This morning, while walking the dog down a switchback trail
from the G. Ross Lord reservoir to the West Don River, I came upon an elderly
woman dressed in many layers of Middle-Eastern garb, including a headscarf. Her
clothes were old and drab. She walked with a limp and a pronounced stoop. No
one else was around.
She was bending over and rising, bending over and rising,
putting something that she was finding down by her boots into a plastic bag. As I
approached her, I said “Hello! What are you collecting?”
She looked at me with real fright. I smiled, tried to disarm
her. I pointed to her bag. She showed me—still, with real fright in her face.
The bag was full of young dandelions, not yet flowering. She put her free hand
to her lips and said, “Eat.” But she was also completely unnerved.
Maybe she was scandalized by meeting me alone, a man. Maybe
she was afraid of me because it was a desolate place. Maybe she was worried
about how to handle conversation, her English being nonexistent. Maybe she was
ashamed to be collecting dandelions, or ashamed of seeming so out of place, or
maybe it was all the above.
Walking home, it struck me that it can be very hard to be an
immigrant, a stranger in a strange land. No wonder so many immigrants stick
together in whatever places they can find to do so. When I was a teen I worked
in a chicken processing plant where most employees were either of Portuguese or
Dutch extraction. When I used to go for a walk in the park in Cobourg I was always
amazed that so many Pakistanis beat me there, especially since I didn’t think
any of them lived in town. But then I remembered meeting the Dutch clans, as a
kid, on the beach at Niagara-on-the-Lake, also on Saturdays.
It is hard to be an immigrant. No wonder, then, that so many
also stick together in church or mosque or temple or synagogue. One thing that
many of us—the Muslim woman picking dandelions, my many Jewish neighbors near
Toronto’s Bathurst St., and I as a child of Dutch immigrants have in common is
that ethnic religious services and communities play a huge role in helping us
adjust to life in the diaspora.
At the same time, as children and sometimes even their
elders adjust, the role such faith communities play in immigrants’ lives usually
plummets. The faith communities themselves slowly wither away, usually while
trying hard to deny their ethnic reasons for being, and while spinning off
conservative splinter groups that continue to deny they’re ethnic groups in part
by yelling louder and louder about their doctrinal distinctives.
But ethnic churches usually do go into decline. Since I’ve
left the Christian Reformed church I’ve started noticing others who have done
so. I have realized I can make lists many, many names long. These lists include
family, friends, people I grew up with, people I went to parochial school with,
and readers of my book, blog, and Twitter feed. My guess is that less than half
of the Christian Reformed kids I grew up with still belong.
But it isn’t just the Christian Reformed Church. When I
drive through my mother’s neighbourhood, in Brampton, just outside of Toronto,
I’m struck by how many Sikhs walk the streets. They’ve mostly done very well. Of
course, there have been racial and ethnic tensions along the way, but people
are finding ways to get along. They’re a part of the landscape now.
How do I know they are Sikhs? Well, there were newspaper articles
about how and why Brampton has become a favourite destination. There is a Sikh
temple around the corner of my mother’s home. But mostly, Sikhs look like
Sikhs: turbans and flowing robes and hairnets for younger men and great
majestic beards and long hair and no earrings. Sikhs are hard to miss, and
their dress is definitely a lot less boring than most of ours!
But last time I was in Brampton, it struck me how many
people in my mom’s neighbourhood also looked like lapsed Sikhs. These were
mostly younger men and women, who had the same beautiful olive complexion and
dark hair, who often walked with other Sikhs, but who also wore miniskirts and
t-shirts and jeans, colored hair highlights in many styles and bling—people who
were obviously not participating in anything like Sikh orthodoxy. Many, many younger
Sikhs must be leaving their temples and striking out on their own. Not so
different than in my old Dutch Christian Reformed community.
What does it mean? Well, to the degree a temple or church or
mosque relies on ethnicity to thrive (whether this is acknowledged or not) it probably
will, but only for a generation or two. The thing is, like sticky notes, ethnic
glue is not strong and dependable for the long term. Many who belong to such
ethnic communities will leave when the protection and support such communities
provide is no longer needed. Their leaving will also demonstrate that the
spiritual convictions that were supposed to be at the heart of these communities
are not and were not nearly as compelling as the spiritual leaders, professors,
and teachers thought they were. Most people belong to spiritual communities for
reasons other than what those communities teach from their pulpits or podiums.
Don’t get me wrong. I now belong to a denomination that has
been bleeding members for nearly as long as my previous denomination has been
in this country. Deep-seated conviction about theological confessions of any
kind is not much in favour anywhere these days, in almost any faith
community—again, except among the professors and professionals.
I’m reading a just-published (fascinating, too) book by United Church
historian Phyllis Airhart. She describes how in the face of massive
foreign immigration into Canada of non-Protestant people over a hundred years
ago, part of the motivation for the United Church’s founding was the idea that
it would missionize these people in order to help the Canadian state build a unified
Christian society. The book is titled, A
Church with the Soul of a Nation. It turns out to have been a lofty Constantinian-type
goal that was never achieved. But it goes to show, once more, that the
intersection of faith and ethnicity—in this case fear of new immigrants and
what they meant—has a long history.
At the same time, this real function of many churches—being a
safe place for immigrants and their children and (hopefully, they think) their
children’s children—this actual function reveals the hubris that most
denominations display in teaching that their way is the best way. That sort of
confessional bluster is just smoke and mirrors for the real reasons churches
succeed, sometimes, for a while. Or, at the very least, this confessional
bluster is just a small part of why some churches succeed for a short time.
So what? I’m not sure. I’m thinking that someone, somewhere,
needs to think creatively about what is going on when churches say they’re all
about their confession or teachings or dogma, but the truth is that they fill
quite a different social function.
And, given that community and love of neighbour gets so much
stress in scripture, maybe that is something that should be more openly and
strongly embraced, while doctrine ought to be given the public place in
churches that it actually has in our hearts.
