Religion and Ethnic Diversity

As in other regions of the world, ethnicity and religion have intertwined so closely in the United States that it is often appropriate to speak of synthetic “ethnoreligious” identifications—German-Catholic, Japanese-Buddhist, Indian-Sikh—rather than considering ethnicity and religion as entirely separate categories. On the other hand, ethnic and religious identifications have at times escalated in importance to the minimization of the other: for example, it is possible to distinguish between the independent Polish National Catholic Church, which may have at times prioritized ethnic considerations to a greater degree than did the (also intensely nationalist) canonical Polish Catholic Church. Ethnoreligious identifications have also been closely linked in the United States to processes of migration, both for indigenous peoples (Native Americans) and for so-called immigrants, who, given their broad range of migratory practices (such as permanent settlement, sojourning, cyclical migration), may more simply and aptly be called “migrants.”

Migration has proven to be at once a “theologizing” and “ethnicizing” experience, as new expressions of ethnic and religious identification have emerged in the United States, often in dialectic relationship. Yet, both “de-theologization”— in the form of religious nominalization, disaffiliation, or loss of faith—and “de-ethnicization,” through, for example, processes of assimilation, have characterized the U.S. ethnoreligious experience. In short, ethnicity and religion have intersected and diverged in widely varying patterns in U.S. history: while it is possible to discern broader ethnoreligious trends and assert useful overarching generalities, it is also critical to consider the idiosyncrasies of particular cases.

Any discussion of ethnicity and religion in U.S. history must take into consideration the complexities and historical development of ethnic and religious classification. For most of U.S. history, hardly anyone used the terms ethnic or ethnicity, and certainly not in the current sense of a culturally and historically—as opposed to biologically—determined phenomenon: not until the 1950s did “ethnicity” gain terminological currency and begin to achieve widespread usage. Before then, “race” and “nation” provided the preferred nomenclature for individuals and groups, both those that today might be distinguished as “racial,” on the one hand, and as “ethnic,” on the other.

Thus, historical commentators referred to the “Italian,” “Slav,” or “Irish” races, in much the same way as they did to the “Asiatic,” “Negro,” or “Hispanic” races. Until the 1990s, it had been common to assume that, when earlier commentators used the term race to refer to those groups and individuals that might today be called “ethnic,” they simply meant “ethnic,” in the modern sense. Yet, revisionist historians and practitioners of “critical whiteness studies” have demonstrated convincingly that “race” often indicated both cultural and biological underpinnings, regardless of whether the term was applied to blacks, Native Americans, Poles, Greeks, or any number of other “groups.”

Given the ambiguous and evolving meanings of ethnicity alongside race and nationality in U.S. history, this article considers “ethnic,” “racial,” and “national” groups and individuals (in the commonplace, contemporary sense of those terms) together, in conjunction with religious experience. This is not to say that the experience of Asians in U.S. history was the same as for blacks or for Poles; it is merely to adopt a definition of “ethnicity” broad enough to encompass a wide range of cultural, social, and historical phenomena.

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