01: A recent survey finds that 36 percent of Americans report experiencing or witnessing some form of religious discrimination at work, with nearly half of non-Christian workers (49 percent) reporting so.
Tanenbaum’s 2013 Survey of American Workers and Religion finds that almost the same percentage of white evangelicals (48 percent) report experiencing or witnessing religious non-accommodation at work, with 40 percent of atheists likewise. Such non-accommodation can mean being denied the right to display a particular religious object or the right to pray during the day or being required to work on a Sabbath or holy day—the most common complaint (24 percent).
The Weekly Number blog (Aug. 11) reports that the survey also finds that less than half of all workers report that their companies have such policies as flexible work hours to permit religious observance and materials explaining the company’s policy of non-accommodation.
(The Weekly Number, http://theweeklynumber.com/weekly-number-blog.html)
02: Arab-Americans who are Christian tend to stress their faith over their ethnicity to differentiate themselves from Muslims as well as presenting their faith as a more ancient and authentic form of Christianity than that of other Americans, according to Randa Kayyali of American University.
The study, presented at the meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco in August, was based on 51 interviews with Arab-American lay people from Orthodox and Melkite (Eastern Catholic), with additional interviews of clergy, and found that two-thirds of respondents wore crosses, with many using English translations of their biblical names and even acknowledging that they ate pork.
They also tended to claim that their Christian faith was older and more genuine than that of other Christians. They did not identify as Lebanese or Jordanian but as Orthodox or Catholic. But many did identify as Arab, especially the Orthodox respondents. Even those who are non-religious still identified as Christian. But while Christian identity was stressed, there were few attempts to insult Islam, according to Kayyali.
03: While whites may be in the minority in Latino congregations, they still play an influential role in such churches, according to a study by Brandon Martinez and Jeffrey Tamburello of Baylor University presented at the meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, which RW attended.
Congregations have become more multicultural in recent years—from about 8 percent in 1988 to about 15 percent today. In their study of 25 predominantly Latino congregations (making up 47 to 100 percent of their memberships) and 17,000 attendees from the Congregational Life Survey (2001-2008), the researchers found that both whites and Latinos were equal in decision-making roles. The more rare whites were in congregations, the more likely they were to report being asked to take up a leadership role. Martinez and Tamburello conclude that there remains a racial hierarchy in Latino congregations where whites hold a disproportionate amount of power.
04: North Korean Christians face considerable difficulty in integrating into the Korean-American community, according to a study presented at the August meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in San Francisco.
The number of North Koreans who have settled in the U.S., mostly as political refugees, is very small, totaling 146 people, according to Hien Park of Vanguard University. Park interviewed 31 refugees in Los Angeles and found that six were “born-again,” 10 did not believe in God, and 15 were church-attending but did not believe in God. She found that the Korean churches have not embraced these newcomers, and those that attended services did not see the benefits of involvement that marked immigrants in the wider Korean community.
Interestingly, those who say they are “born-again” Christians were the least church-attending group in the sample. Such non-attendance may be due to Christians rebelling against the public religion that was imposed on them in North Korea and thus shy away from outward rituals and religion, Park said. Many of these refugees first lived in South Korea where they felt stigmatized and then made their way west.