CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Religion and the New Immigrants
Helen Rose Ebaugh
Changes in U.S. immigration laws in the past four decades have had far-reaching con-
sequences for American religion. Even though the majority of the new immigrants
are Christian (Warner and Wittner 1998; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b), the practices,
symbols, languages, sounds, and smells that accompany the ethnically and racially
diverse forms of practicing Christianity, brought by immigrants from Latin America,
the Caribbean, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, India, Africa, and elsewhere chal-
lenge the various European practices of Christianity that have predominated in the
United States since its founding. As Maffy-Kipp (1997) argues, rather than immi-
grants “de-Christianizing” religion in America, they have, in fact, “de-Europeanized”
American Christianity. In addition, the new immigrants have brought religious tra-
ditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Vodou, and
Rastafarianism, that were unfamiliar to Americans prior to the mid-1960s. Today
many American neighborhoods are dotted with temples, mosques, shrines, storefront
churches, Christian churches with foreign names, guadwaras, and botannicas.
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The “new immigrants” refer to those who entered the United States after the passage of
the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. The abolition of the country-of-origin quotas
established in 1924, and the dramatic increase in immigration visas provided to people
from Asia and Latin America, in particular, significantly altered the racial and ethnic
backgrounds of immigrants. For example, the number of Asian immigrants living in
the United States rose from about 150,000 in the 1950s to more than 2.7 million in
the 1980s, while the number of European immigrants fell by more than one-third.
Likewise, during the 1950s, the six hundred thousand immigrants who came from
Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for one in four immigrants, while three
decades later, the 3.5 million immigrants who arrived from these areas accounted for
47 percent of all admissions (Miller and Miller 1996). Of the five million immigrants
who arrived between 1985 and 1990, only 13 percent were born in Europe, Canada,
Australia, or New Zealand, while 26 percent came from Mexico, 31 percent from Asia,
and 22 percent from other parts of the Americas (Chiswick and Sullivan 1995: 216–17).
In addition, per country limitations on legal flows have increased the national diversity
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