Religion and the New Immigrants 229
Muslim congregation in Canada, and Yang’s (1999) analysis of several Chinese Chris-
tian churches in Washington, DC. Even more numerous are studies of religious insti-
tutions among one specific ethnic or nationality group. These include Mullins’s (1987)
study of Japanese Buddhists in Canada; Williams’s (1988) description of the religions of
Indians and Pakistanis; Fenton’s (1988) research on Asian Indian religious traditions in
the United States; Denny’s (1987), as well as Haddad and Lummis’s (1987), analysis of
Islam in the United States; Diaz-Stevens’s (1993a) description of Puerto Rican Catholi-
cism in New York; Kashima (1977), Lin (1996) and Fields’s (1992) work on Buddhism
in America; Orsi’s (1985) study of Italians and Haitians in Harlem; and the numerous
studies of the Korean Christian church in America ( I. Kim 1981; Hurh and Kim 1984;
Shin and Park 1988; Min 1992; Kwon 1997; Chai 1998; Chong 1998).
In the mid-1990s, a number of research projects on religion and the new immigrants
were initiated, fueled by grants from the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts,
and the newly established initiative in religion by the Ford Foundation. The first of
these was Warner’s NEICP (New Ethnic and Immigration Congregations Project) study
that funded twelve doctoral and postdoctoral fellows to study immigrant religious
communities across the United States. In addition to providing rich ethnographies
on Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Rastafari, and mixed Vodou-Catholic congregations, the
NEICP experience was a training ground for newly minted scholars interested in the
study of religion among new immigrants. Individual books and articles on the various
immigrant religious communities began to filter into the sociology of religion literature
and to fill the lacunae that had earlier been identified.
Building on Warner’s work, in 1996 I initiated the RENIR (Religion, Ethnicity, New
Immigrants Research) project in Houston, Texas. Rather than a series of ethnographies,
my research design was a comparative one in which I focused on thirteen religious con-
gregations within the same city. These congregations included two Roman Catholic
churches (one overwhelmingly Mexican, the other composed of seven formally or-
ganized nationality groups); a Greek Orthodox church; a Hindu temple; a Muslim
mosque that was mostly Indo-Pakistani in membership; a Zoroastrian Center, most
of whose members also came from India and Pakistan; two Buddhist temples (one
Chinese and one Vietnamese); and five Protestant churches (one whose members rep-
resent forty-eight nationalities, one dominated by Argentines, one mostly Mexican,
one totally Korean, and one totally Chinese). By conducting focus groups in the im-
migrant community in Houston, we were able to develop research questions that were
grounded in the experiences of those we were to study. Focus group members also
helped us to identify immigrant congregations to study. We spent three to six months
in each congregation, conducting observations of worship services and other activities
that take place in the congregational setting. We also conducted interviews with clerics,
lay leaders, immigrants, nonimmigrants and youth in each setting, utilizing the same
observation protocols and interview schedules, thereby generating comparable data
(see Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b for a comprehensive description of the findings of this
study).
In 1997, the Pew Charitable Trusts approved a $5 million new initiative, entitled
“The Gateway Cities Projects,” whose purpose is to facilitate the examination of the
role of religion in the current immigrant experience in the United States and how it
relates to the incorporation of immigrants into American society. Six gateway cities
(New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami), the