Affinity, Identity, and Transcendence: The Experience of Religious Racial Integration in Diverse Congregations

How do members of disparate ethnic and racial heritages come to identify and achieve stable affiliation with multiracial congregations? This article specifies an approach to understanding member experiences of corporate belonging in diverse congregations using ethnic identity theory. Synthesizing ethnographic data drawn from two extensive case studies, the article provides a heuristic model for understanding the process by which members of disparate ethnic and racial heritages come to identify and achieve stable affiliation with multiethnic/multiracial congregations.Three“moments” (affinitywiththecongregation,identityreorientation,andethnictranscendence) represent key phases in the lived religious experience of members as they co-construct common bonds of spiritual kinship. Cautions and suggestions are provided for future research. The study of multiethnic/multiracial congregations is quite new, growing in the last decade, and particularly with the publication of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s book, Divided by Faith (Emerson and Smith 2000). While a notable spurt of scholarship has already occurred (e.g., Becker 1998; Christerson, Emerson, and Edwards 2005; Dougherty 2003; Dougherty and Huyser 2008; Edwards 2008b; Emerson 2006, 2008; Emerson and Kim 2003; Garces-Foley 2007, 2008; Marti 2005, 2008b; Stanczak 2006), an understudied dynamic within diverse congregations is the formation and negotiation of subjective identities among members who join them. How do members of disparate ethnic and racial heritages come to identify and achieve stable affiliation with multiracial congregations? While scholars distinguish integration from assimilation in order to emphasize that a multiethnic/multiracial congregation can allow members to maintain aspects of their separate racial/ethnic cultures while participating in a new, shared culture within the congregation (DeYoung et al. 2003; Emerson 2006; Garces-Foley 2007), the lived experience of integrating disparate ethnoracial groups within these congregations is unknown. Studies show that ethnically specific identities may be subsumed within a congregationally specific identity constructed around value-rational ideals, yet these same studies also show that members of diverse congregations experience inconvenience, discomfort, and outright conflict in their cross-ethnic interactions (Dougherty and Huyser 2008; Garces-Foley 2007; Marti 2005). A similar dynamic is the seemingly paradoxical finding that congregants retain particularistic ethnic designations while embracing a broader Christian identity that crosses racial lines (Alumkal 2001, 2005; Emerson 2006; Jeung 2004; Kim 2004, 2006). The relationship between ethnic identity and multiracial congregational membership is perceived as ambiguous, contradictory, and difficult to sustain, and the apparent contradiction between ethnic specificity and religious unity makes the basis for integration unclear. The difficulty in disentangling the layers of the self among members of diverse congregations is due to the insufficient conceptualization of ethnoracial identity and its relative boundedness to concrete social situations. Any discussion of race or ethnicity invokes complex issues, and distinctions between “optional” versus “imposed” race-ethnicity are always subject to overarching