Study: Immigration patterns change church communities
BY MARGUERITE RIGOGLIOSO
Research on how the organizational composition of communities shifts over time can provide insights not only into how our quality of life is evolving, but also into how business organizations compete. This is one reason Glenn Carroll studies the social dynamics of local communities throughout the United States.
Carroll's most recent study looks at how changing immigration patterns at the turn of the 19th century affected participation in religious institutions, and what the mechanisms were that made people turn toward—or away from—their churches, temples and other religious meeting places. The key finding is that the most important factor in spurring church attendance was a great and sudden influx of immigrants of different denominations or faiths. Individuals turned to their familiar religions, the religions that had been a part of their community and its identity for many years, when confronted with high numbers of newly arriving immigrants from different faiths.
Carroll, the Laurence W. Lane Professor of Organizational Behavior and Change, and Özgecan Koçak, a who earned a PhD at Stanford and is now an assistant professor of management at Columbia University, found that many earlier theories did not hold up. Those theories argued that religious attendance increased as religious diversity increased because of competition among churches for new and old members among people who already lived in the area. "If those arguments were correct, we would see things like more Sunday schools being established as religious diversity increases, but that is not the case," Koçak says. Instead, the increases came as new residents who practiced different religions moved to an area. For instance, attendance at Protestant churches increased in a community when a disproportionately large group of Catholic immigrants arrived in the area.
Looking at membership in religious institutions in all counties and large cities across the United States in three different time periods—1890, 1906 and 1916—Carroll and Koçak found that where new churches or Sunday schools were established, the motivation was not competition for new members but rather the need to accommodate the influx of existing members of those religious groups who had not attended before.
If threats to a group's identity from immigration spurred attendance, melting-pot situations, more common in cities, resulted in decreased activity at religious meeting places. "People who encountered those of different faiths began to question the absolutism of their own religion and to see it as something in which they had more choice," Carroll says. "In this sense the study confirms early theories in the sociology of religion arguing that with increased diversity of religious denominations, people would start to doubt their own faith."
Marguerite Rigoglioso is a freelance writer.