God Needs No Passport

Trying to define the new boundaries of belonging.

by Peggy Levitt

[In: Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn 2006)]

The suburb of expensive homes with neatly trimmed lawns and SUVs seems like any
other well-to-do American community, but the mailboxes reveal a twist: almost all
are labeled "Patel" or "Bhaghat." Over the last 20 years, these Indian immigrants
have moved from the villages and small towns of central Gujarat State on the west
coast of India, initially to rental apartment complexes in northeastern Massachusetts,
and then to their own homes in subdivisions outside Boston. Watching these
suburban dwellers work, attend school, and build religious congregations here,
casual observers might conclude that yet another wave of immigrants has succeeded
at the American dream. A closer look, however, reveals they are achieving Gujarati
dreams as well. They send money back to India to open businesses and improve
family farms. They support the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian American
Political Forum. The temples and religious schools they build are changing the
Gujarati as well as the American religious landscape. And their influence is not lost
on Indian politicians, who energetically encourage their involvement in Indian
political and economic life.

Dipa Patel and her husband, Pratik, exemplify two such immigrants who keep their
feet in the United States and in their homelands at the same time. Nearly six years
ago, Pratik left Bodeli, a town of approximately 10,000, to marry Dipa. He had a
bachelor of arts degree in computer science from an Indian university, and he and
his cousin were partners in a computer school franchise. When he first moved to
America, Pratik found a job on the assembly line of a large telecommunications firm.
Rewarded for his hard work, he moved back to the engineering track and has
ascended the corporate ladder steadily ever since. The company, which packed over
8,000 cars into its parking lot each morning in its heyday, now employs less than a
thousand workers, but Pratik is still among them.

Nothing has deterred Pratik and Dipa from their pursuit of the American dream. As
soon as he completed the mandatory five-year residency requirement, Pratik filed for
citizenship. He and Dipa now have two young daughters who are more conversant in
American children's songs and folktales than they are in Indian stories. In the
evenings, Pratik takes classes toward a master's degree at a Boston University
satellite campus. Dipa works as a quality assurance supervisor at a computer
manufacturing company. Each month, they go to BJ's Wholesale Club to purchase
pieces of American middle-class life. And last fall, they finally achieved the pièce de
résistance—their own home in a new subdivision in southern New Hampshire.

But Pratik and Dipa steadfastly pursue Gujarati dreams as well. They are the primary
source of financial support for Pratik's parents, and Pratik continues to be a partner
in the computer school. He sends money back to buy new equipment when he has
funds to spare. And before buying their home in America, the family's first project
was to build a second story onto the house in Bodeli, including a separate bedroom
suite and Western-style bathroom, which sit empty except during their visits.
One of the principal ways that Pratik and Dipa's lives transcend national borders is
through religion. They belong to the International Swaminarayan Satsang
Organization (ISSO), a Hindu denomination based in Ahmedabad in Gujarat State
that has interconnected chapters all over the world. They spend most of their
weekends at a temple in Lowell, Massachusetts (their congregation used to use an
old Episcopal church, but recently moved to a converted Goodwill warehouse). On
Saturday evenings, there are sabhas, or prayer sessions, followed by large
communal vegetarian meals. Pratik and Dipa's children attend religious school
classes and youth group meetings each Sunday. Most of their friends are fellow
Swaminarayan members who stand in for the extended family they so sorely miss.
The community is an important font of social support when a new baby is born, a
family moves into a new home, or there is an illness or death. By being
Swaminarayan, Pratik and Dipa make a place for themselves in the United States.

At the same time, belonging to the ISSO is very much about maintaining a home in
India. Pratik constantly consults with religious leaders there, not only about temple
business, but about difficult decisions he faces in his personal life. When he was
deciding whether he should invest in a small grocery store, he called India. When the
community was unsure about whether to participate in a city-wide relief drive for
Asian tsunami victims, he called to discuss the pros and cons. The directors of the
temple always consult their leaders back home about important decisions. They host
a steady stream of visiting dignitaries from India and from other ISSO communities
around the world. By being Swaminarayan, then, Pratik and Dipa also carve out an
enduring place for themselves in their ancestral home.

Evidence of America's increasing religious diversity, brought about by Pratik, Dipa,

and others like them, is at every corner. The sign at the local Protestant church now
includes a line in Korean or Chinese to attract newcomers to the ethnic
congregations that worship there. In between the Subway and Dunkin Donuts at the
strip mall is a new Swaminarayan meeting hall. Religious groups that were once
tightly connected to one immigrant community have become "disengaged,"
abandoning their commitment to that particular group in favor of a more universal
and inclusive approach. The Roman Catholic Church has backed away from its
national parish strategy toward multi-ethnic congregations. Pentecostals proselytize
among all groups, regardless of race and ethnicity. The White House hosts Diwali and
Id al-Fitr1 celebrations each year, sending a clear signal to the country that the
American religious rainbow has added more colors.

Commentators such as Diana Eck, Martin Marty, Robert Wuthnow, and Alan Wolfe
applaud the country's increasing religious diversity, but tend to explain this pluralism
as the result of forces operating inside the United States. They argue that America's
sacred texts, such as the Constitution, laid the groundwork for religious diversity to
flourish. In the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights and antiwar movements
transformed this "culture of pluralism" into something mainstream.

We need to broaden our lens and see religious pluralism in America as an integral
piece of the larger global religious puzzle. Just as the corporate CEO would be out on
the street in a heartbeat if she did not see her company as part of the global
economy, so we miss the boat by continuing to insist that religion and culture are
nationally bounded. Just as we recognize the U.S. economy is made up of various,
worldwide production and distribution networks, so we must see the local mosque or
Pentecostal church as part of multilayered webs of connection where religious
"goods" are produced and exchanged around the globe.

Undeniably, many religious institutions were founded on universal claims and, in

many cases, have always been global. In this era of the nation-state, however,
religion's universality and globalism are often seen as taking a back seat to national
legal and political regimes. But religion, like capitalism, is no longer embedded in a
particular territory or legal regime; nor is it as encumbered by external political,
cultural, or moral principles. Cultural referents, once bounded by ethnicity, language,
and nation-state borders, are being disconnected or lifted out of national territories,
rendering discussions of national religious practice off the mark.

A growing body of work has begun to use a broader optic and provides important
insights about the role of religion in today's global world and how it differs from prior
incarnations. Theorists such as Peter Beyer and Roland Robertson emphasize the
need to use the global system as the primary unit of analysis to understand
contemporary social life. As Christopher Queen points out in a 2002 article,
Buddhism, like Judaism and Christianity, has been an "international" religion from
early on, but its local variations remained largely isolated from one another. 2 Manuel
Vásquez calls this the "thin" globalization of world empires, in which interdependence
was horizontal and constant, and any cultural or religious syncretism was limited to
cosmopolitan urban centers and port towns.3

What are the cultural and religious consequences of "thick" contemporary

globalization, with its increasing velocity? First, many religions have become multi-
centered, which differs from their multi-sitedness of the past.4 Buddhist ideas and
practices, for example, now move with unprecedented speed to non-Asian countries,
but it's not simply a move from the religion's center to periphery—it's about the
emergence of multiple new centers, with regionalized Buddhist interpretations and
practices. Because the centers are constantly in communication with each other, East
and West, the "old country" and the new, infuse and transform one another.

Second, if globalization is the ever-changing state of "mutability," as Beyer describes

it, and we no longer have the security of an ascribed or fixed sense of self, this leads
to several problems which religion may be able to solve. Roland Robertson and
JoAnn Chirico define two of these problems as the "legitimacy of the world order of
societies (nations)" and "the meaning of what mankind 'really is.' " Peter Beyer
reminds us that in this state of mutability, it is not only the speed with which rapid
changes occur that can be problematic, but who ends up holding the power. He
proposes two responses that religious groups offer in the wake of globalization. The
first is "conservative," and fundamentalist in nature. In this case, religion is a vehicle
for asserting particularistic identities that are threatened by changing global
conditions. The second, or "liberal," response, is for religions to reorient toward the
global whole and take up the values of the emerging culture. Beyer emphasizes that
these are "pure types" and points out the many hybrid forms that fall between these
two extremes.

In his 1994 book Public Religions in the Modern World, José Casanova suggests that
the changes that occur in religion happen because the secular (political) realm has
infiltrated the two arenas religion once fulfilled—a monopoly on salvation and the
function of "community cult," or the solidarity offered by collective representation of
an imagined community. Accordingly, we need to view religion as a cultural system,
one that in a globalized world has been disembedded. This represents both a threat
and an opportunity. On the one hand, the "old" world civilizations and religions can
free themselves from the territoriality of the nation-state, resuming their
transnational dimensions and regaining a leading role on global stage. On the other
hand, they may be plagued by dissolution of the intrinsic link between sacred time
and sacred space, or the bonds of shared histories, peoples, and territories that have
always defined civilizations and religion.

Although helpful, these largely theoretical accounts tell us little about how religion is
actually lived. Much of this work overlooks the people actually doing the globalizing.
Further, as Willfried Spohn asserts, globalization theories are macro-paradigms that
are not unlike modernization paradigms in some respects. One essentializes the
global system, the other the nation-state system. Both tend to "correlate the
political, socioeconomic and cultural phenomena and dimensions, instead of
considering the local, national and transnational macro-micro linkages, relations and
interactions."5 In their book Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas,
Manuel Vásquez and Marie Marquardt warn similarly about the danger of "glossing
over the contested, uneven, and situated impact of globalization." 6 They prefer to
talk about "anchored" or "grounded" globalization. Moreover, they use case studies,
as I do, to emphasize the importance of local places and "thick" descriptions.

It is precisely this nexus between global religious norms and institutions and lived
religion—the actual religious practices, discourses, and organizations that are the
stuff of daily religious life—that my research and soon to be published book try to
capture. By paying attention to everyday lived religious experience, it is possible to
see where and how religious globalization is really happening. Such a focus is needed
if we are to bring conventional wisdom about religion, migration, and the nationstate
more in sync with reality. Let me suggest some new ways of thinking about
categories we tend to take for granted.

Thinking Outside the Nation-State Container

Grasping that people earn their living, participate in election campaigns, or raise
children across borders can be challenging. Most people take for granted that the
world has always been and always will be organized into sovereign nation-states.
They are more likely to compare family life in different countries than to think of
households as networks of people living in several countries who pool their income.
Most governments locate the causes and solutions to their problems inside their
borders rather than thinking of health or educational status as produced by people
living in several places at one time.

But such a view is short on history. Capitalism, imperial and colonial regimes,
antislavery and workers' rights campaigns, illegal pirating networks, and, of course,
religions have always crossed borders. The modern nation-state system did not even
exist until after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In the early 1900s, there were
barely 130 sovereign states; the remaining 65 percent of the world's political entities
were colonies and protectorates. Three-quarters (150) of the more than 200
countries recognized today came into existence in the last century.7

Assuming that social life automatically takes place within a national container blinds
us to the way the world actually works. Assuming that political outcomes are decided
nationally doesn't give enough credit to political and social movements involving
activists from around the world. Taking literally the label "Made in the U.S.A."
ignores the fact that some piece of that garment was probably made in Latin America
or Asia. Eberhard Sandschneider, the research director at the German Council on
Foreign Relations in Berlin, got it right when he told the 2005 Davos delegates,
"What we are increasingly seeing is a multidimensional system in which states and
state-based multilateral organizations work with businesses and civil society through
a dense web of international and interdisciplinary networks." 8

To pick up on these dynamics, one has to trade in a national lens for a transnational
one. This is not to deny the continuing importance of nation-states, nor the fact that
states continue to regulate many aspects of life. Nor is it to argue that everything is
produced by factors operating outside national borders. Indeed, in many cases, they
play only a small supporting role in the story. It is to say that to understand today's
world, one has to ask how individuals and groups actually organize themselves,
without assuming, a priori, that they fit neatly within a national box.

Immigration Seen Through a Transnational Lens

Understanding that migration is a transnational process, and that people will

simultaneously belong to this country as well as their homelands for the long haul,
reveals several important things. For one, sometimes migration is as much about the
people who stay behind as it is about people who move. In some cases, the ties
between migrants and nonmigrants are so strong and widespread that migration also
radically transforms the lives of individuals who stay home.9 People don't have to
move to participate across borders. People, money, and what I have called social
remittances—the ideas, practices, social capital, and identities that migrants send
back into their communities of origin—permeate their daily lives, changing how they
act and challenging their ideas about gender, right and wrong, and what states
should and should not do. The religious, social, and political groups they belong to
also begin to operate across borders.

Nonmigrants hear enough stories, look at enough photographs, and watch enough
videos of birthday parties and weddings filmed in the United States to begin
imagining their own lives elsewhere. They covet clothes and accessories that soon
become a standard part of their dress code. They want to play by the rules they
imagine are at work in the United States, which they learn about each time they talk
on the phone, receive email, or someone comes to visit. In such cases, migrants and
nonmigrants, though separated by physical distance, still occupy the same social
space. Although laws and political borders limit movement and formal citizenship,
their lives are strongly connected by the myriad economic, political, and religious
activities that cross borders. What happens to those in the United States cannot be
separated from what happens to those who remain in the homelands, because their
fates are inextricably linked. When a small group is regularly involved in their
sending country, and others participate periodically, their combined efforts add up.
Taken together and over time, they are a social force that can transform the
economy, the values, and the everyday lives of entire regions.

One factor propelling these changes is the enormous amount of money that migrants
send home. According to the World Bank, official remittance numbers ($93 billion) in
2003 may represent only half the funds people actually send. According to Mushtaq
Hussain's 2005 report "Measuring Migrant Remittances: From the Perspective of the
European Commission," the global remittance market may actually be as large as
$200 to $300 billion annually.10 Countries like Albania, Croatia, El Salvador, Samoa,
Yemen, and Jordan are among a growing number of countries in which remittances
exceed private and official capital inflows and are the primary source of foreign
currency.11 These nations depend so heavily on remittances that their economies
might collapse if they declined. To prevent that from happening, numerous
governments now offer emigrants some form of longdistance, long-term
membership. States as diverse as France, Ireland, Greece, the Dominican Republic,
Brazil, Italy, Portugal, and China give emigrants and their descendants full rights
when they return to their homelands, even if they are passport holders of another
country. Colombia even grants political rights to emigrants who are abroad by
allowing expatriates to elect representatives to the Colombian legislature.

Looking at migrants and nonmigrants transnationally also acknowledges that their

lives are influenced by people and organizations in many other places and at many
other levels of social experience. The relationship between Salvadoran villagers and
their migrant family members in Los Angeles is not just a function of the specific ties
between these two local settings. It also results from ties between the Salvadoran
and U.S. governments and the Salvadoran and U.S. Catholic Churches. Similarly,
understanding the religious lives of Brazilians in Massachusetts requires looking
beyond the connections between specific congregations in Boston and Brazil and
placing them in the context of the thick, multilayered web of denominational
connections linking the two countries.

Finally, seeing migrants and nonmigrants as occupying the same social space also
drives home the dramatic changes that have occurred in the meaning of immigrant
incorporation. The immigrant experience is not a linear, irreversible journey from one
membership to another. Rather, migrants pivot back and forth between sending,
receiving, and other orientations at different stages of their lives. They supplement
the income they earn in the United States with investments they still have in their
homelands. They raise their children in Boston during the school year and send them
back to Pakistan for the summer because they want them to be culturally and
linguistically fluent in both places. Some are fortunate enough to be able to move up
the American and homeland socioeconomic ladders at the same time. Others move
up with respect to their homeland while experiencing status declines in the United
States, while still others are downwardly mobile in relation to both places. And the
more their lives are grounded in legal, health care, and pension systems on both
sides of the border, the more likely it is that their transnational lives will endure.
Newcomers will not fully assimilate or remain entirely focused on their homelands,
but continue to craft some combination of the two.

Remapping the Religious Landscape

Statistically speaking, the United States remains overwhelming Christian. According

to a 2002 Pew Research Center Report, of the 82 percent who call themselves
Christians, the majority (52 percent) are Protestant, followed by Catholics (24
percent). Those who claim "no religious preference" make up about 10 percent of the
population.12 Although the numbers of Muslims and Buddhists have doubled in the
last decade, and the numbers of Hindus have tripled, non-Christians still represent a
fairly small portion of America.13 Jews and Muslims represent only 2 percent and 1.5
percent of the population, respectively, and "Eastern" religions, such as Buddhism or
Hinduism, weigh in at less than 1 percent each, according to the World Christian
Database in 2004. The most remarkable change in American religion has been the
increasing number of individuals who say they have no religion, up from just over 8
percent in 1990 to anywhere between 9 and 14 percent a decade later.14

Embedded in these categories, though, is much more diversity than broad labels like
"Christian" or "Catholic" reveal. New immigrants are introducing new faiths as well as
"Latinoizing" and "Asianizing" well-established denominations. A survey of "new
immigrants," conducted by Guillermina Jasso and based on a random sample of
persons admitted as permanent residents to this country in July and August of 1996,
found that Catholicism (41.9 percent), Christian-Protestant (18.6 percent), and "No
Religion" (15.1 percent) were the residents' top religious preferences.15 By some
estimates, including by the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops' Secretariat for
Hispanic Affairs, Mexican and other Latin American foreign-born individuals account
for nearly 40 percent of the country's Roman Catholics.

Differences in migrants' country-of-origin mix are also changing the religious make-
up of the Asian immigrant population. Between 1990 and 2001, the proportion of
newly arriving Asian Christians fell from 63 to 43 percent, while those professing
Asian religions increased from 15 to 28 percent.16 Jasso and her colleagues also
found that the proportion of foreign-born people professing faiths other than Judeo-
Christianity was more than four times greater than among the native-born—nearly
17 percent versus 4 percent. Surveys conducted in 2003–04 found a continued rise
in non-Christian religious preferences, although the researchers carrying out this
work differed as to how much, ranging from 2004 Gallup polls which found about five
percent professing "Other, non-Christian religions" to a 2004 survey by the Barna
Research Group which uncovered 11 percent "aligned with a non-Christian faith,"
including 45 percent among Asians.

Incorporating newcomers is an age-old story for Catholics, who had plenty of

practice turning Irish and Italian immigrants into American Catholics and are now
using many of the same techniques to incorporate Brazilians and Vietnamese.
Mainline and evangelical Protestant faiths are not as experienced at integrating
newcomers, although they face great incentives to do so, given their declining
native-born populations. Many of these new immigrants are the product of
missionary work done in Latin America and Asia during the 1900s. The extensive
missionary work that was part of American Protestantism from the start was never a
strictly one-way religious export. Even while imperialist assumptions dominated, the
Christianity of the missionizers was changed by those being missionized. Now,
descendants of those who converted are bringing their own version of Christianity
back to the United States and asking to practice their faith alongside their
denominational brothers and sisters. New and old members are having to invent
ways to pray, learn, and pursue social change together. Their views about how to do
this are often quite different, but the compromises that are starting to be reached
are a major source of religious change. David Machacek asserts, "Instead of
assimilating American social practices and cultural beliefs and values, the new
immigrants, often using religion as a primary resource, appear to be actively
renegotiating the terms of American social and cultural life," 17 thereby transforming
mainline Protestant denominations in the process.

Other immigrants belong to global religious movements that unite members who
happen to be living in the United States with fellow believers around the world.
Again, this is not entirely new. Some Sufi orders, for example, have maintained
strong ties between new places of residence and their centers since the tenth
century.18 Charismatic Catholics also belong to small communities of prayer and
fellowship which unite them with fellow believers in other countries. The Tablighi
Jama'at, one of the largest transnational Islamic movements, is now believed to be
comparable in size and scope to Christian Pentecostalism. Its members participate in
missions travel around the world, urging Muslims to wake up, be faithful, and return
to the correct practice of their faith.

Migrant and nonmigrant followers of particular saints, deities, or religious teachers

also belong to imagined global communities of connection. One of the fastest
growing religious shrines in Mexico, for example, is Santa Ana de Guadalupe in
Jalisco State, the birthplace of Mexico's patron saint of migrants, St. Toribio. Many
believe St. Toribio guides people safely across the border to the United States. Santa
Ana has been transformed from a former backwater into a major tourist destination,
not by remittances but by the many faithful who visit each year and feel a sense of
kinship to this saint and to each other. Vendors eagerly sell them pocketsize prayer
books, which include a bon voyage message from the local bishop and a prayer for
those crossing the border without documents. "I feel I am a citizen of the world," it
says, "and of a church without borders."

The anthropologist John Bowen describes what he calls a transnational public space
of reference and debate, which he argues has been in place since the beginning of
the Islamic era. Long before it emerged in the West, this space was created, in part,
by debates and exchanges between Muslim scholars and public figures in Indonesia,
Pakistan, Egypt, and elsewhere. In its contemporary incarnation, scholars and
professionals form networks, attend conferences, and create institutions to help
convey how universally shared faith and values apply to local contexts. Bowen
states, "This sense of Islam's transnational character is diffuse but powerful, and it
derives its power from the ways in which rituals reproduce, and histories remind
Muslims of, the shared duties and practices of Muslims across political boundaries. In
its impulse to refuse particularistic loyalties to ethnic groups or to a nation-state, this
consciousness first and foremost creates an imagination of an Islamic community
transcending specific boundaries and borders.19

The globalization of the sacred, then, occurs on many fronts. 20 Changes precipitated
by migration run parallel to connections arising between members of global religious
communities and social movements. And these developments are taking place in a
world where universal norms about human dignity, rights, and social and economic
justice are increasingly salient. As global actors, religious bodies make people aware
of these norms and mobilize their adherents to support them. In turn, sharing
universal norms encourages the emergence of religious global identities.

It is not only the cast of religious characters that changes through migration. Ideas
about what religion actually is and where to find it change as well. The separation of
church and state is so firmly embedded in the American psyche that most Americans
treat religion and culture as more distinct than they actually are. Many new
immigrants come from places where religion and culture go hand in hand. They
cannot sort out Irishness from Catholicism, Indianness from being Hindu, or what it
means to be Pakistani from what it means to be a Muslim. Faith guides the way they
live their everyday lives, who they associate with, and the kinds of communities they
belong to, even among people who say they are not very religious. Their ideas about
tolerance and diversity are shaped by having lived in states where religious life is
actively regulated and where expectations about relations between "us" and "them"
are quite different from those in the United States.

As a result, many immigrants bring to the table a much broader understanding of

what religion is and where to find it. The sacred and the spiritual spill over into the
workplace, the schoolyard, and the neighborhood. When people adorn their
refrigerator doors with "saint magnets," hang cross-stitched samplers with religious
teachings on their walls, light candles in honor of the Vírgen, or decorate their
rearview mirrors and dashboards with photos of their gurujis, they imbue the
quotidian with the sacred. When a Latino family celebrates its daughter's 15th
birthday or a Hindu son invites his elderly father to live with him in the United
States, they are performing religious as well as cultural acts. For some newcomers,
American values are, in part, religious values. And these values are not just "made in
the U.S.A.," but around the world.

Migrants also bring different understandings of what it means to belong to a religious

community. In some cases, membership means worshiping in a particular
congregation, with a clearly de- fined canon, leadership, and fee structure. But many
people do not identify with a single congregation. They are comfortable worshiping at
whatever church, temple, or mosque is close by. Their faith does not depend on
participating regularly with the same group of people or, in some cases, with
worshiping in a group at all.

Furthermore, religion does not stay inside the walls of official religious buildings.
Private, informal religious rituals often reveal much more about the changing nature
of religious life than what goes on at the church or at the temple. When a Muslim
silently says her prayers while stopped at a traffic light because there is no place
nearby to pray, she is transforming Islam in America. When a traveler crosses
himself before the plane takes off, he is expressing his faith, whether or not he
attends mass on Sunday. These changes in ritual and belief are communicated back
to the home community where they also transform religious practice.

Just as the walls of religious buildings are permeable, so are the boundaries between
faith traditions. Many migrants come from countries where religion has always
combined elements from several faiths. Much of Latino Catholicism, for example,
integrates indigenous, African, and Christian practices, implicitly giving followers
permission to be many things at one time. Many of the Brazilian and Indian
immigrants I have studied saw no problem with belonging to several religious
communities simultaneously, because all the pieces fit under the broad umbrella of
Christianity or Hinduism. For these individuals, boundary crossing, or combining
elements from different faiths, is the rule, not the exception. The American context,
with its wide array of religious choices, strongly encourages this kind of mixing and
matching.

Similarly, religion itself does not obey political or ethnic boundaries. The Crusaders
resurrected Christianity in a range of dominions, kingdoms, and principalities that
had been claimed by Muslims. Incan, Mayan, and Aztec traditions were forcibly
absorbed into Hispanic Catholicism. The British spread Anglicanism to the four
corners of their empire. Even the birth of the modern nationstate system has not
required God to use a passport. There are one billion Roman Catholics around the
globe—just less than the population of China. India's 966 million population is only
slightly bigger than the worldwide population of 900 million Sunni Muslims. The
Catholic Church has the most sophisticated, familiar system of transnational
governance, linking its members around the world through its national conferences
and social movement chapters. But many denominations, such as the Baptist World
Alliance and the International Swaminarayan Satsang Organization, also have
administrative structures with a global reach.

These changes in religious demography are transforming the balance of power within
global religious institutions. At the last 10-year meeting of the Anglican communion,
third-world bishops challenged the traditional authority of English and American
prelates and their positions on homosexuality, abortion, and the ordination of
women. The center of political gravity in Roman Catholicism, dominated until only
recently by Italian prelates, is slowly shifting as more and more cardinals from
Africa, Asia, and South America are appointed to positions of power.

Finally, religion is the archetypical spatial and temporal boundary crosser. It endows
followers with symbols, rituals, and narratives that allow them to imagine
themselves in sacred landscapes, marked by holy sites. Some people think of these
as easily coexisting with the actual physical and political geography. For others, the
religious landscape takes precedence over its secular counterpart. What happens in
Bombay, London, Johannesburg, Sydney, and Trinidad matters much more to some
Swaminarayan members, who think of these sites as the boundaries of a sort of
"Swaminarayan country." Minarets, crosses, and sanctuaries are the salient
landmarks in these imaginary terrains, rather than national monuments or historical
structures. Religion also transcends the boundaries of time because it allows
followers to feel part of a chain of memory, connected to a past, a present, and a
future.21 That is why, for example, Cubans in Miami bring their newborns to be
baptized at the shrine they built for their national patron saint. They are inducting
their children into an imagined Cuban nation with a past in their ancestral land, a
present in Miami, and a future that they hope to reclaim once again in Cuba.22

A Blessing or a Threat?

America is likely to remain an overwhelmingly Christian country. Those who settle

definitively in the United States will probably always outnumber migrants who live
transnational lives. But changes in migration and religion are on the rise and signal
important changes on the way. More and more migrants will live transnational lives,
and they will use religion to do so. This is a good thing for the United States, rather
than something to deny or to attempt to halt.

These trends are not confined to the United States. In Europe, migrants also live
lives that cross borders by belonging to religious communities. Some sending-
country governments actively facilitate these linkages. The Paris Mosque, for
instance, with its many member mosques, is run by the government of Algeria. The
National Federation of Muslims, one of the largest Muslim organizations in France, is
run by the Moroccan government. The Turkish states' directorate for religious affairs,
the Turkish-Islamic Union for the Institution of Religion (DITIB) maintains foreign
branches that act as the government "caretaker" of Turks abroad and supports the
community's many Turkish-Islamic cultural organizations. Thus, indirectly, it controls
nearly half of all Turkish mosques (about 1,100) in Europe.23

Some Americans feel that keeping one foot in the United States and one foot in the
country that you come from will only lead to trouble. They believe it is impossible to
pursue American and homeland dreams at the same time. Samuel Huntington's
much-discussed 2004 book, Who Are We?, warned Americans that we are headed
toward our own internal "clash of civilizations" because Mexican immigrants do not
assimilate Anglo-Protestant values and because they remain behind linguistic and
political walls. To survive and thrive as a nation, many believe, America needs
newcomers to "become Americans," which means subscribing to a core set of values,
and abandoning their ancestral homes. Especially after September 11, they argue,
aren't those who are loyal to two countries suspect?

Others point out that many acts of terrorism and violence are perpetrated in the
name of God.24 Not just al-Qaeda but Hindu, Christian, and Jewish groups espouse
versions of faith that leave little room for argument. With some exceptions, like
Catholic liberation theology or Women Living Under Muslim Laws, it seems like there
are few progressive, tolerant groups using religion to promote a different end. These
critics find it hard to imagine a religious voice preaching inclusiveness and respect.

But such religious voices are out there, and they are the face of the future. Rather
than posing a threat, transnational migrants represent an opportunity. Instead of
precipitating a "clash of civilizations," they build bridges across cultures. They carry
ideas, introduce skills, and redistribute wealth. Like the Pakistani mosque-goers I
have been studying, they are translators—teaching people in the United States about
Islam and exporting a more liberal version of what it means to be Muslim back to
Pakistan. Like the Gujaratis, they are negotiators—figuring out how they can
reconcile the conflicting demands of Hindu and American values by still meeting their
aging parents' expectations about filial respect while taking their children to soccer
practice at the same time. Like the Brazilians who realize that "your last name isn't
going to get you a job in the U.S.," they are catalysts of change who demand equal
treatment for all at home.

By doing so, these migrants extend the boundaries of the collective good beyond our
national borders to include those in their homelands. They expand the dictionary of
the values and meanings we all share. What constitutes right and wrong, tolerance,
and fairness is transnationally, not nationally, determined. Fighting poverty,
sickness, or pollution is not just an American project. We need to embrace this
reality and use it to move forward. There is too much at stake to throw the religious
baby out with the bathwater. And there are all kinds of religious voices that can be
brought into the conversation. Some simply need help speaking up.

Clearly, there is cause for alarm when religious extremists want to make the world
over in their own image. There is also cause for concern when secular public space,
narrowed in the name of God, compromises basic rights. But the vast majority of
people are not religious extremists. They live transnational lives to achieve
something better for themselves and their families, not to perpetrate atrocities. In
India, Pakistan, Brazil, Ireland, or the United States, most of the people I talked with
were concerned about raising their children, and being able to live safely and
securely in places where the schools and police departments work. Their stories
could not be reduced to simple punch lines with clear heroes and villains. Their
dreams are dreams we can all agree on.

Finally, true diversity requires a willingness to confront this country's Christian biases
and how they limit the possibilities for difference and choice. Protestantism is what
Martin Marty calls "the wallpaper in the mental furnishing department in which
America lives, always in the room but barely noticed."25 While American culture
claims secularity and tolerance, in fact it demands religiosity, and religiosity of a
certain kind. Protestant assumptions and models permeate American corporations,
universities, and charitable institutions. The Bush administration's openly religious
orientation is new only in degree, not in kind, an explicit, more extreme version of
the marriage between religion and politics that has always been in place.

Women's rights and civil rights activists woke us up to the pervasive power of white,
male privilege. A similar conversation needs to take place around Protestant
privilege. This is not to deny the positive legacy of tolerance and diversity
bequeathed to us by our Protestant forebearers. It is to drive home how individuals
feel when they are on the wrong side of the default category. Just as women
internalize a certain minority status when the operative pronoun is "he," so Muslims,
Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews feel like outsiders when Christian cultural references
and practices are the automatic norm.

New immigrants and their family members around the world, regardless of their
address, are all important participants in this conversation. As the religious
panorama expands, our challenge is to construct a genuinely pluralistic community,
based on engagement and interaction with difference, rather than its simple
acknowledgment. This is a question not just for the newcomers and native-born
inside our borders, but one for the people, organizations, and social movements to
which they are connected across the globe.

Notes

1. Diwali is the Hindu New Year, often celebrated with a Festival of Lights, and
the Muslim Id al-Fitr is a celebration marking the end of the fast during
Ramadan.
2. Queen (2002:327).
3. Vásquez and Marquardt (2003:35–36).
4. Beyer (2001).
5. Spohn (2003: 266).
6. Vásquez and Marquardt (2003: 3).
7. In 1900, there were 43 generally recognized nation-states; by 1998, there
were 193—today the number is over 200 (Martin 2003). The number doubled
(90 to 180) from 1960 to the mid-1990s (Held et al 1999).
8. Quoted in a January 26, 2005 article by Katrin Bennhold, "Taking Networking
to the Next Level," International Herald Tribune, p. 1.
9. I use the term migrant, rather than immigrant or emigrant, to capture this in-
between status.
10. International Technical Meeting on Measuring Migrant Remittances, January
24–25, 2005. Available from: www.worldbank.org.
11. Claudia M. Buch and Anja Kuckulenz, "Worker Remittances and Capital Flows
to Developing Countries, " ZEW Discussion Paper No. 04–31 (April 2004).
12. The remaining 6 percent identified as Mormons, "Something Else" and "Don't
Know or Refused to Answer," at 2 percent each.
13. Barry A. Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keysar, using their figures from the
1990 NSRI (National Survey of Religious Identification) and the 2001 ARIS
(American Religious Identification Survey). Available from www.gc.cuny.edu.
 14. Kosmin et al (2001) cite that the number of adults "who do not subscribe to
any religious identification" doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million
in 2001.
15. Jasso et al (2003: 221).
16. Kosmin et al (2001).
17. Machacek (2003).
18. See Eickelman and Piscatori (1990).
19. Bowen (2004).
20. I borrowed this term from Vásquez and Marquardt (2003).
21. Hervieu-Léger (2000).
22. Tweed (1999).
23. Marechal, 2001: 32, cited in Lawrence (2004).
24. See work on religious violence by Scott Appleby, J. Harold Ellens, Mark
Juergensmeyer and Jessica Stern.
25. Quoted from an interview with Bob Abernathy, May 3, 2002, Religion & Ethics
Newsweekly, Episode 535, produced by Thirteen/WNET New York.

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Peggy Levitt is Associate Professor of Sociology and chair of that department at

Wellesley College and a Research Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International
Affairs and at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.
Her new book, God Needs No Passport: How Migrants are Transforming the
American Religious Landscape will be published by the New Press in 2007.