Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City: Religion, Immigration, and Civic Engagement in Miami

1. Religion, Immigration, and Civic Engagement

1 1 Religion, Immigration, and Civic Engagement ALEX STEPICK, TERRY REY, AND SARAH J. MAHLER On a typical Sunday in Miami, a Haitian pastor from Port-au-Prince lays hands on the afflicted in a storefront Pentecostal church in Little Haiti, while a few miles west a Catholic priest from Nicaragua says Mass in Spanish to his diverse Latino flock. A few blocks further west, a group of elderly Cuban Catholics plans a fund-raising event for the Diocese of Guantánamo-Baracoa in eastern Cuba. Meanwhile, in Miami’s southern suburbs, another Catholic church is receiving the bishop of Trinidad, and further south still, Mexican fieldworkers busily prepare for the feast of their patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Nearby, tucked away in a large church on a side street, African American Protestants, most of Bahamian descent, respond enthusiastically to their pastor’s sermon on the importance of preserving God’s land, the good earth that the Lord bequeathed to them. Miami’s diverse religious landscape stretches not only across Miami-Dade County, but throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Indeed, many of these religious activities may appear to be more foreign than “American,” not of the United States. Are they? Do they focus exclusively or even primarily on immigrants’ home countries and perhaps isolate the immigrants from U.S. society ? Do they impede rather than assist in immigrant integration into Miami and the United States? Are the immigrant churches somehow fundamentally different from American houses of worship? Based upon ethnographies of immigrant and African American congregations in Miami, complemented by a survey of local youth, this book addresses these questions. Each ethnographic chapter provides in-depth detail of the congregation ’s activities, both those that are focused inwardly and those that reach out to the broader civil society. The survey provides a broader examination of the relationship between religion and civic engagement among Miami youth. This first chapter reviews previous work on immigrant religion and civic 2 A. STEPICK, T. REY, AND S. J. MAHLER engagement and provides the theoretical framework for the subsequent ethnographic chapters and the discussion of the survey results. With more than  million foreign-born people, the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century is home to more immigrants than ever in its history . The vast majority of these immigrants are racial or ethnic minorities in their new country; i.e., Latinos, Asians, and Blacks. They contribute to the nation’s increasing cultural diversity and to the concomitant decline in the majority status of non-Hispanic Whites. Indeed, in many larger cities, particularly those receiving immigrants, native minorities and immigrants are now a majority of the population, a trend that appears destined to become national. Many, if not most, of these immigrants, and many of the native minorities that they encounter while settling in the United States, are highly religious, making religion an essential issue toward understanding the multifaceted and farreaching influence that recent immigrants are having and will have on American social life. Driven by the abiding faith of both its native born and its immigrant populations , the United States itself is an extraordinarily religious country, with over  percent of its people professing belief in God. In spite of a seemingly apparent trend of secularization in modern Western society, which is assailed by many right-wing Christians, and despite infamous sociological predictions that religion was on the decline in human life (Greeley ), there is strong evidence that faith continues to play a key role in American society. For example, a greater fraction of U.S. adults believed in life after death in the s than in the s (Greeley and Hout ). Nearly two-thirds of Americans identified with a particular church in the early s, and between  and  percent of Americans attend church services during any given week. So, whereas formal church affiliations may be in statistical remission in the United States, religious belief clearly is not. As we detail below, it is safe to add that immigrants will contribute to a strengthening of this trend. Church and Civic Engagement Against this backdrop, it should not be surprising that religion influences the broader civic agenda even at the highest level of American politics. President George W. Bush, who professes to strong evangelical Christian beliefs himself, advocated and implemented policies, generally referred to as the Faith-Based Initiative, to more deeply involve religious institutions in civic society (Milbank ; Pipes and Ebaugh ; Farris, Nathan, and Wright ). More generally, contemporary American politics are...