The Limits to Decoupling Ethnicity from Religion: A Japanese Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles

• In Event: 292 - Regular Session. Religion and Intersecting Identities

Abstract

Scholars studying immigration and religion eagerly proclaim that ethnicity becomes detached from religion in ethnic religious organizations after immigrants assimilate to their new country. The decoupling thesis posits that the ethnic religious organization will structurally assimilate to mirror Protestant churches, the religion will return to its ‘theological’ roots that promotes universalism, and the organization will turn into a multi-ethnic congregation. Using archival research and 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a 90 year old Los Angeles Japanese-Buddhist temple, this article partially validates while explaining the limits of this thesis. I exploreexplores how ethnicity persists in religious organizations if we reframe ethnicity as ethnic groupness, “a contextually fluctuating conceptual variable” (Brubaker 2002:167). I posit that ethnicity never full disappears from the organization. Rather, ethnicity waxes and wanescan be episodic: it crystallizes and becomes a grouping mechanism during important events and dissipates during mundane everyday events. Scholars miss the continued importance and persistence of ethnicity’s coupling with religion if traditional frameworks of ethnicity as an entity ‘in the world’ are utilized.

Author

• Andrew N. Le, UCLA