Congregants and citizens: religious membership and naturalization among U.S. immigrants

Scholars and pundits have long debated whether religion helps new immigrants integrate politically in the United States. Those who see religion as an integrative institution cite the country’s history of vibrant religious congregationalism that supports connections between the native and foreign born, while critics point to anti-immigrant hostility, Christian nationalism, and patterns of religious membership that can reinforce social segregation. This article aims to adjudicate this debate, using a large sample of survey data, the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), fielded among new legal residents in 2003/2004. I find that religious membership is associated with increased probability of naturalizing in a short (3.5–7 years) timeframe and is stronger for those with greater human capital and income and longer tenure in the United States. Involvement in US-origin congregations also exhibits a stronger effect on naturalization than involvement in national-origin congregations. Additionally, I find that religious minorities, though less likely to be members of congregations, are independently more likely than Christian immigrants to naturalize in the same timeframe. These results are interpreted as support for a view of organized religion as a setting for American identity formation and a basis for mobilizing resources in response to anti-immigrant sentiment. For certain groups, organized religion seems to support a type of selective acculturation that combines American citizenship with the establishment and/or retention of a distinct ethno-religious identity. The article thus affirms, with caveats, the broader relevance of a long tradition of ethnographic scholarship on immigrant religion in the United States.Accepted manuscrip

Table of Contents

Table of contents for Explorations in Sights and Sounds, Number 14, Summer, 199

[Review of] Anny Bakalian. Armenian-Americans: From Being to Feeling Armenian

Aside from work on the 1915 genocide of Armenians in Turkey and some work on ancient Armenia, there is precious little published work on the Armenian people. Even the Armenian genocide in which 1.5 million of the 2 million Armenians in Turkey were killed has been largely ignored by the world community and was named by one scholar, the forgotten genocide (Dickran H. Boyajian, Armenia: The Case for a Forgotten Genocide, Westwood, NJ: Educational Book Crafters, 1972). Particularly missing from the scholarship is work about contemporary Armenians in diaspora. Anny Bakalian\u27s book begins to fill that void

Review of Race Scholarship and the War on Terror

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increased scholarship on American Muslims. In the social sciences, this work has focused mainly on Arabs and South Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or South Asians. Rather, the authors highlight a preexisting, racializing war on terror and a more complex history of these groups with race both globally and domestically. Islamophobia is a popular term used to talk about Muslim encounters with discrimination, but the concept lacks a clear understanding of race and structural racism. Newer frameworks have emerged situating Muslim experiences within race scholarship. The authors conclude with a call to scholars to embark on studies that fill major gaps in this emerging field of study—such as intersectional approaches that incorporate gender, communities of belonging, black Muslim experiences, class, and sexuality—and to remain conscious of the global dimensions of this racial project

Sara Rahbar and the Art of Loving Otherwise

Born in Iran and currently working in New York City, Sara Rahbar is a contemporary multimedia artist who gained some acclaim with her Flag series (2006-present), which was inspired by her experiences in the aftermath of 9/11. Many of these works merge Persian fabrics onto the American flag thus expressing her lived history and political views. To shed light on the political nature of Rahbar’s works writ large, I examine a textile from her War series (2009-2013), titled I Want to Shelter You (2013). Against a flat canvas bag, Rahbar attaches large-caliber bullet casings into a heart-shape to point out that war is never about love. Tied to how war proponents used voices of people from the Middle East to promote the War on Terror, it is a commentary on how human rights were used to justify violence. I examine Faith Ringgold’s flag painting, Flag for the Moon (1969), to show how flag imagery has been used previously to protest both war and prejudice. I also connect this painting to the postcolonial phenomenon of the native informant to track a stream of thought that travels from Frantz Fanon through the Black Power movement and continues in postcolonial feminist critiques of the War on Terror. Beyond claiming Rahbar as an American artist, this reading of Rahbar’s work is an intervention in the art world’s unwitting complicity in using Iranian diasporic artists to further Western supremacy

Divided They Conquer: The Success of Armenian Ethnic Lobbies in the United States

The end of the Cold War has sparked considerable academic and policy debates on the direction and aims of US foreign policy. One aspect of that debate has centered on the role of ethnic groups in influencing foreign policy and determining the national interest. Two broad camps are visible in this debate. The first camp argues that ethnic lobbies are highly influential and a threat to US foreign policy and the national interest (Schlesinger, Jr.: 1992; Huntington: 1997; Smith: 2000). The second camp sees these groups as moderately influential but largely beneficial; specifically, they promote American interests abroad (Clough: 1992; Shain: 1999). Neither of these camps, despite their conclusions, has offered rigorous case studies aimed at measuring the impact of ethnic lobby groups on the US foreign policy process nor divulging how these groups attain their alleged influence. One US minority in particular, Armenian-Americans, has achieved considerable success in gaining political and material support from Congress. Such achievements include roughly $90 million in annual aid for the state of Armenia; maintenance of Section 907 of the Freedom of Support Act, which blocks aid to Armenia’s rival Azerbaijan; the stalling of an arms deal with Turkey; and increased support for official US governmental recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915-1921. This case study of Armenian lobby groups in the US argues that the amount of aid and support for Armenia and Armenian issues is best explained by the intense lobbying efforts of Armenian-Americans in the United States. The lobbying success of this small US minority is largely the result of two factors: an intense inter-community rivalry between two factions within the Armenian-American population, which has led to hypermobilization of this ethnic group’s resources, and the formation of key alliances in Washington including members of Congress and other lobby groups and organizations

[Review of] Chalmers Archer, Jr. Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi

Archer\u27s book is a non-fictional account of the pain and anguish of one extended family\u27s struggle and fight during the 1930s and 1940s to survive the racist south

Discrimination Against Middle Eastern Americans, Still Searching for Affirmative Action Rights

The September 11th attacks have largely alienated all Middle Eastern Americans from the rest of the country such that they are actively being discriminated against. Furthermore, attempts for reorganization as a collective unit are difficult as classification efforts largely obscure Middle Easterners as a distinct group. Only through new changes in legislative policy and a reintroduction into Academia can Middle Eastern Americans begin to be reintegrated into American Culture

Forget-Me-Not : The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Community in Armenian America

This project looks at how politicized identity and community was formed in Armenian America through the creation and dissemination of Armenian genocide memories. The Armenian genocide, which occurred in 1915, resulted in the mass dispersion of the Armenian people, and in great numbers to America. The traumatic genocidal experience, along with erasure by the Turkish government, has resulted in the genocide being the most seminal piece of Armenian community building and political organization. Most work done on the Armenian-American community and Armenian genocide focuses on the impact of non-recognition by the Turkish government. In my thesis, I seek to rediscover the ways that the Armenian-American community historically utilized this trauma in order to redefine their identity and look towards new possibilities of identity, community, and memory. This exploration of the intersections of memory, political organizing, and community building showcases the hopeful potentials of traumatic events