Religion and immigration in the United States and Canada: A Bottom-Up Perspective

International Conference March 20-21, 2025 IEA (Institut d’études avancées de Paris) https://www.paris-iea.fr/fr/ 17 quai d’Anjou 75004, Paris

Keynote speakers:

Stéfania Capone (CNRS Research University, CREDA)

Blandine Chelini (Aix Marseille Université, LID2MS)

The United States and Canada share a history as settler-colonial societies built simultaneously on immigration and religious diversity on the one hand, and the exclusion of newcomers from national, ethno-racial and religious backgrounds deemed undesirable on the other. Immigration policies enacted after American independence (1793) and Canadian Confederation (1867) opened the floodgates from Europe, as both nations expanded territorially and built their economies (Kelley & Trebilcock 2014; Maldwyn 1992). Racialized concerns about maintaining their white, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ characters subsequently gave rise to Chinese restriction acts in the late nineteenth century, followed by broader policies limiting entry to other “undesirables” from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent (Higham 1984; Holland 2007; Johnson 2004; Zolberg 2009). These immigration policies began to be re-evaluated after WWII, as programs to allow for the immigration of refugees were put in place and piecemeal changes were made to reverse restrictive pre-war policies. In turn, both the United States and Canada enacted major overhauls to their immigration policy in the mid-1960s, allowing for an influx of newcomers from around the world (Maldwyn 1992; Kelley & Trebilcock 1998; Thompson & Weinfeld 1995). These sweeping legal changes played a critical role in diversifying a religious landscape dominated by Christianity in both Canada and the United States at a time when multiculturalism was becoming the public face of both societies (Taylor 1994).

Important differences in religious and immigration history also set these two countries apart. The presence of a French Catholic founder population alongside a dominant Protestant majority is a distinguishing feature of Canadian society. In the United States, by contrast, the Young Republic saw the consolidation of a hegemonic evangelical Protestantism that began to erode with the en masse arrival of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, and to a lesser extent Germany, in the 1830s (Day 2000; Moogk 2000; Noll 1992). Furthermore, despite government efforts to encourage immigration to the newly created Dominion of Canada (1867), more people left the country than entered it in the second half of the nineteenth century (Kelley & Trebilcock 1998, 62).

In both countries, migration spiked in the early 20th century. These new arrivals further diversified the religious landscape of both countries. The Catholic population grew substantially in conjunction with immigration waves from Italy and Poland, while Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians as well as Eastern European Jews also became a presence on both Canadian and United States soil. Canada continued to be a second-choice immigration destination for many of these new arrivals who had originally (and in some instances continued to) set their sights on the United States (Diner 2012; Kelley & Trebilcock 1998, 62).

While immigration policy in both Canada and the United States in the post-1965 era favored universalist policies over ethno-geographic based restrictions, important differences in the functioning of immigration law also set the two countries apart. Canada’s economic-based point program has favored skilled immigration more so than the United States’ more expansive system, which includes generous allowances for family unification (Kelley & Trebilcock 1998; Maldwyn 1992; Zoldberg 2009). Undocumented immigration is also much more prevalent in the United States, both in real terms and in the popular imaginary, where it has come to occupy a central place in the culture wars (Williams 2016). There are also important differences in how the social fabric of diversity and the “politics of recognition” have functioned in these two countries. In the United States, the legacy of slavery and racism are at the center of debates about inequality, diversity and minority recognition. In Canada, the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples, as well as “the French factor,” and the institutionalization of multiculturalism as government policy since 1973 are rather at the fore (Fleras 2021; Gordon & Newfield 1996; Starblanket 2020; Taylor 1994).

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the religious beliefs and practices of immigrant populations in both popular and academic discourse. While this topic is most often addressed as part of larger conversations about multiculturalism and social cohesion within the broader society, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to religious identities as experienced by the immigrants themselves (Hagan & Straut-Eppsteiner 2019, 290; Prencipe & Giovanella 2012). Indeed, notes Peter Kivisto, two of the most basic questions to be asked regarding religion and immigration are “Do religions promote immigrant adjustment? Is religion a solace, a help in integrating or a hindrance?” (2014) Following Kivisto’s comparative and transnational perspective, this conference will take a “bottom up” approach to explore how religion has factored into the migrant trajectories, lived experience, and imaginaries of newcomers to the United States and Canada from the nineteenth century through to the present day.

We welcome papers proposals that reflect on immigration and religion in the United States and Canada from different disciplinary perspectives, including (but not restricted to) anthropology, history, sociology, and literary studies, along two major axes:

1) Religion as a motive for immigration, real and imaginary

This axis aims at interrogating the way migrants and their descendants have understood and narrated the religious factor in their origin communities’ immigration stories, on both an individual and group level. Whether this becomes a reality upon arrival or not, religion may appear in the migrant discourse as one of the motivations justifying relocation to the United States. For example, in the narrative surrounding the foundation of the nation the Pilgrim Fathers have played an important role in shaping the vision of the United States as one of religious freedom (Lambert 2012; Tyrell 2010). In the post-WWII Cold-War context, this association between Americanism and religious liberty was integrated into immigration law, notably allowing both Jews and Evangelical Christians from the Soviet Union to enter the United States as religious refugees (Gregg 1991; Peretz 2017; Wanner 2007).

Following this line of inquiry, participants might propose papers exploring questions such as:

– To what extent has religion functioned, in both real and imaginary terms, as a motivation for migration?

– What role do networks of religious communities play, in both serving as facilitators for migrations and determining collective representations about the how and why of their communities’ emigration to the United States and Canada? – What explanatory power have migrants and their descendants given to religious, political and economic “freedom” as motivations for departures from “the old country”?

– How have these explanatory models changed over time, and how do they relate to broader political, cultural, and economic evolutions in both Canadian and United States society?

– Is there disjuncture between historical evidence and the popular imagination in explaining the immigration motives of particular religious communities and their descendants?

Another line of questioning is the role that religion has played in facilitating (or hindering) the migration of particular groups of individuals within evolving geo-political and legal contexts. For example, differences between entry rules for Russian-speaking evangelicals in contemporary Canada and the United States have shaped migrant narratives and self-understanding. Russian speaking migrants may apply for religious refugee visas in the US, where the religious motivation thus becomes part of the migration narrative construct. In Canada, by contrast, where a religious refugee visa is not available, members of this same community tend to frame their immigration journey as professionally motivated (Hume & Hardwick 2005). Women fleeing cultural practices, such as genital mutilation, identified as religious in their countries of origin, provides another example of this phenomenon, as does the (less well-known) practice of Mormon fathers taking their under-age daughters across the United StatesCanada border for arranged marriages, and finding themselves (and the daughters’ mothers) convicted of human trafficking (S. Petrella, 2023).

Following this line of inquiry, participants might propose papers exploring questions such as: What are the particular legal contexts that have pulled immigrants from different socio-religious communities towards the United States and Canada? What role have the immigration laws of the United States and Canada played determining whether individuals posit their application for entry as religiously motivated?

2) Transformation of Religious Cultures Post-Immigration

This axis is centered around the role that “religious choices” play in the integration trajectory of immigrants in the United States and Canada. Whereas classical historical and sociological literature tended to treat religion as a stagnant form of old-world baggage, literature is more attentive to the dynamic and changing nature of religious cultures through the immigration and integration processes (Connor 2014; Hagan 2019; Levitt 2007; Prencipe & Giovanella 2012). For Jewish immigrants to the United States who settled in frontier towns in the mid-19th century, for example, practical considerations played a critical role in the spread of Reform Judaism, a religious movement born in Saxony in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars that emphasized the universalist aspects of Jewish teachings (Meyer 1995 & 2007). Turning our attention to Muslim youth from immigrant families in the late 20th century, we find another example of the intersection between theology and acculturation. For these youth, evoking the umma as a spiritual community that binds all Muslims provided a potent ideological tool to push back against the older generations’ insistence on finding marriage partners within their ethnic community (Ghanea 2010; McDonough & Hoodfar 2009).

The evolving relationship to “home” among individuals who were members of minority religious communities in their origin country provides another example of the dual pulls of in-group links and post-immigration acculturation. For example, as a minority group in Russia, evangelicals who feel marginally Russian in Russia have developed a strong attachment to “being Russian” once in Canada in the last decades, even as what it means to “be Russian” is culturally redefined (Rogova 2020). Even as some individuals maintain and reshape their religion of origin as part of the integration process, for others, immigration leads to the embrace of new religious cultures or to a secularized embrace of the culture of their country of immigration. Notably, for example, in both the United States and Canada, Latinx and Asian American immigrants represent an important and growing base for evangelical Christianity, but also for non-affiliation (Bean 2014; Bramadat & Seljak 2008; Wong 2018).

We can also point to the ambiguities and tensions that immigrants, particularly non-Christian ones, experience in both the practice of and identification with rituals, ethical codes and doctrinal systems of their cultures of origin (Scott 2002, 112) The dominant culture’s view of animal sacrifices in the Afro-Cuban Santería, or of ancestor worship and household gods among the Hmong are examples of this phenomenon (Owusu 2015; Zhang 2020). Nora Rubel’s book on the place that the ultra-Orthodox occupy in the American Jewish imagination also underlines the extent to which the implications of Americanization can remain structuring for descendants of immigrants, particularly with regard to women’s rights and mastery of the English language (Rubel 2009).

As Jamie Scott argues, literature provides a fruitful way of exploring such ambiguities (2002, 112). In that regard, historian Françoise Le Jeune’s analysis of the role played by Christian evangelism in 19th-century British emigrant Susanna Moodie’s settler narrative (Le Jeune 2012) has opened stimulating lines of enquiry that can be extended to other textual productions, both non-fiction and fiction, by diasporic authors.

Following these lines of inquiry, participants might propose papers exploring questions such as: – How do immigrants transform and negotiate their religious practice and belief in their new environment? – To what extent does religion function as a force for the maintenance of in-group community boundaries? – In what circumstances does religion function as a force for emancipation from “old world” values and facilitate integration into the host society? – How do immigrants negotiate their sense of attachment to “home” when they are members of marginal minority religious movements or communities in their places of origin? – What are the social, economic and cultural factors that lead some individuals to convert to a different religion upon immigration, or to shed religious affiliation altogether?

Program Committee

Nadia Malinovich (Université de Picardie/Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, GSRL)

Anne Dalles Maréchal (Université Jean Monnet St Etienne, GSRL)

Anne-Sophie Letessier (Université Jean Monnet St Etienne, ECLLA)

Cécile Coquet-Mokoko (Université Versailles-St Quentin, CHCSC).

Scientific Committee

Michel Prum (Université Paris Cité, GRER-ICT)

Ludmilla Ommundsen Pessoa (Le Mans Université, 3.LAM)

Nargès Bardi (Université Paris Cité, GRER-ICT)

Mokhtar Ben Barka (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, LARSH)

Vincent Wimbush (Emory University, Candler School of Theology-ISS)

Proposals (400-word abstract + short bio) should be sent before November 9 to

immigrationreligion2025@gmail.com

Notification of acceptance by December 15.

For the list of works cited, see the the attached document.

 

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