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ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has declared multiculturalism to be in retreat, yet multiculturalist discourses and practices remain salient in many realms of social reproduction. This paper explores multiculturalism in predominantly white churches in the U.S. South, a region that has seen significant demographic transformations due to immigration. Church outreach to immigrants draws on theologies that reject racial prejudice and that call for the accommodation and celebration of cultural differences. Drawing on qualitative research with pastors and congregants, this article explores how multiculturalist practice is both re-working and reinforcing existing social relationships in Christian faith communities. Multiculturalist practices, we show, disrupt racialized hierarchies long embedded in white churches. But they simultaneously leave racialized distinctions and inequalities intact, in part by maintaining separation between immigrants and non-immigrants. This case illustrates the everyday politics of multiculturalism and the ways in which the boundaries of social membership take shape in ordinary, seemingly non-political spaces.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Geoff Schwitzgebel from the University of South Carolina for producing . The authors also thank Breanne Grace and Ben Roth for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The term “mainline” describes long-established Protestant denominations in the U.S., including the Episcopalian, United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, and Presbyterian (U.S.A.) churches. These are typically distinguished from evangelical churches, which have a more literal approach to scripture and which emphasize the experience of personal conversion.
2. The term “international” is commonly used in the South, especially among Protestants, to refer to immigrants.
3. Mexicans constitute around a third of immigrants in these three states. No other nationality approaches this percentage.
4. This binary had been complicated in the past by the presence of small communities of Jews and Syrians, as well as by acts of racial transgression by blacks and whites (see Gualtieri Citation2009).
5. Immigration has brought non-Christian faith communities (Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh) to the South, but we focus here exclusively on Christian faith communities, which are more numerically significant.
6. Immigrant outreach is rare in traditionally black congregations, though some black Christian leaders have mobilized against anti-immigration laws in the South.
7. For example, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
8. It should be noted that segregated worship is not unique to the South. Blacks and whites across the U.S. tend to worship separately, reflecting broad patterns of racial discrimination, as well as transplantation of Southern black traditions in the North through black migration.
9. The transplantation of Northern whites to the South has also played a role.
10. There are important differences between the terms “multiethnic/multiracial” and “multicultural”. In evangelical circles, the former often denotes racially integrated, non-traditional worship conducted English, while the latter often refers to the accommodation of multiple cultural/linguistic groups within a church community, typically through separate worship (as we describe below). There are some tensions between these concepts (see Stetzer Citation2013), but we observed that they are commonly used interchangeably to describe an ethos of inclusiveness and respect for cultural differences. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches tend to use the term “multiculturalism” more explicitly than do evangelicals.
11. Not coincidentally, contemporary overseas missionaries increasingly reject American ethnocentrism and validate the cultural traditions of “unreached” populations (see Pelkmans Citation2007; Hancock Citation2013).