Ecologies of Faith in New York City: The Evolution of Religious Institutions

4. Diversity and Competition: Politics and Conflict in New Immigrant Communities

105 4 Diversity and Competition: Politics and Conflict in New Immigrant Communities Weishan Huang 3 Falun Gong (FLG) stepped onto the world stage with its sit-in demonstration in Beijing on April 25, 1999–with more than 10,000 participants, the largest public protest in China since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. Since then, New York City has become the center of the group’s resistance efforts. Established by its charismatic leader, Master Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong is an interesting case study of a modern Buddhist-Taoist–qi-gong faith group with a highly mobilized group of followers. This chapter seeks, first, to understand the changing ecology of Chinese immigrant communities in New York and to discuss the gentrification of Flushing, which is triggered by transnational capital. Second, the chapter introduces the practices of Falun Gong and focuses on the strategic campaigns of the movement in New York, particularly its parades in immigrant communities . The research has discovered that, to understand the politics of diversity within ethnic Chinese politics, we have to locate the immigrant community in a global milieu. The conflict between Falun Gong and China’s government has been translated onto the streets of New York City, a development that reveals the politics of immigrant communities as a reflection of domestic politics in their home countries. Working within the framework of religious ecology, I examine Falun Gong in New York as a network “unit” that interacts with other units in society : people, organizations, and cultures. The group’s practices in public parks Weishan Huang 106 and community parades are examined in terms of the purposes of “evangelical ” mission and community building in this noninstitutionalized but highly mobilized faith group. a MuLtiLayered reLiGious ecoLoGy As conceived by Nancy L. Eiesland, Nancy Ammerman, and R. Stephen Warner, the ecological frame recognizes that a congregation is one among many, each having its own functions, membership, vision, and influence. Eiesland and Warner (1998) introduced the concept of the open-ended character of the congregation’s environment: its extension from the local neighborhood to the global community, and from the immediate present to the past and future. A congregation is linked to networks and events across geographic and temporal space. Not only are communities discrete localities with stable boundaries and fixed constituencies, but they are also characterized by shared conversations, common practices, and structures that promote cooperation and exchange. These conversations, practices, and structures often connect communities and congregations in what some have called the “global village” (Eiesland and Warner 1998, 40–41). Eiesland and Warner also offer the concept of a “multi-layered religious ecology”: To speak of several layers refers to the fact that the interconnection between a congregation, or any institution, and its environment occurs at different levels. We will use a three-layer conceptualization from the discipline of sociology to speak of the social fabric of any community as a complex web of people, meanings, and relationships, alterations in any one of which can result in social ramifications elsewhere. The first layer is demography, or the characteristics of the people in the community, described in terms of numbers, age, and sex distribution; ethnic and racial profile; and changes in these data over time. The second layer is culture, or the systems of meaning , values, and practices shared by members of the community and groups within the community. The third layer is organization, or the systems of roles and relationships that structure the interaction of people in the community. (1998, 41–42) Eiesland and Warner thus recognize the variety of religious voices just as the ecological perspective on the natural world leads us to see ourselves as one of several billion individuals within a species that is itself one among millions (1998, 40–41). What does it mean to say a congregation exists in relation to an environment? The religious ecological perspective identifies a Diversity and Competition 107 congregation with a wide-scope view, made up of layers and elements both relatively invisible and visible. Although the group I studied for this chapter is not a conventional “congregational” organization, the theory of ecology is still valuable in terms of examining the relations between the group and the community and the interactions between in-group and out-group relationships in that community. As may be seen with the parades I describe in the second part of this chapter, the defined cultural or changing values shared by members of...