Abstract
The concept of ethnic transcendence—defined as the process of co-formulating a shared religious identity among diverse members that supersedes their racial and ethnic differences through congregational involvement—captures a critical aspect of successfully integrating different racial and ethnic groups into a single, commonly shared, multi-ethnic congregation. Drawing on classic theoretical resources from Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, this paper expands on previous scholarship by conceptually articulating two different paths for the achievement of ethnic transcendence in multiracial congregations. In the first path, ethnic transcendence supports and encourages congregational diversification by inspiring members and mobilizing them to contribute their efforts to accomplish a common religious mission. In the second path, the achievement of ethnic transcendence involves the sublimation of congregational members’ religious selves to an overarching moral collective. Both paths involve privileging religious identities in favor of a particularistic ethnic or racial identity. Moreover, through both paths, the development of congregationally specific religious identities results in joining with co-members of different ethno-racial ancestries as a type of spiritually-derived kinship. Due to the fact that ethnic transcendence is an interactive process, congregational diversity is a bi-directional phenomenon representing the extent to which members allow for the integration of separate ethnicities/races into a common congregation through idealized and richly-symbolic notions of connection and belonging to a congregation. Overall, this paper suggests a heuristic framework that productively expands the concept of ethnic transcendence, allows an approach for observing cross-ethnic/inter-racial organizational processes, and ultimately contributes toward understanding how congregations (whether church, temple, or mosque) pursue alternative identity reconstruction projects to sustain cohesive collective identities.
Highlights
The core contribution of this paper is to provide conceptual resources for explaining the process by which diverse congregations become diversified
Multiracial congregations are very defined as churches that have at least 20% of their membership being different from the majority population in terms of race or ethnicity [1,2]
While ethnic transcendence provides a broad sense of how congregational diversity is achieved, it is not a monolithic process, and the complexity with which religious identities become more salient than ethnoracial ones allows for multiple paths of understanding the accomplishment of diversity within congregations
Summary
The core contribution of this paper is to provide conceptual resources for explaining the process by which diverse congregations (whether church, temple or mosque) become diversified. Race-ethnicity can be displaced from in favor of a common religious identity within multiracial churches using the symbolic resources inherent to congregational structures [10,11,12,13]. While ethnic transcendence provides a broad sense of how congregational diversity is achieved, it is not a monolithic process, and the complexity with which religious identities become more salient than ethnoracial ones allows for multiple paths of understanding the accomplishment of diversity within congregations. In focusing on understanding how religion is involved in the cultivation of multiracial congregations, it is important to conceptualize processes that account for both ideas and social interactions. To come to terms with the structural dynamics in the occurrence of attitude and behavioral changes within churches, a focus on congregations as organizational systems is necessary and involves asking the question, what organizational processes within multiracial contributions account for diversification?. I focus on the concept of “ethnic transcendence” as involving both of these processes of integration and identity to analytically highlight a set of social processes that account for the social processes inherent to different multiracial congregations
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