Review Reviewed Work(s): Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora by MARGARITA MOONEY Review by: Solange Lefebvre Source: Sociology of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 1 (SPRING 2011), pp. 112-113 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41288554 Accessed: 15-04-2024 19:42 +00:00 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociology of Religion This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Mon, 15 Apr 2024 19:42:13 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and all of this have on adaptation? She con- cludes that, while faith is an anchor of Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora , by MARGARITA MOONEY. Berkeley,hope in all three communities, "it is only Los Angeles and London: Universityin Miami that the Catholic Church is of California Press, 2009, 302 pp.; having a "long-term impact on the $21.95 USD (paper). adaptation of Haitian immigrants." To understand why, we are drawn into longI strongly recommend this theoretistanding debates about how religious cally interesting and empirically relevant institutions "as a fundamental part of civil book to scholars and students as well as society" vitalize the democratic process people involved in community work and religious groups. In the context of the current debates on relations between the state and religion, it offers a very concrete analysis of the impact of state support on the life of immigrant religious commune ities in Miami (United States), Montreal (Quebec), and Paris (France). After deciding to focus her doctoral work on the Haitian community, she soon discovered that, for this group of immigrants, religion was both a personal resource and a pillar of social life. In this case at least, religion proved to be good for both community life and social welfare. The central hypothesis of her work thus states that and "people's sense of meaning and well- being" (2). Differences in the Catholic Church's financial resources and in its relations with officials in the three cities help explain the Miami success story. The climate of American democracy fosters greater confidence in religion as a positive influence on immigrants' economic and cultural adaptation. This does not seem to be the case in France, under the long reign of Republican values, nor in Canada, under its current model of multi- culturalism. Though, constitutionally, both France and the United States oceans. Therefore, if we are concerned declare the separation of church and state, they differ totally in their stance toward religion. While French laws do not "proscribe private religious belief," they do their utmost "to shield French citizens with how such religious sentiments are transformed into institutional support to from religion." The United States' constitution prohibits "the establishment of a help immigrants adapt to life in a new national religion or a state church. . . home, we would do well to pay attention to how government agencies interact with religious institutions and their affiliated social service centers" (10). In the book's first chapter, she clarifies the questions that guided her research: How do people use religious narratives to interpret their migration and adaptation experiences? How do immigrants create moral communities? How do leaders of [but] also provides many protections for "International migrants often express similar religious sentiments across vast the free exercise of religion" (164-65). This constitutional recognition of religious freedom allowed President George W. Bush to establish the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Office, thus reinforcing the American tradition of support- ing private social organizations such as Catholic Charities. In the American context, Miami's Haitian religious communities interact Haitian Catholic community had room to with other institutions? What impact does develop faith-based institutions like Notre © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. 112 This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Mon, 15 Apr 2024 19:42:13 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 113 Dame and the Toussaint Center which "over time attracted millions of dollars in the evolving intricacies of such relations. Their very informality makes them a diffimostly government funding for [their] pro-cult research topic. It is hard to find out grams" and persuaded both politicians andhow each country is actually applying its the press to recognize their "social andown basic rules and laws at the grass religious" significance (2). In France and roots. For example, while it is true that, in Quebec (Canada), church -state relations Quebec, the state is cautious in funding would make a Miami-type success story some religious groups, it is also true that quite unlikely. In 2003, Quebec stoppedreciprocity is not confined to faith-based funding the social initiatives of some organizations but generously displayed in groups declaring a religious allegiance anda number of secular community organizain Paris; the Haitian Catholic communitytions as well. That being said, we do hope is struggling with invisibility and poverty. that other scholars will make case studies In neither case, has the government been like Mooney's to help us understand a persuaded to acknowledge the commun- little more about what does work and ity's power to contribute to its own adap-what does not work. tation. Throughout the book, concrete examples show how relations between Solange Lefebvre mediating structures and state agencies have been characterized by "cooperation" in Miami, "conflict" in Montreal, and "invisibility" in France. University of Montreal doi: 10. 1093/socrel/srr006 Advance Access Publication 14 February 2011 Such examples support one of the conceptual mainstays of Mooney's theo- retical framework: "cultural mediation" and its role in the constitution of "moral communities." Referring to the notion of "mediating structures" put forward by Berger and Neuhaus, she finds that they "help bridge gaps between the poor and the state, while also creating meaning and moral order that empower the poor to pursue common interests" (35). Religious Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building'Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things , by ANN TAVES. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 212 pp.; $26.95 USD (hard). faith provides immigrants "with narratives of hope in situations where they have little status or political voice," and it shields their youth from crime and drugs. Paying close attention to these narratives, Mooney discovered that the faith communities studied are havens of reciprocity between "children of God," whereas a "civic or state agency gives one-way exchange from the most powerful to the less powerful" (45). This book is certainly relevant to reflections on relations between modern secular states and faith-based immigrant communities in their midst. However, we may legitimately ask to what extent its conclusions (drawn from comparisons of three countries based on the experiences of only one group) can be said to capture Two books have significantly shaped the social-scientific study of religious experience: William James's 1903 The Varieties of Religious Experience and Wayne Proudfoot's 1985 Religious Experience . We now have a third. Taves follows James and Proudfoot in using an "overbelief" model, which separates the experiences themselves from the ideas that people use to interpret them. Taves differs from James in her insistence that experiences are not religious sui generis , but become religious as people deem them so. She differs from Proudfoot in insisting that the process by which religious meaning is attributed to experiences occurs after the fact, not as part of the experiences themselves. These are matters of degree, not kind. All three This content downloaded from 137.122.8.73 on Mon, 15 Apr 2024 19:42:13 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms