God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape

by Peggy Levitt

A major new examination of the American immigrant experience, revealing how recent immigrants are transforming religion in America and around the globe.

"People who know how to live in more than one cultural world have mastered the art of living in this global age, which is good for this country and for their homelands." —from God Needs No Passport

Thousands of Hindus fill the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City to worship with their guru from Gujarat, India. The Boston Garden plays host to a packed house of Brazilian Protestants, with ministers beamed in via satellite. Similar scenes are played out across middle America, where millions of new immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have settled over the past decade. While many Americans expect that immigrants will trade in one membership card for another, sociologist Peggy Levitt's pathbreaking new account argues instead that many keep one foot in their countries of origin by participating in religious institutions—made possible by communications technology and the ease of international travel—that are a powerful but little-known force in today's world.

Immigrants are changing the face of religious diversity in the United States, Levitt argues, helping to make American religion just as global as U.S. corporations. In a book with stunning implications for today's immigration debates—where commentators routinely refer to a "clash of civilizations"—Levitt shows that the new realities of religion and migration are subtly challenging the very definition of what it means to be an American. God Needs No Passport reveals that American values are no longer just made in the U.S.A. but around the globe.

Genres: Religion, Immigration, Nonfiction

270 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[Holly Bea]

read for my thesis
super useful frameworks/models for understanding transnationalism/religion -- will come back and use them later.
doesn't touch very much on buddhism.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Levitt posits a post-identity America, where neither national nor religious affiliation gets in the way of the everyday business of just being American. Beyond being annoyingly blithe, I don't think this is all that accurate across as broad a spectrum as Levitt claims. Her book samples a very homogenous cross-section of American immigrants: religious, religiously-tolerant, and educated middle-class moderates and liberals, but then extrapolates this to conclude that diversity is a universal good, universally accepted. I agree with the former, with some reservations; my reservations as to the latter are somewhat larger. I've read enough on certain reactionary movements to take Levitt's overly-optimistic outlook with a large grain of salt. This is an interesting and necessary study, but too shortsighted.