226 Helen Rose Ebaugh
of the immigrant population. In 1960, for example, the top ten countries accounted for
65 percent of the legal immigrant flow, but only 52 percent in 1990, and the number
of countries with at least one hundred thousand foreign-born residents in the United
States increased from twenty in 1970 to forty-one in 1990 (Fix and Passel 1994).
Along with increased diversity in national origins, the new immigrants are creating
greater religious diversity in the United States as they transplant their home country re-
ligions into their new neighborhoods. As a result, the religious landscape of the United
States is changing (Warner 1993; Eck 1997). Not only are ethnic churches, temples,
and mosques springing up around the country, but many established congregations
are struggling to incorporate these new ethnic groups into their memberships. As
Ammerman describes inCongregation and Community(1997a), ethnic changes in a
neighborhood often mean changes in the composition of local churches, a shift that
is frequently threatening to established congregants who may have built and nurtured
the church for decades.
While we know much about the new immigrants in terms of their countries of ori-
gin, socioeconomic backgrounds, labor force participation, educational achievements,
family patterns, reasons for migration and the role of social networks in their pat-
terns of settlement, we know relatively little about their religious patterns. Immigration
scholars have ignored religion as a factor both in the migration process and in their
incorporation into American society. A number of reasons have been posited for this
lack of attention. Most important, as Warner (1998) has pointed out, immigration
researchers rely primarily on data gathered by governmental agencies (e.g., Bureau of
the Census, the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS], the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, and boards of education), which are restricted from asking questions about
religion. Their other source of data is surveys such as those conducted by the National
Opinion Research Center, which employ random samples of the U.S. population that
do not contain sufficient respondents from small subpopulations, such as Muslims,
Jews, or Buddhists, to effectively analyze. Kivisto (1992) also has suggested that it is
frequently insiders who study their own immigrant groups and that many groups lack
a critical mass of such scholars who are interested in religion. A third explanation is the
antireligion bias that exists in much social science literature, based on the assumption
that religion deals with value-laden issues that are not amenable to empirical analy-
sis. In addition, many social scientists have uncritically accepted secularization theory,
which argues that religion is becoming increasingly unimportant in modern industrial
societies. For whatever reason, religion is missing in the work of immigration scholars,
as evidenced in the fact that four recent special issues of social scientific journals on im-
migration (International Migration Review, Vol. 31, Winter, 1997;Sociological Perspectives,
Vol. 40, No. 3, 1997;American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 42, January 1999; andRacial
and Ethnic Studies, Vol. 20, January 1999) include no article on religion. Likewise, the
recentHandbook of International Migration(Hirschman et al. 1999) has no index entry
on religion.
Until the mid-1990s, scholars in the field of religion had also, by and large, ne-
glected the study of new immigrants. Christiano’s (1991) analysis, as well as that of
Kivisto (1992), bemoaned the lack of research concerning religion and the new immi-
grants. The bulk of the social scientific research on religion in the latter decades of the
twentieth century was devoted to issues of denominationalism, the rise of conservative
Protestantism, new religious movements and the disenfranchisement of disadvantaged