c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Tired of the polarized rhetoric about immigrants, Peggy Levitt spent a decade researching four immigrant communities around Boston: Pakistani Muslims, Indian Hindus, Brazilian Protestants and Irish Catholics.

What she found is that the immigrant vision of the good society and religion’s role in that society is not that different from that of the average “American” _ in the middle, not at the extremes.

Levitt, a sociology professor at Wellesley College, is the author of the recent book, “God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape.” She argues that religious pluralism is essential, and says “American” religion is no longer American, but rather global religion.

Q: You describe immigrants as “transnational religious actors.” What do you mean by that?

A: Somebody who lives a life across borders, and many people do this using religion. Take Brazilians. They go to the Catholic Church or they go to an evangelical Protestant congregation that very much integrates them here but also has connections back to a congregation or a sister church back in Brazil.

Q: You also say they are best equipped to deal with religious and cultural difference in a post- 9/11 world. Why?

A: Because we live in a global world, and only knowing how to live in America just doesn’t cut it any more. The people who are on the forefront are those who are able to translate between, or build bridges between, multiple communities.

Q: Yet Osama Bin Laden is the epitome of a transnational type.

A: To me that’s religion on the margins, rather than religion in the middle. One of the main things I learned in this book … was we hear all this stuff about immigrants destroying the social fabric and there are going to be clashes of civilization. Well, what happens when you actually talk to immigrants? You find out that yes, there’s a small group of mini Osamas on the margin, but most people care much more about bread-and-butter issues like education and health and the environment.

Q: The number of Muslims and Buddhists doubled, and Hindus tripled, during the 1990s, yet they represent less than 3 percent of all Americans. You say that while their numbers are small, their cultural influence is great. How so?

A: In the immigration debates last summer, we saw these kind of skewed exaggerated views about who immigrants are and what they are going to bring to this country. Especially given world events, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about Muslims in particular and about the dark-skinned foreigner in general. That’s an imagination that’s fueled by ignorance, by lack of contact.

Immigrants and their children represent a quarter of the U.S. population. And that’s part of the population that’s moving to nontraditional areas … so this kind of diversity is just going to deepen and spread.

Q: At what point should immigrants stop wanting to worship in their native language and start adapting to English, or should American churches adapt to worshiping in a foreign tongue?

A: Asking someone to not worship in their native language is like asking a parent to sing a lullaby in a foreign language. It’s just the language of your heart. And so asking someone to speak English in school, OK, but asking someone to speak English when they’re praying to God, seems to me a very different thing.

Q: What does “true religious pluralism” mean to you?

A: I make a distinction between tolerance and pluralism. Tolerance means live and let live, separate but equal, you can do what you want to do, I’ll do what I want to do. There’s not a willingness to change and be changed and really interact in the process. Religious pluralism means being willing to engage with someone who’s different from you and being willing to allow their words and their values to become part of the conversation so that they can recognize themselves in it. Otherwise, they won’t want to come to the table or they won’t feel like there’s a place for them around the table.

Q: Do you see religious pluralism happening in the U.S.?

A: There is a lot of fear and suspicion, but there’s also a recognition on the part of people that we really need to have these conversations now. The Muslim folks that I talked with are really trying to do a lot more outreach work, trying to build bridges.

Many of us either ignore religion _ we’re oblivious to its salience, or we wish that it would go away, or we only want it to be our kind of religion. And those are stances that we can’t afford to take anymore; religion isn’t going away, and it’s getting more and more diverse.

Q: Your overall argument is that religion has a beneficial role to play in a globalized world. How do you reconcile that with the sometimes divisive role of religion, especially religiously connected terrorism?

A: That’s why you need to be having these conversations _ how are you going to take back those religious traditions from the fundamentalists or terrorists who would distort them, be they Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Christian?

You have to find the moderate people in all of those religious traditions who you can have a conversation with. My conversations writing this book convinced me that they’re really out there and some of them are very willing to be part of this conversation _ they just need to be invited into it.

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