God Needs No Passport:How Migrants Are Changing the

Religious Landscape

Peggy LevittWellesley College and

Harvard University

RETHINKING OLD ASSUMPTIONS

• Migrants don’t trade in one membership card for another.

• The sources of religious diversity are inside and outside our borders.

• The nation-state is not the automatic, logical container where social life takes place.

METHODOLOGY

• Four immigrant communities – Pakistani Muslims, Gujarati Hindus, Irish Catholics, and Brazilian Protestants.

• Immigrant interviews first conducted in Boston and then with family members in the home country. More than 200 interviews in the U.S. and at least fifty in each sending country were carried out.

• Interviews with religious and political leaders with participant observation in both settings.

• Team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers and colleagues in each country.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE NATION-STATE CONTAINER

• Many things, such as capitalism, social movements, illegal pirating networks, and religion have always been transnational.

• The contemporary nation-state system is relatively new.

• Taking the nation-state container as given blinds us to many social processes.

• Trading in our national lens for a transnational lens.

WHY TRANSNATIONAL?”

• “Global” scholarship treats all kinds of phenomena as if they were the same when, in fact, they differ in strength, scale, and scope.

• “Local” scholarship gives short shrift to larger social processes.

• Transnational scholarship tries to hold these layers in conversation with each other.

USING A TRANSNATIONAL LENS TO UNDERSTAND MIGRATION

• Migration is about people who stay behind and people who move.

• The “landscapes” migrants inhabit are multi-sited and multi-layered.

• Incorporation and transnational ties are not incompatible. Simultaneity rather than assimilation vs. transnationalism is the norm.

REMAPPING THE RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

• The United States is numerically overwhelmingly Christian, but the cultural impact of non-Judeo-Christian faiths is great.

• Newcomers are introducing new faiths and “Latinoizing” and “Asianizing” old ones.

• The globalization of the sacred occurs on many fronts.

• Migrants bring different ideas about religion and where to find it:

a. Religion and culture are one and the same. Religious acts are cultural acts.

b. Religion doesn’t always take place inside institutional walls.

c. The boundaries between faith traditions are permeable. Syncretism is the norm.

d. Religion is great at crossing spatial and temporal boundaries.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THINKING ABOUT POLICY

1. Rethinking space

2. Redefining outcomes

3. Getting the institutions right

1. Extending sovereignty

2. Fostering partnership

3. Taking advantage the skills of of non-residents

4. Professional associations

5. Education programs

6. Hometown and religious organizations

• The target population

• Development, but at whose expense?

• The second generation

IS THIS A BLESSING OR A THREAT?

• Transnational migration and religion, while on the margins, are important harbingers of the future.

• Transnational migrants bridge cultures rather than precipitate clashes between them.

• Transnational problems need transnational solutions

• True religious pluralism means letting go of Protestant privilege and recognizing that religion is not just about “Bibles, Buildings, and Boys.”