A tie to the old-country religion remains one of the ways by which ethnic group identity is expressed and maintained in America. Recent survey results suggest, however, that this relationship between religion and ethnicity is not as strong as it once may have been. Moreover, the degree of ethnic and religious identification, as well as the strength of their corelationship, varies from one ethnic group to another. After a presentation of these facts, we then discuss what they mean for ethnic assimilation and religious development in these waning years of the twentieth century.
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References
1.
1. Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), p. 43.
2.
2. Egon Mayer, Love and Tradition: Marriage between Jews and Christians (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), p. 48.
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3. Phillip E. Hammond, “The Extravasation of the Sacred and the Crisis in Liberal Protestantism,” in Liberal Protestantism: Realities and Possibilities, ed. R. S. Michaelsen and W. C. Roof (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1986), pp. 51-64.
4.
4. The other defining characteristic is the existence of a myth of origin, a story accounting for the peoplehood of those sharing an identity.
5.
5. U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Ancestry of the Population by State: 1980, Supplementary Report P.C. 80-S1-10, 1983.
6.
Rodney Stark and C. Y. Glock, American Piety (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
7.
7. J. S. Olson, The Ethnic Dimension in American History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), p. 436.
8.
8. Harold J. Abramson, “Religion,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. S. Thernstrom, A. Orlov, and O. Handlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
9.
9. In actuality, of course, there can be exceptions, as the labels “jack Mormon,”“banned Amish,” or “cultural Jew” suggest.
10.
10. Richard D. Alba, Italian Americans (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 89.
11.
11. Phillip E. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992).
12.
12. This question followed one that determined whether the respondent was native- or foreign-born.
13.
13. A similar complication forced us to exclude Jews from this analysis. Jews answered the question of national origin with “Germany,”“Russia,” and so on, requiring us to use religious identification to determine their ethnicity. That, in turn, meant we could not investigate their ethnicity and religion separately.
14.
14. This is not the entire explanation, however, as is seen from a parallel study to be discussed later in this article. There, with a sample that is national and 50 percent larger, the same characteristics are found among German American Catholics.
15.
15. The procedure of combining ethnic groups this way gives greater weight to groups having more members. If, instead, the several group scores are averaged, the results are nearly identical.
