“¡Venga a Nuestra Baptismo!”
Religious Identity and Migration
Migration is often talked about in terms of humanitarian assistance or upholding human rights, but how often do we consider the role of cultural and religious identity?
For the past several years, I’ve worked with immigrants in the Greater Kansas City area. My efforts include accompanying families as they navigate the asylum application process, advocating for change in local and national policies, and organizing for immigrant justice with special emphasis on encouraging local immigrants to step into their power as leaders of their own cause. In the past, I studied in El Salvador and Jordan where I was up close to the social realities that cause displacement for refugees and asylum seekers. In my personal life, I grew up with a Catholic father and Muslim mother.
As a student ten years ago, I noticed how my peers in El Salvador would process their sufferings and economic hardships through the lens of their faith in Christ. They shared their burdens in the intimate life of Christian community. Similarly, Syrian refugees I knew at my university in Jordan clearly found a source of strength in their faith in Allah, as well as through the communal support of fellow Muslims as they integrated into their new neighborhood masjids.
Today we witness the largest number of displaced persons in world history. Practically all the world’s refugees and asylum seekers are religious. Since most displacement comes from Syria, South Sudan, Venezuela, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, we know the majority of displaced persons are Christian or Muslim.
For most immigrants, their lived experience of religion is tied to familiar cultural and/or regional expressions of faith. What is little talked about is the difficulty not just of being displaced, not just of adjusting to a completely new culture, but the difficulty of maintaining connection to one’s own cultural traditions. This is not just a sociological concern. It’s a deeply psychological matter crucial to one’s well-being.
Identity is complex and certainly tied to the various beliefs, ideologies, and cultural traditions which surround a person in their own families and countries. As migration advocates, we are often concerned for the well-being of immigrants, knowing they may have experienced intense traumas on their journey or in a conflict back home. Suddenly adjusting to a new culture can be a “shock.” In our concern for their psychological well-being, do we also show concern for the suffering people face when their sense of identity is in flux?
There are real dangers to not taking this seriously. In Webb City, Missouri, last summer, the Kohistani family, refugees from Afghanistan, lost their son, Rezwan, shortly after being resettled in a town where they were isolated. Maybe the family was safe from the Taliban, but they were thrown into a place completely unlike anything that resembled their cultural or religious sense of identity. When people’s sense of identity is marginalized or overlooked, they suffer.
The family’s son attended a majority white high school. There was no one else like him there — not in terms of culture, race, religion, skin color, or language. Just five months after settling in Webb City, Rezwan’s body was found hanging under the bleachers. The circumstances were suspicious considering there were accounts of how he was being bullied by classmates, especially during Ramadan.
Yasir Ali, board chair of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Missouri Chapter, said the incident pointed to a larger problem. He shared in a statement:
“Thousands of newly arrived Afghan refugees are being left with insufficient support from resettlement agencies and caseworkers. Too many refugees aren’t being provided with the tools they need to learn English, get jobs and adjust to life in their new home. They are often not even receiving desperately needed medical attention, food stamps and housing. The tragic death of this 14-year-old boy must be a wake-up call. Our government must do more to ensure that newly arrived Afghans receive the assistance they need.”
After this tragedy, I attended a vigil for Rezwan in Kansas City as part of a nation-wide movement to support his family. The KC vigil was organized by my personal friend, Laela Zaidi, climate activist with Sunrise Movement. She rightly highlighted that while the location of resettlement may have been determined by US government, the local resettlement agency did not consider how their community would be unfit for the Kohistani family.
It’s clear that Rezwan and his family were vulnerable because they were isolated from anything that was familiar to them. They weren’t connected to their own people, nor to centers of shared culture and religion. Ultimately, the nation-wide vigils helped raise funds for the family to move closer to a supportive Islamic community in Texas.
Advocates’ personal biases can cloud their vision. A resettlement group might assume that religious demographics don’t matter, but that attitude is essentially false charity. It appears as a good intention on the face, but it is not an authentic charity which seeks to go outside of one’s own comfort zone to learn about someone else’s cultural and religious identity from their point of view.
What if an advocate has anti-religious views? They could be involved in migration work out of deep humanitarian conviction, which is admirable. But when working with a family, is the advocate willing to go outside their comfort zone to learn about cultural and religious identity from the family’s perspective? If the advocate cannot do this, how can they empathize with the complex psychological pain of displacement when personal identities are suddenly thrown in flux?
Granted, religious identity may not be an important issue for every family. There are different degrees of religiosity. Not everyone who grows up with the majority religious practice of their country cares about religious observance. However, my experience is that for most families, the religious dimension of their lives is important.
Everyone’s sense of identity is complex. People may think of themselves in terms of cultural identity, sexual orientation, race, or religious group — or they may even “identify” with their country’s football team. Some people do not explicitly define themselves by these terms at all, and yet, all the various aspects of our lives form a complex “color spectrum” that make up who we are or how we present ourselves in different contexts. Not everyone who knows us personally can see our whole “spectrum.” They may only know one side of us.
If we have ever known the experience of being treated like “the other,” the pain of not belonging, or the suffering that comes from having an identity that doesn’t fit into the acceptable categories of our surrounding society, then maybe we can understand some of the pain people go through when they are forced to leave the places which celebrate the cultural and religious practices they hold dear.
Religious identity is an under-appreciated aspect of the immigrant experience. Media reporting on migration often fails to acknowledge the religious dimension of people’s lives in favor of reporting on the drama of people’s journey stories. However, sometimes we advocates also fail to see how important an immigrant’s religious beliefs are to their psychological well-being.
I knew one asylum seeker who normally never talked about religion. However, she suddenly expressed her profound faith in God as the time came close for her final asylum hearing, where a judge would decide her fate. She knew for a fact she would be killed by the Sinaloa Cartel back in Mexico if she were deported. If granted asylum, she could remain safely in the U.S., but she could not afford an immigration lawyer. Without a lawyer, most cases in Kansas City lose asylum in the immigration court.
Raiza Guevara, a close partner in this work, and I did everything we could to advocate for that asylum seeker in need of protection from the Sinaloa Cartel, which meant connecting her to legal support and personally accompanying her throughout the process. “Accompaniment” also meant the simple act of praying with her right outside the court. Incredibly, she won her asylum case, which is almost unheard of in Kansas City.
There is another family we’ve accompanied for a long time through the asylum process. Over the years they have invited us to their wedding and the birthday party for their new baby. Touchingly, they asked Raiza and me to become the godparents at the baby’s baptism. This baptism carried incredible symbolic significance considering that their newborn daughter closely resembled the three year-old daughter they lost when migrating across the desert. For this family, a common religious ritual among Catholics in Central America took on a unique meaning within their family’s personal story of fleeing danger, experiencing death, literally finding new life, and settling down in a new land.
For many immigrants, the religious dimension of their lives is intimately woven into the stories of their journeys and struggles, as well as their hopes and joys. As advocates it’s important to respect their religious and cultural identities because when one’s identity is marginalized, they suffer. Fortunately, when one’s identity finds communal support, they flourish.
