Religious Association, Social Incorporation, and the Search for Trust among Migrants from Ghana to the United States

• In Event: 242 - Section on International Migration Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 17. Immigrant Well-being

Abstract

Most studies of religion and immigration have viewed church-going as positive for social incorporation, having been influenced by a social capital understanding of trust-building as a strategic enterprise that facilitates the attainment of migrant inclusion and upward mobility. Yet an important question remains unaddressed, namely whether migrants’ patterns of religious association actually reflect the motivation to expand social capital, or whether other, more complex motivations might be at work. Utilizing transnational ethnographic data, I examine the subjective processes through which migrants from Ghana, West Africa, in Chicago decide where and with whom to go to church. I show that they are split in their choices between American evangelical congregations and Ghanaian congregations; and also that as a group they are torn between the motivation to diversify their church networks and the motivation to establish trust. I examine how church size and models of interaction facilitate trust in Ghanaian congregations but make it very difficult to establish in American evangelical congregations. These findings suggest that religious-based ties are often central within Ghanaians’ post-migration social networks, and that diverse pathways of religious association can lead to very different levels of social incorporation even among the same group of migrants. The study’s conceptual offering is a critique of the dominance of the social capital metaphor in studies of trust, countered with a more robust understanding of trust as something that is both strategically useful but also sought out for its own sake, as a relational good.

Author

• Nicolette Denise Manglos-Weber, University of Notre Dame