De Facto Congregationalism and Socioeconomic Mobility in Laotian and Vietnamese Immigrant Communities: A Study of Religious Institutions and Economic Change
Sociologist R. Stephen Warner has recently proposed that immigrant religious organizations in the United States tend to take on a de facto congregational form. By this, he means that they tend to become voluntary gatherings with lay involvement and control and professionalized clergies. In this stud...
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| Contributors: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2000
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| In: |
Review of religious research
Year: 2000, Volume: 41, Issue: 4, Pages: 453-470 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | Sociologist R. Stephen Warner has recently proposed that immigrant religious organizations in the United States tend to take on a de facto congregational form. By this, he means that they tend to become voluntary gatherings with lay involvement and control and professionalized clergies. In this study, we provide descriptions of two Southeast Asian religious organizations, one Vietnamese Catholic and one Laotian Buddhist. We examine how the concept of a de facto congregation can provide a theoretical framework for understanding how ethnic communities in these two groups gave rise to immigrant ethnic congregations. Further, we attempt to describe the mechanics of congregationalization by discussing how members of the community in question formed their religious organizations for the perpetuation of cultural traditions. We suggest that although cultural preservation was a key manifest function of the church and the temple, these two also served a latent function of expressing and promoting socioeconomic mobility. Both the voluntary character of the organizations and the mobility associated with them tended, ironically, to reshape the organizations into non-traditional congregational forms. |
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| ISSN: | 2211-4866 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Review of religious research
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3512315 |