The Making of a Promised Land Religious Responses to Gentrification and Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity

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The Making of a Promised Land: Religious Responses to Gentrification and Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity Weishan Huang Since the 1980s, Flushing, Queens, has been the site of a new and revived commercial zone. Its prosperity reflects not only the successful investment of Taiwanese and Korean merchants, but also the formation of a new Asian community with a unique kind of religious pluralism. This article, consisting primarily of case studies, seeks to understand how immigrant congregations/temples are responding to the increasing racial/ethnic diversity in Flushing, Queens, which results from the global processes of migration/immigration. Throughout its history, New York has always been a city of immigrants and one of the gateway cities in the United States. The flow of immigrants has changed not only the demographics of New York, but has also revitalized the practices of faith groups. My research has found that Flushing is not a “satellite city” of the traditional Chinatown (Manhattan) as described by sociologist Jan Lin. By studying the faith groups in Flushing, this essay argues that the rise of Flushing has created a promised land for Taiwanese enterprisers in the 1980s and 1990s and has more recently became a new center for ethnic Chinese immigrants after September 11, 2001. The 2000 United States Census Bureau ranked Queens County as the ninth most populous county in the United States with over 2.2 million residents. According to the Census Bureau, Queens County experienced over a 14 percent increase in population since the 1990 census. The 2000 Census also reflected the growth of the Asian population in Queens County with over 391,500 people identifying themselves as Asian Americans. More than half of Flushing’s population is Asian American, and many of the neighborhoods around Flushing also have a large number of Asian American residents. It is also claimed that Flushing has the largest ethnic Chinese community in the New York metropolitan area, surpassing the number in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Today, Flushing is the second‐largest town with Chinese ethnic residents in the United States.1 With these dramatic changes in Flushing, I intend to examine how immigrant faith groups interact with the increasing racial/ethnic diversity in this dynamic section of the city. Vision and the evolution of research method As Lowell Livezey stressed in his previous study, since World War II, changes in American cities has been so fundamental as to be termed “urban restructuring.”“Both structural changes are further linked to the social transformation of the 1960s and 1970s, which extended the presumption of individual autonomy and the moral legitimacy of personal choice at the expense of traditional collective authorities, including religion” (Livezey 2000). Despite its differences from other cities, Flushing exemplifies the processes of urban restructuring identified by Livezey and his team in Chicago: religious restructuring and social transformation with which religious organizations must interact if they are to participate effectively in urban life. In this study, congregations throughout the city are made up of people who are financially successful but always on the move. Recent immigrants in Chicago are highly mobile and widely distributed as well. Thus the local ties of the more prosperous congregation of all faiths are weakened by the centrifugal forces of people on constant reassignment and the speed of capital allocation (Livezey 2000). As Livezey pointed out, in the last decades of the twentieth century, a new metropolitan structure was emerging, one that was highly decentralized and multipolar, with edge cities and other concentrations of employment and commerce distributed throughout the metropolitan area (Livezey 2000). Just as the Chicago School methods were adapted to study churches by Graham Taylor arriving in Chicago in 1892 to teach at Chicago Theological Seminary, the Religion in Urban American Program, directed by Livezey, continued this history of religious and community research in Chicago, paying particular attention to the responses of religious organizations to the processes of post‐war urban and religious restructuring and social transformation (Livezey 2000). In 2006, Livezey launched the Ecologies of Learning Project as another attempt to study faith groups and communities. We made ethnographic case studies of congregations the core of our investigations in order to see urban religion as much as possible “from the native’s...