Immigrants, Religion and Conflict - the U.S. Experience

This is Part 1-A to Friday's post on violence against women in Sweden. Before we look closely at what is (and isn't) being done in response to the sharp rise in violence within Swedish immigrant communities, it's worth considering what our experience has been in the U.S.

I'd like to springboard this post off of a longish quote from a recent paper written by Charles Hirschman of the Univ. of Washington entitled The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptation of Immigrant Groups:

The wave of post 1965 immigration has brought a new religious diversity to the United States. Over the last few decades, Islamic mosques and Buddhist and Hindu temples have appeared in most major cities and in quite a few smaller cities and towns. New places of worship have been constructed, but many new churches or temples begin in storefronts, the “borrowed” quarters of other churches, or simply in the homes of members. New immigrants are also bringing new forms of Christianity and Judaism that have shaped the content and the language of services in many existing churches and synagogues.

For example, there were more than 800 Chinese Protestant churches in the United States in 2000, and by the late 1980s, there were 250 Korean ethnic churches in the New York City metropolitan area alone Although these new forms of religious practice may appear to be “foreign,” they represent the characteristic path of adaptation of newcomers to American society. Just as many immigrants come to learn that they are ethnics in the United States, immigrants also become American by joining a church or temple and participating in its religious and community life ...

Religious faith and religious organizations remain vital to many, if not most, persons in the modern world. It is only through religion, or other spiritual beliefs, that many people are able to find solace for the inevitable human experiences of death, suffering, and loss. With the expansion of knowledge and the heightened sense of control that accompany modernity, the inexplicability of death may be even more poignant than in traditional societies where death is an everyday experience.

Churches, and other religious organizations, also play an important role in the creation of community and as a major source of social and economic assistance for those in need ... The idea of community—of shared values and enduring association—are often sufficient to motivate persons to trust and help one another even in the absence of long personal relationships. Immigrants, as with the native born, have spiritual needs, which are most meaningful when packaged in a familiar linguistic and cultural context. In particular, immigrants are drawn to the fellowship of ethnic churches and temples, where primary relationships among congregants are reinforced with traditional foods and traditions.

Immigrants also have many economic and social needs, and American churches, temples, and synagogues have a long tradition of community service, particularly directed at those most in need of assistance. The combination of culturally attuned spiritual comfort and material assistance heightens the attractions of membership and participation in churches for new immigrants to the United States. Although religious faith provides continuity with experiences prior to immigration, the commitment, observance, and participation are generally higher in the American setting after immigration than in the origin country. This pattern was characteristic of immigrants from Europe in the early twentieth century and appears to be the same for contemporary immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

Off to a Rocky (and Unchurched) Start

Things didn't always work this way. As Hirschman points out,

According to the often-retold stories of America’s founding, the early colonists were fleeing religious intolerance in the Old World and they wanted freedom to express their deeply felt religious beliefs. Their own experience with religious persecution was thought to have created a social and cultural environment in which freedom of religion would eventually flourish. The reality, however, was that colonial America was not particularly religious and quite intolerant. The creation of an American society that was highly religious—in terms of the proportion of adherents and high levels of participation—and pluralist happened slowly over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ... less than one in five persons—only 17 percent—in colonial America on the eve of the revolution were members of a church.

Those are the statistics I learned 20 years ago as well. And it remained that way through the 1790s. So how did we get to where we are today? Not automatically ....

Well into the eighteenth century, colonial America remained frontier society, which was shaped by the character of migrants who left settled lands to find their fortune and adventure in the New World. With a surplus of men relative to women and a youthful age structure, frontiers are places where many people are not attracted to traditional conventions, including religion. The United States, at the time of its founding, was a rather “unchurched” society.

Many of the most religious groups in colonial society were among the most intolerant. In the mid 1600s, Puritans in Massachusetts hanged two Quakers who refused to quit their province. Although Catholics made up less than one percent of the population, most of whom lived in Maryland, Catholics were forbidden to practice their faith in every colony except Rhode Island and Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century. Massachusetts threatened to execute priests who were caught in the colony twice, and Virginia banned Catholics from public office. The small number of Jews in colonial America, perhaps only 1,000, made them less of an object of fear and hatred than Catholics, but derogatory comments about Jews were commonly expressed by most leaders of colonial society. The degree of religious intolerance in colonial society was only exceeded by the prejudicial attitudes towards the one in five Americans who were of African ancestry and the American Indian population whose lands were coveted by Colonial setters who considered “Indian wars” as part of the national tradition.

Sometimes I think it is a God-given miracle that the U.S. coalesced into a single country. The colonies each had differences they jealously guarded, including religion. Here is where the Constitution becomes so very important for us.

Freedom of religion (or of no religion) as mandated by the First Amendment does not appear to be a sign of tolerance among religious people, but perhaps the compromise that emerged from the rivalries among the many Protestant denominations and the majority of colonialists who were not adherents of any religion.

If Americans did not begin as an especially religious people, they seem to have become so over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tolerance of different religious traditions was much slower to develop. The American religious tradition has been “created” with the proportion of the population who were affiliated with a church rising slowly over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reach its current level of about 60 percent (of the total population) adherents (affiliated with a church or a formal religious body) by the middle of the twentieth century.

The increase in American religiosity over the past two centuries appears to be due to two primary sources. The first was the competition for church membership created by the “upstart sects,” most notably Baptists and Methodists, on the American frontier. Finke and Stark argue, convincingly in my opinion, that competition among churches for support and members increased the fraction of the total population that were churchgoers. The other major factor was the ability of the American Catholic Church, especially after 1850, to retain a high degree of religious identification and practice among the descendants of immigrants from Catholic nations and regions in Europe.

In the interest of time and space here, I'll skip over the frontier revivals, the growth of utopian sects, Mormonism and other 19th century religious phenomena in the U.S. to look at the role of religion in two massive waves of immigration: the Irish in the 19th century and Eastern Europeans in the 20th.

"No Irish Need Apply"

Immigrants from Ireland were present in small numbers in the U.S. from early in the country's history. The rate of Irish immigration began increasing in the 1820s and shot up sharply around the time of the 1846 Great Famine.

During the 19th century England grew powerful and wealthy as a result of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1820s many poor Irish migrated to Britain for seasonal work; by the late 1830s they had begun to settle in the northern industrial towns. There are many opinions as to why Ireland did not successfully industrialize in parallel with Britain, and many factors were probably at work: the degree to which land was in the hands of English owners, exacerbated by the immigration of Scots to northern Ireland in the first half of the 18th century; lack of natural resources and perhaps aspects of the Irish culture. Whatever the reasons might be, both British and Continental authors uniformly described the Irish as crude, dirty, slothful, given to drunkenness and violent.

By the mid 1840s Britain began restricting both immigration from Ireland and Irish-made goods. Irish in Britain were blamed for driving down wages in the agricultural sector; for decades most were concentrated to unskilled or low-skilled jobs. Meanwhile, in Ireland itself as the soil began to be overworked and the potato crops subject to disease, landowners began forcibly destroying tenant homes and forcing the peasantry off their property in favor of sheep and other livestock.

Thus, Irish immigration to the U.S. did not occur in a vacuum. From the early days, there were those (in places like Boston) who viewed the Irish as slothful, violent, naturally stupid, culturally and religiously barbaric and a danger to society if too many were to gather in one place. As in Britain, Irish immigrants either lacked skills for better jobs or were openly discriminated against. "No Irish Need Apply" signs were plentiful in many places of employment along the eastern seaboard, especially in New England.

Just north of my hometown area, in the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, Irish coal miners organized the secretive Molly McGuire gang. The Molly McGuires, modeled on an infamous Irish vigilante group from the past, used sabotage, beatings, threats and in a few cases explosives to fight against mine owners and employment practices in the 1850s and 1860s. They were linked to, but not synonymous with, the secretive fraternal group the Ancient Order of Hibernians. As few non-Irish spoke their Gaelic language or knew Irish customs well, penetration of the McGuires by law enforcement or private security forces was difficult.

The miners had multiple motives for their violence, including a resentment of the military draft that supported the Union Army in the Civil War. Mostly Democrats, they resented their Republican employers, resented that wealthy men could buy their way out of serving and resented being asked to risk their lives for Blacks, whom they considered inferior. Draft riots broke out in several states and in New York included at least one lynching of African Americans.

Perhaps it was the tension over the war and the draft, perhaps it was the stress the miners were facing as they struggled to keep up with the increased production demands created by the war, or perhaps it was the white hot rage of men who were being used as fodder for the great industrial machine, but the years during and immediately after the Civil War were particularly bloody. Between 1863 and 1867, there were 57 murders in Schuylkill County alone.

In eighteen hundred and forty one
I put me corduroy breeches on,
I put me corduroy breeches on to work upon the railway.
Billy me ooriooriay, Billy me ooriooriay, Billy me ooriooriay to work upon the railway.

In eighteen hundred and forty two
I left the Old World for the New,
Bad cess to all it put me through,
a workin' on the railway.

The prairies, the mountains and the Gold Rush towns in California and Alaska - all offered breathing room, a chance to work hard and build a new life. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed those with a modest amount of money to become landowners. Many laborers who had lived prudently and saved their wages and later many veterans of the Civil War took advantage of this opportunity:

The Homestead Act of 1862 has been called one the most important pieces of Legislation in the history of the United States. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln after the secession of southern states, this Act turned over vast amounts of the public domain to private citizens. 270 millions acres, or 10% of the area of the United States was claimed and settled under this act.

A homesteader had only to be the head of a household and at least 21 years of age to claim a 160 acre parcel of land. Settlers from all walks of life including newly arrived immigrants, farmers without land of their own from the East, single women and former slaves came to meet the challenge of "proving up" and keeping this "free land". Each homesteader had to live on the land, build a home, make improvements and farm for 5 years before they were eligible to "prove up". A total filing fee of $18 was the only money required, but sacrifice and hard work exacted a different price from the hopeful settlers...

The Homestead Act remained in effect until it was repealed in 1976, with provisions for homesteading in Alaska until 1986. Alaska was one of the last places in the country where homesteading remained a viable option into the latter part of the 1900s. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 substantially decreased the amount of land available to homesteaders in the West. Because much of the prime land had been homesteaded decades earlier, successful Homestead claims dropped sharply after this time.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is recognized as one of the most revolutionary concepts for distributing public land in American history. Repercussions of this monumental piece of legislation can be detected throughout America today, decades after the cry of "Free Land!" has faded away.

By the early 1870s violence in the coal mining areas of Pennsylvania was over.

Not all of the Irish immigrants went west. Many settled in the newly industrializing towns in the East and MidWest. There, the Roman Catholic church became the second important factor in the integration of the Irish into American life. As Hirschman notes, the Church played an increasing role in the lives of Irish and other Catholics as they moved out of tenant slums and coal mines. The growth in influence of the Catholic Church in the U.S. was not a smooth process, however, nor one that was obviously going to be successful:

The question of how religious the new immigrants were depends, in part, on the definition of religiosity. In the American context, religious practice usually means attending weekly services on a regular basis. In most rural areas of Europe, as well as in Asia and Latin America, religion and folk beliefs were intertwined into a way of life. Spirits of nature and the souls of the departed were nearby, and the daily life of villagers included many rituals to bring good fortune, to cure illness, and to avoid dangers. Many of these ideas were intertwined with formal religious beliefs in ways that religious purists criticized.

For example, Polish immigrants are described as having a Polish version of Catholicism that was infused with animism and magical beliefs. The characterization of Italians was that their Catholicism was “a folk religion, a fusion of Christian and pre Christian elements, of animism, polytheism, and sorcery in the sacraments of the Church”. The Italian religious tradition of the festa, when the statue of a saint was paraded throughout the local community with the community following in a procession, was considered to be a pagan ritual by the established Catholic Church. Similar descriptions have been made about the religious beliefs and traditions of nominally Catholic immigrants from the Philippines and Mexico.

In spite of these tensions in the first generation, the children of nominally Catholic immigrants often became practicing Catholics. Russo reports that, over generations, Italian Americans were gradually acculturated and assimilated into the American Catholic Church. The first generation – labeled the “Italian problem” by the Church—was anti-clerical and encountered an Irish dominated Church that was conservative, preoccupied with fund raising, and unsympathetic and often hostile to poor Italians.

As the second and third generation left the cities for suburbs, they often joined mainstream Catholic Churches ... Attendance at weekly Mass was a characteristic practice of upwards of 90 percent of the Irish in Ireland and in the United States population circa 1900. The Irish have become virtually synonymous with the American Catholic Church, both in terms of their dominance of the clergy and hierarchy, but also in defining the culture of the Church.

This is not just an American phenomenon. Irish priests and nuns have played a significant role in the development of the Catholic Church throughout the English-speaking world: Not only did Roman Catholic Churches in England and Scotland become essentially Irish, but the Churches in the United States, English speaking Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were all strongly influenced by the developing values and mores of Irish Roman Catholicism. There are frequent observations about the negative reaction of many Catholic immigrant groups to the Irish dominated American Catholic Church, which created a very formal set of obligations and was not particularly receptive to the folk versions of Catholicism from other lands.

Nonetheless, the American Catholic Church gained ground in the competitive American religious market, and eventually captured the children of most Catholic immigrants, even if the first generation rejected the Irish model of the American Church. By the middle of the twentieth century, about one-third of all Americans identified as Catholics.

As Joseph Ferrie of Northwestern University notes, Irish immigrants differed greatly in the skills they brought with them and the success they carved out for themselves in the New World - a reminder that education and culture play a role in the fortunes of immigrants. But as the example of the U.S. shows, so too does public policy and the leadership of religious and civic organizations. These were not fixed, but evolved over time in response to successive waves of immigration and to the opportunities offered by their new country - a country which, in turn, they shaped in succeeding decades.

Ellis Island and the Great Immigration Wave of the Early 20th Century

In 1892, the Ellis Island facility opened in New York harbor. Over 12 million immigrants, mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, poured through its gates over the next 30 years. Predominantly Catholic and Eastern Orthodox by religion, sometimes having no or very little English and often coming from rural villages, these immigrants strained the fabric of the country. The resulting backlash led to the highly restrictive anti-immigration legislation of 1924.

In addition, after a Polish anarchist assasinated President McKinley in 1901, Congress forbade immigration to members of certain political groups deemed violent or a threat to civil order - a move that in retrospect seems prudent, given that the assasination of Archduke Frances Ferdinand by a Serbian anarchist with ties to an international terror network was the trigger for World War I.

Once again, a massive wave of immigrants threatened the identity of the existing society. The new immigrants were strange and threatening, with their alien food, dress, languages, habits and unfamiliarity with the customs that had evolved here over more than 250 years. Nativist political parties emerged, demanding that borders be closed to these sub-human, dangerous people who (in many cases) came from countries where anarchists were assasinating royalty and violent revolution threatened. Overtly violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan gained support in some parts of the country.

My grandfather (father's father) was the son of a Ukrainian landowner whose ethnic roots go back to the horsemen of the steppes. The family held their estates in exchange for raising and training cavalry horses and for organizing border patrols along the vast south-west portion of the Russian empire. Just before the Revolution broke out in Russia, my great-grandfather brought his headstrong 17 year old son, his oldest child, to live with a relative in the mid-Atlantic area of the United States. He returned to take up his military duties and they never met again. Some of my grandfather's siblings escaped during or just after the Revolution and made their way to Canada; others died defending their home or fighting against the Germans in the World War that crashed eastward a few years later.

My grandmother (father's mother) was the daughter of a Khulak family in western Ukraine. Although they had worked hard and gained some financial stability, under Russian law and that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that controlled lands around Lvov at the time, they could not own their property or pass it on to their children. My great-grandfather came to the U.S. and worked for 6 years hoping to raise the funds to bring his entire family here. When the Revolution threatened, he returned and used his savings to send his two oldest children here to live with a distant cousin. Sophie, age 17, and her 15 year old brother arrived at Ellis Island with few English skills. They expected to walk to Connecticut that day, since they'd been told it was right next to New York. Eventually, Sophie proudly watched her brother graduate from high school after she picked fruit to raise the money for his books and clothes. Then she married Phillip - a mixing of classes that could never have happened in the old country.

Those of Sophie's family who did not die during Stalin's enforced starvation and collectivization of the farms in the 1930s died in WWII, with the exception of one brother whose letters came with most of the text cut out by Soviet censors.

The period after WWI was a turbulent one. In 1919, a workers' strike was observed by nearly 1/5 of all laborers in the U.S. There was anarchist violence in several parts of the country, tied (probably correctly) to immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Slavs found themselves turned away from employment offices, not only during the Depression of the 1930s but even during WWII when labor was desperately needed.

Nevertheless, Sophie and Phillip's 10 children attended public schools, served in the military and joined the middle class. During the late 1930s my father lived with another family and worked on their farm in exchange for room, board and clothes to wear to school. By the 1950s, the post war economic and technical boom allowed him to buy a modest home. Three of his four children hold bachelor's degrees; one holds multiple graduate degrees.

The small town I grew up in had churches from 12 different denominations, ranging from mainstream Protestant to a small Assembly of God congregation. On a two block stretch of side street, our 5000 souls supported a Roman Catholic church, an Eastern Orthodox church and a Byzantine Rite Catholic congregation as well. Our Slavic, Orthodox family lived in an otherwise all-Austrian Catholic neighborhood. A friend of mine down the street lived with grandparents from Japan (her grandfather fought in the War against the U.S.) and a father who is half German and half Italian by ancestry.

Something worked right. Despite all the difficulties and rough spots, the massive waves of immigration that threatened to tear apart the country eventually were absorbed and enriched it instead.

Lessons Learned - What Worked Here and Why

This pluralistic society that is deeply religiously observant and ethnically diverse did not occur easily or all at once. Several factors played a key role.

First, opportunity. Immigrants often found themselves in low-paying jobs, crammed into slums, discriminated against. But again and again, in different ways, opportunities arose that opened the door to a better life here. Homesteading the prairies, building the railroads, working in mines and steel mills, the ease of starting small businesses, the G.I. bill that sent thousands of WWII veterans to college -- each of these meant that immigrants were never totally shut out. Nor, given the relative size of the country and its population, could any one ethnic or religious group dominate as a large minority - at least, not for long.

Second, the adaptability of religious and social organizations. By the time of the Eastern and Southern European wave, precedents were in place for the creation of local ethnic clubs and social networks. Along with the impressive and unprecedented evolution of the American Catholic Church, these helped to support immigrants by offering ties to their cultures of origin in a new land. Moreover, as Hirschman documents, immigrants to the U.S. become more religiously observant here than their parents were in the countries of origin. And yet, that increased religious identity has, by and large, not led to fracturing and conflict.

The very first clause of the Bill of Rights. Congress shall not do so - but for decades, States could and a few did. Free of either the restrictions of an Established single religious authority or of a stifling political establishment hostile to religion, Americans have evolved a rich and deep religious (and irreligious!) plurality that continues to adapt and change. As Hirschman notes, the latest wave of immigrants - many from the Pacific Rim, Asia, Latin America and the Indian subcontinent - are adapting and contributing their religious life here while also enjoying aspects of their homeland cultures.

I am not unaware of the challenges we face regarding immigration and assimilation, especially since 9/11. It is an open question whether, to what degree and how some of our immigrants will come to identify with America. But we've been through some tough patches before. I'm optimistic that we can get through this one as well.

Whether the American experience can be adapted and adopted in places like Sweden is a different matter and one that I'm less clear on. In Part 2 of my post, I'll take a look at the response of the Swedish authorities and some feminist groups to the challenge of violence in immigrant communities there.

Full Series

Swedish Rape Stats: Where's The Outrage?

1. Sweden, Rape & Responsible Speech
2. Immigrants, Religion and Conflict - the U.S. Experience
3. Honor-Related Violence: The Feminist Response