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

In their book, Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America's Newest Immigrants, Fred Kniss and Paul D. Numrich present a new study of immigrant religious congregations that is admirable both for its breadth and for its conceptual innovations. Kniss and Numrich report ethnographic and interview data from 16 immigrant congregations in the Chicago metropolitan area that include Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist congregations. Rather than focusing only on how religion informs the ethnic or social identity of immigrants, they keep their analytical gaze fixed on what they term "core religious ideas, practices, and identities"(5), all the while seeking to address questions central to sociology of immigration, such as citizenship, civic engagement, language, marriage and education. In other words, Kniss and Numrich not only describe immigrants' religious practices but conceive of those practices as an independent variable in understanding various facets of immigrant assimilation.Another strength of the book are the excellent photographs by the renowned photographer of religion Jerry Berndt, which bring to life many of this book's field sites and remind scholars of religion how important visual tools can be to presenting our cases and concepts.

In order to accomplish their goals, Kniss and Numrich organize the book in three sections: what I call theoretical (what they term "why religion matters"), locational (what they term "sacred assemblies in social contexts") and finally a third section that attempts to synthesize the previous sections around the topic of civic engagement. Organizing the book in this manner allows them to present an impressive amount of data in a theoretically coherent manner.

In the theoretical section, Kniss and Numrich argue that the diverse religions they studied can be understood and analyzed together using the concepts of sectarianism, moral authority and moral projects. Sectariariasm refers to the level of tension between the newcomers and the host society. Not surprisingly perhaps, they find that Muslims have the most tension with the host society, and thus their congregations' actions and activities have most tension with the world around them, yet these congregations still build bridges to the host society in many ways, such as through education.

Next, they analyze how different religious traditions conceive of moral authority on a continuum from individual to collective. Although others have shown before that Evangelical Christians or Orthodox Christians place great emphasis on collective moral authority whereas liberal Protestants and Buddhists generally do not, Kniss and Numrich innovatively show how these different types of moral authority lead congregations to engage the civic realm in unique ways.

The third concept, moral projects, is closely related to moral authority, and congregations can either engage in mostly collectivist or mostly individual moral projects. Interestingly, we learn that although Evangelical Protestants, for example, primarily conceive of moral authority in collectivist ways, their moral projects are primarily individualistic. The converse is true for liberal Protestants, for whom moral authority is individual but their moral projects tend to be collective. Why this is so is not explained satisfactorily, but nonetheless this section of the book would make a great topic of discussion for both undergraduate and graduate sociology of religion classes.

Readers will undoubtedly dwell on many interesting analytical statements that the authors simply did not have space to fully explain, quite likely because of the breadth of their project. For example, Kniss and Numrich provocatively state that we need to abandon the idea that only collectivist moral projects lead to social change, arguing that "we should not ignore the pervasive social influence of individual decisions and actions, like those of religious people guided by their moral traditions. [Thus] even individualistic moral projects can have significant social and civic consequences."(94) Why this is the case certainly merits more discussion in this book as well as amongst sociologists of religion.

Kniss and Numrich succeed at both presenting a large amount of new information, especially...