Religion and the New Immigrants 227
groups such as women, African Americans, and Hispanics. Again, the relative lack of
immigrant scholars fluent in both the language and culture of their respective groups
no doubt limited access and interest in studying immigrant religion. The decline of
denominationalism and the renewed interest in congregational studies in the decade
of the 1990s, as evidenced in the two-volumeAmerican Congregationsbook (Wind and
Lewis 1994) and Ammerman’s (1997a)Congregation and Community,focused attention
on the local level of congregational life and pinpointed the demographic changes that
were occurring within congregations. With these publications, it became evident that
immigrants were beginning to change American congregationalism.
In addition to thousands of informal places of worship, including house churches,
scriptural study groups, paraliturgical groups, domestic altars, and neighborhood festi-
vals, immigrants have established many of their own formal places of worship. The task
of obtaining an accurate count of these religious institutions and the immigrants who
are members is almost impossible due to a number of issues that Numrich (2000) elab-
orates. Many estimates come from local-level ethnic communities whose self-interest is
served by robust counts. In addition, accounting methods differ greatly, from registered
membership in some institutions to ascribed status in an ethnoreligious population in
others. Census and INS data on ancestry, country of origin, and language is often used
to extrapolate estimates of religious identification, an exercise fraught with question-
able assumptions. Data gathered from various polls and surveys, such as the General
Social Survey (GSS) or the National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI) (Kosmin
and Lachman 1993), are based on random samples that include insufficient numbers
of small subpopulations to make accurate generalizations. The best estimates to date
of immigrant congregations are those generated by Warner (1998): (a) over thirty-five
hundred Catholic parishes where Mass is celebrated in Spanish, and seven thousand
Hispanic/Latino congregations, most Pentecostal or Evangelical, and many others non-
denominational; (b) in 1988, the last count available, 2,018 Korean-American churches;
(c) and in 1994 approximately seven hundred Chinese Protestant churches; (d) in the
early 1990s, between one thousand and twelve hundred mosques and Islamic centers;
(e) fifteen hundred to two thousand Buddhist temples and meditation centers; and
(f) over four hundred Hindu temples.
While variations exist in the organizational structures in the religious institutions
created by new immigrants, Warner (1994) used “congregation” as an umbrella term to
indicate “local, face-to-face religious assemblies.” In our work, we (Ebaugh and Chafetz
2000b) also use congregation in this sense, rather than its traditional Protestant refer-
ence to a type of church polity.
What, if anything, is really “new” about the most recent wave of immigration to
the United States? This question is currently receiving the attention of, and the fo-
cus of debate among, many who study post-1965 immigration (Glick-Schiller 1999;
Perlmann and Waldinger 1999; Levitt 2000). As we indicate in the final chapter of
our book (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b), we found far greater similarities than differ-
ences across time in the types of congregations that immigrants establish, as well as the
roles that religious institutions play in their lives. Nineteenth-century immigrants, like
those today, built their places of worship on a congregational model, emphasizing vol-
untary membership, lay initiative and participation in administrative functions, and
the expansion of worship sites to encompass community centers. The accounts of the
functions served by nineteenth-century ethnic churches (e.g., Thomas and Znaniecki