Abstract
Amidst both a resurgent interest in the impact of religion on social problems like crime, including its contextual effects, as well as scholarship directed toward the immigration-crime intersection, the current study examines how different religious traditions impact known violent offending uniquely in traditional versus emerging immigrant destinations. To do so, we employ negative binomial models regressing homicides, robberies, and aggravated assaults on adherence to three major religious traditions (mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, and Catholic), as well as immigration and other key macro-structural controls. We disaggregate our analysis for three types of United States counties in 2010: emerging, traditional, and other immigrant destinations. We find that religious traditions vary in their relationship with known violence across destination types: Catholic adherence is protective against crime (net of controls) only in established immigrant destinations, but evangelical Protestant adherence is associated with higher levels of robbery and aggravated assault in the same locales. Religious adherence has no links to violence in emerging immigrant destinations. Broadly, our findings reveal that the religious context is an important part of the evolving story of immigration, though it is multifaceted and context-dependent.
Highlights
Across the last half century, the scientific study of religion and its intersections with crime, deviance, and crime control policy has undergone massive growth
Our goal here was to address an underexamined issue both within the religion-crime literature broadly, and immigration-crime research : whether different forms of religious adherence are associated with crime and violence uniquely across immigrant settlement contexts
There is a need to explore the role played by religious organizations and their adherents in providing social capital, norms and values, and social control in ways that might buffer against crime in different communities
Summary
Across the last half century, the scientific study of religion and its intersections with crime, deviance, and crime control policy has undergone massive growth. Research on religious contexts and crime—which remains small but growing—has generally shown that religious adherence is associated with lower rates of violence (Lee 2006; Lee and Bartkowski 2004; Ulmer and Harris 2013). A separate and generally much larger body of scholarship on immigration and crime consistently reports that places with larger immigrant populations have either similar or lower levels of violence than places with relatively few foreign-born residents (Martinez 2002; Ousey and Kubrin 2009; Sampson 2008; Shihadeh and Barranco 2010). High levels of immigration and religious affiliation both appear to make communities safer or (at worst) no more crime-prone than comparable places with less immigration or religious adherence.
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