Due to high rates of immigration and corresponding demographic shifts, it has become increasingly important for those studying the United States, Canada, and Western European nations to take account of these countries' foreign-born populations. The study of religion is no exception, which is highlighted particularly well in Phillip Connor's Immigrant Faith: Patterns of Immigrant Religion in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Using both qualitative evidence and high-quality quantitative data from some of the world's largest immigrant-receiving countries, Connor shows that immigrants are simultaneously both revitalizing and reshaping the religious landscapes of their receiving countries. Conversely, Connor also demonstrates the importance of considering religious factors in scholarship on immigration. In doing so, this book makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing conversation between scholars of religion and immigration in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.
Immigrant Faith offers a wealth of useful data on immigrants' religious beliefs and practices, broken down into four stages or sections: the role of religion in the decision of whether and where to migrate (“moving faith”), the corresponding changes in religious beliefs and practices resulting from migration (“changing faith”), the role of religion in immigrants' integration and the integration of faith into immigrants' daily lives in their receiving countries (“integrating faith”), and the transference of religious beliefs and values to second-generation immigrants (“transferring faith”). Interspersed throughout these chapters, Connor also relates stories of immigrants' real experiences with religion and the immigration process. As Connor acknowledges, these anecdotes are not necessarily generalizable, but they nevertheless add rich detail to the already impressive array of quantitative data he has managed to collect and analyze. With an astonishing degree of both breadth and depth, Connor provides a detailed and occasionally intimate portrait of immigrants' religious lives across key stages of the immigration process.
While this level of data collection would be difficult enough for a single country, Connor manages to pool data from a variety of sources to cover a huge swath of the world's immigrant-receiving nations. This allows him to draw comparisons across a range of differing religious populations entering nations with divergent historical and political contexts. Connor takes advantage of this variation to examine how different immigrant groups respond in divergent ways according to their countries/religions of origin and the religious context of their receiving country. This is done particularly well in the second and third chapters, where he examines the various ways in which immigrants respond to their new environment and the interplay between religious change and immigrant integration. By leveraging data that cuts across groups and communities, Connor provides a range of new and important insights into the ways in which immigrants from differing backgrounds react and change both religiously and socially in their new environments. The examination of how members of religious minorities respond differently than members of religious majorities is particularly insightful, as was Connor's discussion of how religious change can entail both increased and decreased religiosity depending on immigrants' countries/religions of origin. In doing so, Connor makes a major contribution to our understanding of religious adaptation. Despite its ambition, Immigrant Faith manages to avoid feeling overstretched, and Connor transitions almost seamlessly between groups and countries in each section.
In fact, Immigrant Faith could be criticized for not going deeply enough in parsing out differences between immigrant groups and across national contexts. The topic's breadth and the text's limited space inevitably force Connor to gloss over important dimensions of variation. Scholars of any particular immigrant group, religion, or region will likely feel as though the text gives inadequate attention to the nuances that help identify and distinguish these from others. Indeed, Immigrant Faith seems to deemphasize or ignore certain differences while highlighting others with little justification.
Moreover, the empirical analyses used in the book could have been much more systematized. Throughout the book, Connor jumps from data at varying levels, years, and among different groups with little pre-established criteria for what constitutes strong evidence for his claims. While the text flows smoothly despite this approach, it raises concerns about how results were selected for inclusion. The data are dealt with in a somewhat inconsistent manner. However, this is likely a necessary byproduct of examining such a diverse array of groups in drastically varying contexts in such a limited space, and it may very well inspire dissatisfied readers to conduct more focused, rigorous tests with more clearly specified hypotheses to better refine the results offered in the book.
The analysis also suffers from a lack of panel data observing immigrants before and after migration. While this is an understandable deficit that plagues most social scientific inquiry into immigration patterns, it is nevertheless an important obstacle to the development of a clear understanding of how groups choose to migrate and change as a result of the migration process. With a subject as intimate as religion, this kind of data is all the more necessary to remove as much as possible the potential biases that recollection entails.
Ultimately, Immigrant Faith is a strictly descriptive project with little in the way of over-arching theory. The description is incredibly detailed and supported by a rich set of quantitative data and anecdotal evidence, but more explanation of the patterns described throughout the text seems necessary. Connor often teeters on the cusp of providing or at least attempting to provide some explanations, but Immigrant Faith repeatedly pulls back from the task of trying to tell us why we see the observed differences we do across groups and national contexts.
However, while Immigrant Faith leaves some broader — and important — questions unanswered, it will nevertheless serve as a valuable resource both for readers seeking an introduction to the subject and more knowledgeable scholars looking for detailed statistical data on particular groups or receiving countries.
