Migrational Religion

Context and Creativity in the Latinx Diaspora

João B. Chaves

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Print ISBN: 9781481315944
• eBook ISBN: 9781481315968
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Many scholars have documented how migration from Latin America to the United States shapes the interconnected spheres of religious participation, political engagement, and civic formation in host countries. What has largely gone unexplored is how the experiences of migration and adaptation to the host country also shape the ecclesiological arrangements, theological imagination, and communal strategies of immigrant religious networks. These communities maintain close ties with their home countries while simultaneously developing a religious life that distinguishes them both from their home countries and from faith communities of the dominant culture in their host countries.

João Chaves offers an account of the dynamics that shape the role of immigrant churches in the United States. Migrational Religion acts as a case study of a network formed by communities of Brazilian immigrants who, although affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, formed a distinctive ethnic association. Their churches began to appear in the United States in the 1980s due to Brazilian Baptist missionary activity. As Brazilian migration increased in the last decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of Brazilian evangelical churches were founded to cater to first-generation immigrants. Initially their leaders conceived of these churches as extensions of their denomination in Brazil. However, these church communities were under constant pressure to adapt to their rapidly changing context, and the challenges of immigrant living pushed them in exciting new directions.

Brazilian churches in the United States faced a number of issues peculiar to their nature as diasporic communities: undocumented parishioners, membership fluctuation caused by national and international migration patterns, anti-immigrant prejudice, and more. Based on six years of ethnographic work in eleven congregations across the United States, dozens of interviews with Brazilian pastors, and extensive archival history in English and Portuguese, Migrational Religion documents how such churches adapted to unique challenges, and reveals how the diasporic experience fosters incipient theologies in churches of the Latinx diaspora.

1

Framing

Diasporic Networks and Immigrant Christianity

In short, borders fuel many of the fears of our time, and they are invoked ever more frequently without any consideration for their real effectiveness. They multiply at the same rate as disorder. Some of them, even if they have no legal existence, nonetheless determine the course of existence of millions of people.

Manlio Graziano1

Within the context of globalization and transnational movements, simply stated the peoples called Hispanics, Latinos, and Latinas in the United States are those who have roots in Latin America. But as is the case for much of life, what seems simple may be quite complex.

Edwin Aponte2

It is 2016, and during an apparently unpretentious summer afternoon in San Francisco, California, a group of prominent transnational religious leaders are meeting to advance the cooperative work of their religious network. Although several participants in the meeting speak at least two languages, English is not spoken among them during sessions. One of the keynote speakers for the group of approximately forty pastors is one of the most successful authors of the past decade, with fifteen million books sold in over seventy countries and a blockbuster movie based on one of his books. Another speaker is a pastor of a church with over fourteen thousand members and the founder of a network with considerable social, economic, and political influence in one of the most prosperous Latin American states. The attendees and event organizers include a pastor of a multisite church in the Bay Area, the pastor of a megachurch in Florida whose thousands of members speak English mostly as a second language, a church leader whose social media accounts reveal relationships with prominent politicians in his country of origin, and a number of pastors who would later attend an event with the president of their country, Jair Bolsonaro, when he visited the United States on official business. This was the 2016 annual meeting of the Ordem dos Pastores Batistas Brasileiros na América do Norte (Order of Brazilian Baptist Pastors in North America [OBBPNA])—a group formed mostly of Brazilian Baptists whose churches are affiliated to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) but whose denominational life and transnational influence are marked by ethnic and linguistic boundaries that transcend official institutional affiliations.3

The attendees and organizers of this meeting comprised some of the immigrant leaders on whose communities this manuscript focuses; communities whose complexities and value may escape the gaze of those not familiar with their languages, cultural codes, and transnational movements. In these communities, the transnational prestige and social capital of their leaders—clearly illustrated by their access to political, cultural, and religious elites in their countries of origin—coexist with the fact that the majority of their members are undocumented immigrants from the Global South. Many of these latter start businesses that earn them much higher wages than those earned by the average US citizen.4 Their financial contributions and voluntary work help support foreign missions, social initiatives, salaries of church workers, and the purchase of church buildings. Undocumented Christians also worship in their immigrant communities, together with compatriots who include university professors, nurses, high-school teachers, government officials, police officers, professional soccer players, mixed martial arts fighters, and international students. The story that unites immigrant religious leaders with considerable transnational access, undocumented Christians who populate immigrant churches, and foreign-born students and workers who prefer to worship in their native tongue is one of migration. This story is multifaceted, but it is marked by an overarching sentiment of unbelonging that, in conjunction with complex migration patterns, informs central elements in the trajectories of religious communities. It is this multifaceted and complex story that this book tells.5

Migration and Theologies

This book offers a particular narrative that advances a broad thesis. In other words, although the following pages focus mostly on the story of a circumscribed network of faith communities of the Latinx diaspora in the United States, my overarching argument engages the fields of World Christianity, Latinx Studies, American Religious History, Theology, and Migration Studies. While Migrational Religion tells of how immigrants from Latin America are changing the religious landscape of the United States broadly speaking, it also describes how their experiences of migration and adaptation affect the role and identity of particular immigrant faith communities. The particularity and historical contributions of my argument become clear in the narrative of the specific group on which I focus—a network of denominationally connected churches formed primarily of undocumented immigrants, which are sometimes led by individuals with considerable transnational prestige. Yet the particularities of this narrative contain lessons that can be applied toward a broader conceptual understanding of immigrant faith communities.

One of the ways in which the US context affects immigrant faith communities is by upsetting the theological imagination of Global South Christians who migrate to this country.6 Although immigrants often remain within the general contours of the theological frameworks provided by their particular traditions, the struggles of immigrant living create space for incipient immigrant theologies, which are born out of contextual challenges that shape faith communities forced to search for their own theological self-understanding vis-à-vis historical allegiances and external demands. Put simply, the contextual effects of migration push immigrant religious networks to both reconfigure aspects of the theological arrangements imagined in their constituents’ home countries and uncover the theological limitations of the specific traditions to which they become affiliated in their host country. I recognize that faith communities—immigrant or not—often engage in practices that may differ from the official theologies of their particular traditions for contextual purposes. These incipient immigrant theologies, however, are situated in a particular liminal space between pragmatic forms of community survival and new theological articulations.

Paying attention to this dynamic is important because, for a great many immigrants from Latin America, their theological imagination is an indispensable part of their worldview. As such, theological convictions are central to a number of social, civic, and behavioral commitments that help shape immigrant identity. Attending to this helps us transcend reductionist notions of immigrant identity, which can otherwise insulate the religious lives of immigrants from other meaningful activities, imply that immigrant identities are configured solely in the immigrants’ countries of origin, or even suggest that immigrant religious life does not posit creative challenges to the role of churches as vehicles of adaptation.7

In immigrant communities of faith, the struggles of daily life connected to migration dynamics affect how parishioners imagine the function, meaning, and identity of their churches. More specifically, in the churches of the Latinx diaspora, the quotidian social and existential unbelonging of immigrant living is in dialectical relationship with ecclesiological and theological convictions. Immigrant life in the United States often creates a sense of not belonging to society; in diasporic faith communities, this unbelonging often sheds light on the limitations of traditional theological systems and ecclesiological arrangements. That is not to say that immigrant communities of faith necessarily create formal theological treatises. The communities considered here do not compose official theological statements explicitly calling into question available formal theologies. The immigrant theological unbelonging created by sociological factors, however, interrogates traditional commitments in ways that reveal the insufficiency of available formal theologies in dealing with issues faced by immigrant communities. This book narrates a particular history of an immigrant religious network and reveals some general implications of this history for a broader understanding of American religious life, thereby uncovering understudied aspects in the literature on World Christianity and speaking to ways in which incipient theologies develop.

Imagine theologies as maps of an always-changing land drawn by itinerant cartographers or inhabitants, perhaps immigrants. Changes in landscape, geopolitics, and in the cartographers themselves make old maps obsolete and require the production of new ones that better represent the new realities. Intellectual elites with specific agendas, who are often tempted to be more particular to the cartographers themselves than descriptive of groups they claim to represent, construct new maps and new cartographies in response to the perceived inadequacies of old theological maps. The varieties of Anglo-European theologies, Latin American Liberation theologies, Latinx theologies, Black theologies, and Feminist theologies, to name a few, are a testament to the fact that theological maps are tentative, limited, and temporary. Theologies are in constant dialogue with contexts. Contextual changes, such as the ones faced by migrants trying to adapt to a new land, are often pregnant with theological possibilities.8 Theological constructions that address perceived needs in minoritized communities have great value in the sense that the theologians who produce them are often indeed invested in their conceptualization of the community’s best interest. Such theologians also have the training, social capital, resources, and networking abilities to facilitate the dissemination of their ideas. The precariousness of theological interventions that are not developed in community, however, shows itself in the potential gaps present in the nuanced distinction between the use of a community’s struggle for the theologizing of traditional academic theologians and the way in which theological convictions develop in actual faith communities. It is the latter concern that this project attempts to engage. Migrational Religion presents a historically grounded account of how an incipient immigrant theology has developed in a particular network of religious communities. Ethnographic work and interviews, even when not presented in traditional format, are also central to this story. As such, this book functions primarily as a narrative of particular historical developments as they happened on the ground, rather than constructing an ideal theological reality. Although this manuscript considers the theological implications of this history, it is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Brazilian Baptists in the United States

The particular religious network that is the focus of Migrational Religion is one formed of communities of Brazilian Baptist immigrants that participated in the Associação de Igrejas Batistas Brasileiras na America do Norte (Association of Brazilian Baptist Churches in North America [AIBBAN]). These churches started to appear consistently on the US religious landscape in the 1980s after the Brazilian Baptist Convention (BBC)—influenced by the SBC—sent a missionary to reach the Iberian Portuguese population on the American East Coast. Migration to the United States from Portugal and the Azores was initially driven by the needs of the whaling industry, which shaped immigration to New England and California from the 1870s until the 1920s. From the 1960s to the 1980s, another wave of migration increased the numbers of immigrants from Portugal and the Azores in these regions.9 Initially, it was this Iberian Portuguese population that the BBC had in mind when it sent a missionary to the United States.

Brazilian migration to the United States, however, grew in the last decades of the twentieth century, and as thousands of Brazilian evangelicals migrated to the United States, hundreds of Brazilian evangelical churches were created to cater to these immigrants. These Baptist communities were under constant pressure to adapt to their rapidly changing context as immigrant churches. Initially their leaders—male pastors who wanted to replicate the communities of the BBC from which they came—conceived of these churches as extensions of their denomination in Brazil. The challenges of immigrant living, however, pushed these church communities in a direction that moved them beyond their usual role in Brazil.

Brazilian Baptists in the United States are part of what historian of missions Andrew Walls has called “the new Christian diaspora.” In this project, the SBC and its Brazilian Baptist associates name the transnational network whose story I am telling. Limiting this story to a primary, well-defined religious network allows for a meso-level analysis that does two things: it avoids the broad generalizations of macrolevel approaches that are often present in works that deal with World Christianity across large geographical regions, and it skirts the tendency of microlevel studies of individual transnational religious communities to show little evidence of or connection to a broader context of transnational religious networks. This meso-level analysis enables me to introduce major individuals and institutions in more detailed fashion than would be typical of macrolevel studies, without precluding me from tracing general implications for broader religious landscapes, as many microlevel analyses unfortunately do.10

The close historical connection between Brazilian Baptists and the SBC provides an additional benefit for the study of World Christianity. For though concepts such as “reverse mission” and “multidirectional mission” are widely accepted across an array of fields that deal with transnational religious networks, more studies that trace how these phenomena develop within a particular network of immigrants from Latin America are needed. The historical and ideological Southern Baptist/Brazilian Baptist relationships represent an ideal case study for illustrating how these concepts develop across chronological and geographical boundaries. Under Southern Baptist control, the BBC already had missionaries in other Latin American countries and in Europe by 1911, and missionaries who received training in Brazil worked among Mexican and Italian immigrants in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. The multidirectional nature of missions was an assumption in the global network of Baptists, not a novel reality. A brief commentary on this connection, therefore, is important in order to place my analysis of Brazilian Baptist immigrant communities in the United States within a broader historical context. This latter will help illustrate how denominationally informed transnational networks, like immigrant networks in general, “depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and their public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state.”11

The SBC and Their Brazilian Baptists

Generally speaking, Southern Baptists shaped the theological imagination of Brazilian Baptists strongly.12 The SBC, which is now the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, began in 1845 because of a controversy about slavery.13 The racialized form in which the SBC developed in the United States is well documented.14 The ways in which the denomination exported its racialized gospel to many countries around the world, however, are less widely known.15 For example, Brazil was one of the most successful fields ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Framing
• 2. Reversing
• 3. Growing
• 4. Connecting
• 5. Wrestling
• 6. Morphing
• 7. Mapping
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index