344 Fred Kniss
Research on the religion of new (post-1965) immigrant communities has been a
burgeoning subfield in the sociology of religion (Ebaugh, Chapter 17, this volume;
Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b; Warner and Wittner 1998). The new work also draws heavily
on theories of religious pluralism, particularly to address questions of religious identity
and change. Placing these new (for the United States) religious communities on the
moral order map suggests some useful research questions to be explored.^4
One of the first things we notice when placing new immigrant religious groups on
the moral order map is that many of them lie off the main diagonal. Hindu and Bud-
dhist groups cluster in the northwest quadrant where both the locus of moral authority
and the moral project are primarily individually based. These communities are an in-
creasingly visible presence, particularly in U.S. cities, populating a sector of the moral
order that had previously been quite underpopulated, as I noted earlier.
With regard to moral authority, priests and monks in these traditions are religious
virtuosos and exemplars more than authorities or hierarchs directing the religious lives
of congregants. Neither is there an authoritative scripture tradition that is the equiva-
lent of the Bible or the Qur’an for Jews, Christians, or Muslims. This was manifested in
one of our field sites, a Buddhist temple, when a field researcher observed a conversa-
tion between an African-American seeker who had been raised in a Protestant tradition
(Nicole) and a temple leader (Qian). Our researcher observed, “It struck me that Qian
really seemed to be witnessing to Nicole about the benefits of Buddhism, but whenever
Nicole tried to say something like ‘So I need to do such and such?’ Qian would say,
‘This is my experience.’ Qian seemed reticent to cast her story in terms of a universal
truth” (fieldnotes, 1/31/01,Religion, Immigration and Civil Society in Chicago Project).
Similarly, with regard to the moral project, the Hindu and Buddhist temples we
are observing focus primarily on individual projects. One storefront Hindu temple pro-
motes nutritional products, selling wheatgrass juice to worshippers and the public.
A Buddhist temple offers martial arts classes. Meditation is offered as a solution to a
variety of modern problems. We see very little activity around collective social issues
compared to the activities of say, a Puerto Rican or Mexican Catholic parish. I noted ear-
lier that communities with thoroughly individualist ideologies are difficult to sustain
over time. The Eastern religions that we have observed have overcome this problem by
maintaining tight linkages between religion and ethnicity. Where collective concerns
are addressed, they tend to be organized around cultural or ethnic identities rather than
around religion, per se.
In contrast to the Eastern religious groups, Muslims, currently one of the fastest-
growing religious groups in the United States, are clustered in the southeast quadrant
where moral authority and the moral project are collective. Moral authority resides in
a scriptural tradition that is collectively shared. The moral project, the establishment
of theumma(the political, social, and religious community of the faithful), is collective
as well.
These placements spark a few immediate observations regarding the new groups’
relationships to U.S. society. First, we can make predictions about where these groups
are likely to find friendly allies in American culture. Note that Hindus and Buddhists
(^4) The observations I offer here are meant to be suggestive and somewhat speculative, but they
are based on early work in a three-year project in which Paul Numrich and I are currently
engaged,Religion, Immigration and Civil Society in Chicago. The project, supported by The Pew
Charitable Trusts, is studying new immigrant religion in the Chicago metropolitan region.