The Visibility and Invisibility of Migrant Faith in the City: Diaspora Religion and the Politics of Emplacement of Afro-Christian Churches

Abstract

In today's post-industrial city, migrants and ethnic minorities are forming, through their religious practices, particular spaces of alterity, often at the ‘margin’ of the urban experience—for instance, in converting anonymous warehouses into places of worship. This paper examines diverse facets of the religious spatiality of Afro-Christian diasporic churches—from local emplacement to the more visible public parade of faith in the urban landscape. One of the aims is to explore to what extent particular spatial configurations and locations constitute ‘objective expression’ of social status and symbolic positionalities in the post-migration secular environment of the ‘host societies’. Without denying the impact of urban marginality, the paper shows how religious groups such as African Pentecostal and Prophetic churches are also engaged, in their own terms, in a transformative project of spatial appropriation, regeneration and re-enchantment of the urban landscape. The case study of the Congolese Kimbanguist Church in London and Atlanta also demonstrates the need to examine the articulation of local, transnational and global practices and imaginaries to understand how religious and ethnic identities are renegotiated in newly ‘localised’ diasporic settings.

Keywords:

• Diaspora Religion
• African Churches
• Urban Space
• Pentecostalism
• Kimbanguism

Acknowledgements

The project ‘The Religious Lives of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities: A Transnational Perspective (London, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg/Durban)’ was funded by the Ford Foundation through the SSRC, New York. I would like to thank all the members and coordinators of this international project (and in particular Josh DeWind, Peggy Levitt, Jose Casanova, Thomas Blom Hansen, Diana Wong and Manuel Vásquez) and the members of the London team (John Eade and Ann David) for their support at various stages of my research. My research among Congolese in the US (Atlanta), in collaboration with Manuel Vásquez (University of Florida), was funded by a small grant from the American Academy of Religion, for which I am grateful.

Notes

1. http://www.kicc.org.uk/.

2. ‘Need a spiritual boost? You could try living there’, Metro, 15 October 2010; ‘Opposition to plans for eight churches in Lawrence Road’, Tottenham and Wood Green Journal, 14 October 2010.

3. Created by televangelist Pat Robertson.

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnr7kl9qBQQ.

5. The two iconic colours of the church—green for hope (of prophetic salvation) and white for moral purity.

6. While most of these divisions were caused by conflicts in the diaspora, the first division of the Ilford parish was the consequence of a conflict over the inheritance of the leadership of the church in the Congo among the grandchildren of Simon Kimbangu. These schismatic tendencies and power struggles among Kimbanguists took many forms, reflecting tensions within the bureaucratic and prophetic domains (see Garbin 2010b). Contrary to the schismatic dynamics at work among the Apostolic churches studied by Werbner (2011) in the Botswanan context, the inter-generational dimension is not central in the conflicts among Kimbanguists.

7. Echoing what Sarró and Mélice (2010) described in the case of the Lisbon parade.

8. It is important to note that Bourdieu's vision of the arrangement of urban (and social) space is dynamic, as it is shaped by the uneven distribution and combination of different kinds of capital (economic, cultural, social or symbolic) among interdependent ‘agents’.