African Immigrant Religions in America

6: Gender, Identity, and Power in African Immigrant Evangelical Churches

6 Gender, Identity, and Power in African Immigrant Evangelical Churches Regina Gemignani Introduction This chapter explores the relationships among religion, gender, and ethnicity in the African immigrant churches. It aims to understand the complex negotiation of gender as women and men newly arrived to the United States adjust to transformational changes in education, work opportunities , and marriage and family structures. Feminist theorists have pointed out the “hierarchies of difference” embedded in ethnic, national, and religious ideologies and the way in which identity discourses both unite and exclude.1 In relation to Diaspora studies, Anthias suggests that while the concept of Diaspora focuses attention on transnational and dynamic processes that “recognize difference and diversity,” there is still a tendency to undertheorize the ways in which “boundaries of exclusion” reproduce class and gender hierarchies.2 This chapter addresses both accommodation and resistance to gender hierarchies in African immigrant churches in the United States. Very few studies of immigrant religious communities examine women’s agency in shaping gender relations at the level of household and community. Much of the existing research on gender in these communities simplifies the relationship between ethnic and gender ideologies and neglects women’s agency in challenging gender hierarchies. (Notable exceptions discussed in this chapter include studies by Kim and by Rayaprol.)3 For example, Ebaugh and Chafetz describe ethnicity in immigrant religious communities in static and bounded terms, as “native culture” or “‘old country’ cultural traditions” that are carried along into the U.S. context, largely serving to reproduce patriarchal cultural forms.4 Even in the broader liter133 ature on gender and immigration, there is a tendency to view immigrant women as victims, or conscious supporters, of patriarchal ethnic structures . Pessar states that most immigrant women “have only nibbled at the margins of patriarchy” and that they rarely challenge patriarchal domestic ideologies and practices, instead choosing to “defend and hold together their families” in the face of disruptive Western influences.5 This chapter suggests an alternative view, in which women are not in an either/or position with respect to their ethnoreligious identity and their struggle against patriarchy. Instead, it investigates the polyvalence of ideals such as family, domesticity, and the ideal of women’s submission itself and shows how women are able to negotiate these meanings as they simultaneously challenge gender hierarchies and construct religious community. This study explores shifts in the gender division of labor in the African immigrant household and the role of the pentecostal churches in shaping responses to these changes. In African Christian as well as Muslim communities , there is a great deal of flux, ambiguity, and conflict around gender issues, as members adjust to the freedoms and opportunities and, from another perspective, the anomie, individualism, and moral latitude of American life. This is true for both the Christian and the Muslim communities . The focus of this research is on the pentecostal churches, where a significant number of women are finding employment in the skilled professions and where there is a pronounced attempt on the part of these women to reconcile conservative gender values with transformations in their income, autonomy, and status. Methodology This analysis is based on research conducted between February 2004 and June 2005 as part of the African Immigrant Religious Communities Project at U.C. Davis. This research focused on the rapidly expanding Africanled pentecostal communities in Northern California, including Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of my efforts to research the growing phenomenon of African immigrant churches, as well as engage in a more specific analysis of gender relations within these institutions, I conducted twenty-four openended , in-depth interviews with seventeen men and seven women. These interviews were conducted in seventeen Christian churches, of which sixteen are pentecostal/charismatic churches (one church is a Lutheran 134 r e g i n a g e m i g n a n i immigrant mission). Pentecostal churches represent the majority of African-led Christian churches, making up more than 70 percent of the institutions (others include mainline and African Initiated Churches). Of the individuals who were selected for interviews, eighteen were pastors in their community, and the rest held other formal leadership positions within their church. Interviews were conducted in two phases. The first phase (sixteen interviews) involved in-depth questions about a broad range of topics—the history and mission of the church, the relevance in...