Recent Immigrant Religions in a Restructuring Metropolis: New Religious Landscapes in Chicago

Abstract

This essay examines the interrelation between recent immigrant religions and the current restructuring of America's largest metropolitan centers, using Chicago as a case study. New urban religious landscapes are placed into the context of the new American metropolis, with its postindustrial economy, regional reconfiguration, socioeconomic polarization, and increasing demographic diversity. A mapping of over 100 religious centers illuminates patterns of institutional siting throughout metropolitan Chicago, while an examination of locations, facilities, and memberships reveals wide socioeconomic variations both across and within new religious groups. Factors of ethnicity and theology are considered as well. The essay highlights one immigrant mosque on Chicago's north side as an institutional case study of spatial, temporal, and social dynamics at work in the geography of new urban religious landscapes.