Abstract
Once ignored in national and international public policy, religion has made a comeback as policymakers have noticed the significance of the resurgence of religion, especially due to migration flows. While laudatory of these developments, this chapter specifies the need for a theological reading of the migrant religious practitioner as homo religiosus. First, we describe the social geographies of immigrant religion in an international context, drawing attention to the vibrancy of religious devotion, especially Christianity from the global south, among migrant groups. Second, we re-conceptualise religious belief through the theoretical work of John Milbank and Charles Taylor as they recuperate a theological reading of religion that is cautious in imposing secular categories on religious phenomena. Third, we perform an interpretive experiment on immigrant churches through Victor Turner’s hermeneutics of the stranger, arguing that a theological interpretation of migrant religions, including those of some social and economic means, demonstrates that they often comprise a liminal ‘church of the poor’. We contribute to the geography of religion with a call to conceptualise religious belief and practice by ways that draw out the inner logics of such phenomena instead of imposing foreign theoretical categories on them.
An earlier draft of this chapter was prepared by Ley as the keynote address to the Geography of Religion and Belief Systems Specialty Group at the Association of American Geographers conference in Washington, DC in April 2010. This version benefited from lively discussion at the GORABS session and a critical reading by Reinhard Henkel. It also includes significant additions by Justin Tse.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For a more philosophical approach to these issues, see Dewsbury and Cloke (2009).
- 3.
One example among many of the new Catholicism is the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland (California), where services are held in an equal mix of English, Vietnamese and Spanish.
- 4.
For further examples of the vitality of immigrant religion, see Samers (2010: 284–5).
- 5.
Such reflexivity was a central theme of the humanistic geography of the 1970s and 1980s; perhaps the first statement on reflexivity appeared in Anne Buttimer’s Values in Geography (1974). Significantly, Buttimer was writing at that time from within the context of a Catholic order.
- 6.
The books have a related, perhaps a common, project, although Taylor has a more accessible and conciliatory style. In the conclusion of A Secular Age, Taylor claims that his study is complementary to Milbank’s. What he achieves for vernacular and everyday society, Milbank undertakes as an intellectual history.
- 7.
His ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school has formed a putative political party, the ‘Red Tories’, in the United Kingdom and Canada led by theologian Philip Blond (see Hauerwas 2000a). Red Tories marry a traditionalist emphasis on the family with a communitarian ethic that is socialist in economic policy.
- 8.
Compare Grace Davie’s (1994) criticism of the inadequacy of church membership data in assessing the prevalence of ‘believing without belonging’.
- 9.
‘Indeed, the exclusion/irrelevance of religion is often part of the unnoticed background of social science, history, philosophy, psychology’ (Taylor 2007: 429). Stump makes a similar point from within the geography of religion: ‘the influences of secularisation on social scientists themselves may have contributed as well to the de-emphasising of the study of religion’ (Stump 2008: 369).
- 10.
See Ringma (2009) for a brief review of key Biblical texts.
- 11.
The Guardian’s correspondent, Madeleine Bunting (2009), contrasts the poor immigrant Bible readers on her London bus with the middle-class movement to place anti-Christian advertisements on the same bus fleet.
- 12.
See Huamei Han’s detailed study of the deepening encounter of a Chinese immigrant couple with an evangelical Mandarin-language church in Toronto whose services met a wide range of their needs (Han 2009).
- 13.
Compare the cultural divisions between Gentile and Jewish Christians that the apostle Paul sought energetically to suture in his Biblical letters.
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Ley, D., Tse, J. (2013). Homo Religiosus? Religion and Immigrant Subjectivities. In: Hopkins, P., Kong, L., Olson, E. (eds) Religion and Place. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4685-5_9
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