montreal and Paris would be much better off if the Quebecois and French governments provided more support for the Church.

The first factor that raises questions is that while the United States clearly has the friendliest Church-state relationship of the three countries, it is also without a doubt the most religious. Whereas immigrants tend to become more religious upon arriving in the United States, Mooney's data suggests that this is not the case for the Haitians who arrive in France.(190-92) While this finding is a contribution in and of itself, if immigrants in Paris and Montreal are falling away from the Church after immigration, would giving money to the churches there be as effective as it is in Miami?

The second question raised by the book has to do with the fact that in Miami the Church benefitted from its decision to build an ethnically-based Haitian parish within a Haitian ethnic enclave. While both of these are absent in Montreal and Paris, isn't the creation of an ethnic parish well within the capabilities of the Church in both countries, even if that parish would lack a nearby ethnic enclave (given the public housing policies that intentionally discourage their formation in both Montreal and Paris)?

Because I think the answer to this question is yes, part of the story about why the RCC is less capable of helping Haitians in Montreal and Paris is about the ways in which the hierarchy has been affected by the much less friendly political and cultural environments in each city (of which those Church-state relationships are both cause and effect). While Mooney alludes to this a number of times, this argument often gets lost in her focus on the state.

Finally, additional questions are raised by the way in which...