The Grammar of Belonging: Asian Immigrant Religions and the Discipline of American Religious Pluralism

This article examines how Asian immigrant religious identities in the United States are formed through the ambivalent conditions of American religious pluralism. While scholarship on immigrant religion has emphasized the empowering role of religious institutions in adaptation, community formation, and civic incorporation, this article foregrounds the disciplinary effects of pluralism itself. It argues that Asian immigrant communities become legible within an American religious field structured by an Anglo-Protestant grammar that privileges belief, scripture, voluntary association, congregational organization, and the distinction between religion and culture. This grammar enables recognition and belonging, but also reorganizes Asian traditions through inherited Protestant, racial, colonial, and imperial categories. Bringing immigrant religion scholarship into conversation with postcolonial and decolonial critiques of “religion,” the article situates Asian American religious formation within both U.S. pluralism and transpacific histories of missionary, colonial, Orientalist, and postcolonial classification. It develops a framework of religionization, racialization, and ethnicization to show how Asian immigrant religions are translated into recognizable forms, marked through racial and civilizational hierarchies, and institutionalized as sites of communal boundary-making. The article thus reframes Asian immigrant religious life not simply as adaptation or empowerment but as a negotiation with the regulatory conditions of American religious pluralism.