Exploring Religious Diversity and Immigration
A Conversation with Stephen Warner
Brian Steensland
April 1, 1997
Religious pluralism raises challenging questions for a democratic society. What holds together a nation that seems increasingly comprised of different religious traditions? To what extent do different values deserve equal respect? What are the prospects for a basis for common morality? Such concerns are increasingly on my mind as newspaper articles remind me almost weekly of the conflicts across America in courtrooms, classrooms, and congregations that revolve around issues of religious diversity. To the extent that these questions can be effectively addressed, both in my own mind and in broader public discourse, it seems necessary to learn more about the people who are unlike ourselves—where they come from, what their values are, how they live. Increasingly, these people are non-European immigrants—in one historian's words, "strangers from a different shore." To this end, I recently spoke with R. Stephen Warner, a Heading scholar of ethnic and immigrant religion, about a research project aimed at filling in some of the gaps in public and academic knowledge concerning the religious traditions of the "new immigrants," and the demographic and cultural trends that will play a growing role in national affairs in the years to come. A few background details are in order. Even though America's social landscape always seems under construction in one way or another, the issues raised by immigration have not always appeared as compelling as they do today. Indeed, Oscar Handlin, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of immigration in America, speculated at mid-century that immigration was "a dimly remote memory, generations away, which had influenced the past but appeared unlikely to count for much in the present or future." This ...
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