The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – In the Hands of God: How Evangelical Belonging Transforms Migrant Experience in the United States by Johanna Bard Richlin

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

In the Hands of God: How Evangelical Belonging Transforms Migrant Experience in the United States by Johanna Bard Richlin How evangelical churches in the United States convert migrant distress into positive religious devotion Why do migrants become more deeply evangelical in the United States and how does this religious identity alter their self-understanding? In the Hands of God examines this question through a unique lens, foregrounding the ways that churches transform what migrants feel. Drawing from her extensive fieldwork among Brazilian migrants in the Washington, DC, area, Johanna Bard Richlin shows that affective experience is key to comprehending migrants’ turn toward intense religiosity, and their resulting evangelical commitment. The conditions of migrant life―family separation, geographic isolation, legal precariousness, workplace vulnerability, and deep uncertainty about the future―shape specific affective maladies, including loneliness, despair, and feeling stuck. These feelings in turn trigger novel religious yearnings. Evangelical churches deliberately and deftly articulate, manage, and reinterpret migrant distress through affective therapeutics, the strategic “healing” of migrants’ psychological pain. Richlin offers insights into the affective dimensions of migration, the strategies pursued by evangelical churches to attract migrants, and the ways in which evangelical belonging enables migrants to feel better, emboldening them to improve their lives. Looking at the ways evangelical churches help migrants navigate negative emotions, In the Hands of God sheds light on the versatility and durability of evangelical Christianity.

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going on over there. Usually what I do say is refer your friends, neighbors, and relatives to watch the show. Your relatives, not my relatives because my relatives already hate me, and yours will hate me soon enough, soon enough as it is. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership,

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that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have In the Hands of God, How Evangelical Belonging Transforms Migrant Experience in the United States. We have Johanna Bard Richland on the show with

us today. She'll be talking about her amazing new book that just came out May 24th, 2022, hot off the presses. She is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. Who knew that was going to happen? Eugene, Oregon, University of Oregon. She specializes in anthropology of religion and psychological anthropology with expertise in evangelical Christianity in the U.S. and Brazil. A U.S. migration and studies in effect and emotion based on extensive ethnographic research conducted among Brazilian migrants in greater Washington, D.C. She recently completed her first book that we're going to be talking about today, and she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University, probably in Stanford, Oregon.

I'm just kidding. It's not in Stanford, Oregon. Don't do that, people. Don't believe me sometimes. These are just the jokes. A master's in theology studies, are and from harvard divinity school which uh and a ba from wesleyan university i'm not going to do any location jokes anymore uh welcome to the show how are you i'm good thanks so much for having me chris there you go thanks for coming am i getting your first name right johanna johanna johanna johanna my apologies no worry i'll learn to get that right uh so give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs so if you um just google my name Johanna Richland at UO you'll my faculty page at the University of Oregon will come up um also on LinkedIn there

you go uh what motivates you want to write this book? So I have always been interested in religion and how people make sense of the world through their belief and through their faith. And especially for people who come from kind of marginalized circumstances and how they draw on faith to help them cope and help them alleviate some of that difficulty. And I decided to go to graduate school to continue studying these issues, first at Harvard Divinity School in terms of kind of U.S. society. And then at Stanford, I did my doctoral research on the same topics, looking at Brazilian migrants and their religious experience in the United States. And this book is a finished product of that research. And why did you decide to study Brazilian migrants? What drew you to that? Yeah, so I had learned that a lot of migrants coming from Latin America in particular,

which is a predominantly Catholic region, were converting to evangelical Christianity when they came to the United States. And I traveled to Brazil a few times to learn Portuguese, having become really interested in Brazil and Brazilian history and Brazilian culture and religion. And in Brazil, I had the opportunity to attend a lot of evangelical churches. And then when I came back to the United States, noticed that in places like San Francisco, in New York, in D.C., in Boston, these very same churches were all over the place and were catering to Brazilian migrants here. And so much like other

migrant groups from Latin America, oftentimes when migrants come with their Catholic religion or perhaps even already believing in evangelical Christianity, but not quite as intensely. What happens in the United States, what I found is that there is a kind of dramatic intensification of that faith. And so I became really interested in what the relationship was between being a migrant in the U.S. and what that experience was like and how that might alter and change religious longing and what people look for in religion. And then also how that religious experience in turn shapes what it means to be a migrant here in the United States. So they're switching from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity? Yeah, so there were two things that I found.

One was either that people were converting from Catholicism. Sometimes these were folks who had grown up in parishes and their entire lives were organized around the Catholic faith and they felt devoutly Catholic. Other times, some of the people I spoke with said that they weren't really practicing, but it was more of a cultural kind of identity. And here in the United States, they needed something more intense and more devout, and they found that through evangelical Christianity. Another subset of the people I talked to had already converted to evangelical Christianity in Brazil. So in Brazil, as in many

other places in Latin America, across Africa, as well as across Asia, has experienced a surge of evangelical popularity, where churches are drawing converts from many different religions, but primarily from Catholicism, at least in Latin America and many other places. But here in the United States, those folks who had already been exposed to evangelical Christianity became much more deeply devout. So rather than saying it was something that they went to because their families went to or their neighborhoods went to or they had grown up in those churches, this was something that they really found to be an organizing principle and cosmology of their life. And a lot of people describe that by saying, if I thought I had faith in Brazil, I had no idea. If I thought that this was what sincere belief was, I had no idea until I came

to the United States. Boy, the Pope's not going to be happy. He's losing business. Is there a reason that the Catholic churches here aren't picking up those people? Or is, I think I've gotten kind of the implication that maybe they weren't really true Catholics in Brazil and now they're really like finding, I don't know. I'll leave that to you. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's, that's a question that goes right to the center of things. Um, so what I found in my research was that, um, U S Catholic institutions that catered to migrants, even if they had masses in Portuguese and they were trying to recruit migrants to those masses, they tended

to be perceived as quite impersonal, bureaucratic, and cold. And that was in contrast to how evangelical churches were perceived, which was much more familiar about personal faith and personal healing and based on an individual's experience, not only of faith, but also of community. And so that, in my findings, was very much more satisfying to the needs of what migrants here were experiencing. And I should say that most of the people that I spoke to were undocumented migrants. So about 70% of Brazilian migrants in the United States are undocumented. And while Brazilians are a case study of kind of Latin Americans more general, that is quite representative that a lot of the undocumented population in the

United States is from Latin America. And particularly for folks who are population in the United States is from Latin America. And particularly for folks who are living in the United States undocumented without social support, without access to legal visibility, education, health care, etc. These places of worship are not just about faith, but they're very much more about social support and about kind of emotional solace. And so I think that the evangelical churches, which were able to directly speak to people's needs as individuals, as migrants, rather than a more kind of community uplift focus, which was the Catholic church's focus, um, drew people in more. Yeah. And human beings need community. We need social community, especially when you come to a strange place like America. I'll give you, it's pretty strange these days. Uh, and, uh, and maybe there's language barriers or cultural barriers or, and sometimes there's not a lot, there's some good people in this country and some bad people just let you in right now to know about that going on

um and not everyone's friendly um uh but i think that's good because human beings need community and it sounds interesting we talk a lot about different things aspects of religion on this show and book authors that have come on but it sounds like religion is really good at integrating people. We talked before about the show, and I'd heard and read, and I wasn't sure if it was substantiated because I hear it a lot. I'm on the Internet. I'm on Twitter a lot, and I read a lot, but I'm not sure what I'm going to believe. We're actually one of the better countries at being able to integrate migrants

and having a melting pot. We've been doing this melting pot for a while. I guess we're good at it, maybe. Yeah. So I think some of the kind of prevailing theories about why it is in the United States that religion tends to be something that helps people assimilate to this country rather than as a barrier. It's more of a bridge than a barrier in the scholarship and the language, is that because we're a predominantly Christian nation, where even though we have attrition and decline in terms of Christianity, still the majority of people in this country identify as Christian. Christian migrants who come to this country, they can use that as a resource

to assimilate. But if they identify as Christian, whether Catholic or evangelical, there's already a cultural kind of archetype in terms of holidays, in terms of belief systems, theology is how that might correspond to pull yourself up by the bootstraps or a Protestant work ethic, right? Those are things that are not completely foreign. In Europe, you have a different situation where a lot of migrants tend to be Muslim. And so religion tends to be more of a barrier. We also have countries in Western Europe which are receiving more migrants who already don't identify as strongly with Christianity as the United States continues to do in the 21st century. And religion in general, if you look at France, that there is a sense of wanting to very strongly separate public culture from any sort of religion outpouring.

And so the context is different. That's why you get a sense of kind of religion being the means in the United States to being a bridge rather than a barrier in Europe. Yeah. I'm thinking now about the separation of racism. And of course, since we're a Christian country, we have been for 450 years. The Muslim thing is an issue for a lot of countries. And there's a stigma of prejudice, prejudices and stuff. But I know that in places like Minnesota and different things

in this country, there's places in Canada that integrate the Muslim community really well and stuff. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think in France, I think one of the problems is they end up in a lot of bad areas or slums. And I think that contributes to the problem, I think, doesn't it? Yeah. And in the U.S., I think another piece of it that's important to note is that religious institutions have always been important to civic culture. coming into this country, they were able to use the same institutional structures as churches to set up schools, set up hospitals, set up community centers, and get that kind of visibility and kind of seat at the table in some ways. That because our country valorizes religion in that way, that even if they're different faiths, if they fit into those kinds of organizational organizational slots then they provide benefits for the community adherence and of course they can help school each

other and change their language and stuff and help with teaching and educating and getting switch over i remember uh i think a month or two ago we had uh learning america one was a fight for education justice on refugee children by luma muffley i believe and she had come uh she came from i think palestinian and jordanian uh refugee and then she came to america and set up schools to teach um to teach people how to learn the language because they weren't converting on learning the language. And so a lot of that's really important. How does this sit? Because we've had a lot of discussions with authors on the show about the white nationalism part of religion.

I think it's about 30% of the white nationalism. They're very anti-immigrant. They're very racist and stuff like that. How does that fit into the whole body of Christianity and church and those two together getting along? Does it provide some cover for migrants from that end of the religious spectrum? I think it's an excellent question. And I think it's something very much to be determined because the situation that we have in the United States is coming to a head in many ways. But with regards to American Christianity, you have a situation where

there's declining population among white Christians, among white mainline Protestants, as well as Catholics. And so you have every five years, the Pew Forum comes out with a poll that shows that the percentage of Americans who identify as what they call religious nuns, people who don't identify or affiliate with any religion, keeps going up. And the number of people who affiliate as Christian keeps going down. Right. At the same time, you have growth among migrants and among undocumented migrants. congregations, um, espouse anti-immigrant views, or at least are not in favor of amnesty or in favor of kind of pathways to citizenship. Um, so I think it's, it remains to be seen if there is a way for, um, there to be some sort of bridging there on the basis of faith. Uh, but certainly it's not a easy or easily apparent situation right now.

You've made me realize something. We've had a lot of people that have covered white nationalism on the show. And we had Robert P. Jones, of course, a PRI on the show, and I send him little notes every now and then. He wrote the book White Too Long. And he does a lot of studies of the breakdown of the religious people and and statistics through his i believe it's a pack he runs or something um and uh it made me realize that that white nationalism part really hates migrants and migration and it's almost like

a competing thing but maybe they see more of it because they're in that religious thing. I've always wondered why they have such a thing, and I know it's because of the decline of white people and minorities becoming a majority by, I believe it's 2015, it's speculated, and there's a real fear, I forget the name of it, there's a real fear of losing that power and that money and that, I forget the term for it. But it's very interesting.

And then, of course, Matthew Iglesias was on the show who talked about one billion Americans, the case for thinking bigger, and the fact that we are a shrinking country. And that doesn't help us with a growing country like China that can dominate us. And that's what made America great was one of the things was that we're the largest market in the world and we can push the dollar around. A lot of people don't realize our ability to make everybody buy everything in dollars is our last big thing. And once that changes, the yen and the ruble, they've been trying to talk about. Anyway, I'm getting a little off on the thing there, but I'm giving some plugs to the thing that people need to realize.

Migrants are really important to this country. This country needs to grow. Everywhere I go in Utah here, there's unemployment signs everywhere, and they want to hire people. Walmart's got a big giant sign up front. It's $17 an hour. People are paying $20. It's getting out of control. We need people to come here to work, man, so we can keep this economy going and not fall into a deep

recession. Yeah. And I think that that's one of the keys. Certainly what I write about is that partly it's because of what the experience is for migrants in the country, in the United States, that makes evangelical Christianity so compelling. So because oftentimes undocumented workers are working in the service economy where they don't have benefits, and domestic workers, they're working in restaurants, they're working in landscape, that means that there's a certain kind of precariousness that day-to-day life has, and a certain kind of vulnerability, especially without documents, especially without family. Oftentimes, these are people who are leaving their family and are living in fairly isolated ways. So unlike in the 1920s and the middle of the 20th century, where migrants were living in what were termed kind of ethnic

enclaves, right? Now migrant destinations tend to be marked by suburban sprawl. So places like outside of Miami, outside of Atlanta, outside of Washington, D.C., where there's not that kind of public square. It's that kind of Robert Putnam bowling alone that everybody has heard about in terms of increasing loneliness and isolation. And so in that context of what it actually means to be a migrant in the United States in the 21st century, you can see why evangelical Christianity, which offers a sense of intimate community, an intimate kind of embodied experience of God that you can talk to on a day-to-day basis that can transform your everyday experience, that can lend you power and allow you to feel blessed in day-to-day

life if you pray and if you worship and if you embody these ideal dispositions. And there's a sense in which people can feel like they have some power and agency, even when the society in which they are living and enmeshed in refuses that to them. And so that's one of the kind of main arguments of the book is that you have to seek evangelical growth among this population as going hand in hand with what the situation is, the failures of the U.S. to take care of this population or solve issues regarding undocumented migration in the U.S. to take care of this population or solve issues regarding undocumented migration in the U.S. No, it's really unfortunate. Part of what made this country great was its melting pot,

that beautiful statue that sits in New York Harbor and says, bring us your tired, your hungry, and everybody. And that's what made this country great. My great-my grandfather, no, hold on. My great-grandfather is an immigrant in the 1800s from Germany. Uh, he came here, stepped off the, uh, he came into Salt Lake City for the Mormons brought him in. Uh, another example of, I wouldn't call them Christians, but another example of religion helping integrate people. And he, he couldn't speak a lick of English and stood there

at the Union Pacific and they, and they took him him fed him and he was willing to work for whatever it took and that's what built this country I wouldn't be here without that and this fact that we have this notion in this country now that so we don't need that anymore no we do and the scarcity mindset that we have in this country is just deplorable because people think, well, there's never enough. No, the great thing about this country is there's plenty of brilliant minds here. Steve Jobs was a son of an immigrant. The guy who runs Google right now that's the CEO was born in a dirt floor in India. The one thing I learned about owning a lot of companies and businesses, there's no monopoly on who has all the brilliant ideas and the brilliant ideas

that can change the world and make America better. I think this is great for you to highlight this because it may not change some of the prejudice minds that are out there. I didn't realize there was so much support for migrants. And I've always been pro-migration. But knowing that there's this kind of support and knowing they're going, they're being, because people always present that idea that, well, migrants are coming to the country and they're just, I don't know, running amok about the country. Like, I don't

know who would do that. None of us do it. So yeah, there's much more support for them and stuff. Maybe we should do more to support migrants. Yeah, I think that we also have to look at American society and our American economy as completely dependent and reliant on the labor of migrants and on the labor of undocumented migrants that because of cheap, replaceable, vulnerable work labor pool, that's what kind of props up the bottom. The only way that you have domestic workers taking care of the children of elites, right, is if you have this population of low wage work or restaurants or salons or landscaping. at farm workers and agriculture and how that industry is absolutely reliant on migrant wages and migrant labor. But part of that means that securing that in terms of benefit, giving those folks legal visibility, giving them health care, giving them access to in-state tuition in every state, not just in the case-by-case basis, all of that costs a lot of money and then

would mean that those wages would not be so cheap for people to hire. So we have to think about this as a very much structural and systemic issue and why I think it's so difficult, certainly for Congress to solve in terms of what immigration policy reform would actually look because there is quite an interest in maintaining an exploitable and a low wage pool of labor. Yeah. What people don't realize is a lot of the baby boomers checked out. They took their retirements and checked out. A lot of people in the later Gen Z checked out, took their retirements early and checked out, they're gone. And for 20 years now, maybe 40 years, I've been hearing about how eventually the large baby boomer generation, which is larger than any that has come after, once they retire and disappear from the thing, there's not really

good support system for the social security and not only keeping those guys in Social Security, but also just keeping everything going. And we need to expand the population of this country. We have to. Or we're a dying population. You look at what's going on in Japan, where they have huge, I don't know if the right word is gentrification issues, but they have huge issues between their older generation and the younger generation. The younger generation doesn't have kids either. So their future is really almost dying,

and some people predict it will die. I think even Elon Musk said some stuff about that. But what's happened is the boomers have left early because of COVID, and that's why we're struggling. And people are like, well, our price is going up, but we really like the more pay we're struggling. And people are like, why are prices going up? But we really like the more pay we're getting. And you're like, it's because companies are having to compete.

There's not enough employees to hire. We're at the lowest employment, I think, ever. And I don't know, since they started tracking it. And yeah, we really need more people to come here. But everyone's like, we don't want people here because they'll, I don't know, increase the prices. No, they won't. Actually, you'd probably get some stability from what's going on right now. Yeah, and I think that we're in a situation in the United States, and not just for migrants, but just in general what it means to live in the 21st century,

where people are more and more left to their own devices, their own personal strength, their own willpower to fix these broader societal problems. So with less institutional support, with less kind of social welfare programming, right, across the board, people are left to figure it out on their own, to work on their own interior landscapes and feelings and think about how best to do that. And so certainly Brazilian migrants and migrants in general that turn to evangelical Christianity is part and parcel of that, which is that in 21st century America, there are growing rates of depression, there are growing rates of anxiety, there's growing rates of loneliness, of people living on their own, right? More than

they ever have before. And all of these trends mean that people are left to figure that out on their own. And so in many ways, it's not surprising that a religion that valorizes turning inward in many ways, working on one's own righteousness, using mechanisms like prayer and Bible study and thinking about one's family within the lens of God. All of those things mean that you're responding in the only way possible to what the current situation is, because so much of the social fabric for everybody has been starting to fray. Yeah. And just expanding more people here and building it out. And we're an entrepreneuristic country.

We're a country where brilliant ideas can succeed. And then they employ others. Like I mentioned with Steve Jobs, look how many people Apple employs and everything. Because of really him. I mean, it was an important part of it, but really the marketing behind was with Steve Jobs and everything he did, the changes he made. We have these incredible cell phones now

that have driven so many different economies of social media things. All that came out of the iPhone and his father was an immigrant. Do we need to embrace immigrants easier? Do we need to give them driver's licenses sooner and not do all this stupid stuff? Like, I almost have the opinion that, look,

let's get them in the U.S. program. Let's get them taxed. Let's get them on the W-2s. I think it's $30,000 or whatever it costs in years to go through citizenship programs with us. Why don't we just get them in the tax base? Let's go. Well, and the interesting thing, Chris, is that many of these people who live here undocumented

and get no benefit are paying their taxes. They are still paying their taxes. They get tax ID numbers. They don't have social security numbers and they don't get health insurance. They don't get in-state tuition, but they pay their taxes. And so exactly what you're saying about the case of Steve Jobs, I think that many of the migrants that I've met are painfully aware of. They're painfully aware of how they're contributing. They're painfully aware of the fact that they've come with the best of intentions to work hard, to provide for their families, to contribute to this country. And many of them were motivated to come because of the American dream, right? Because they wanted a better life. They aspired for a better life for themselves and their families. And that's part of the deep despair that they experience here is that what they had thought and what they had believed is so divergent from what they experience in terms of exploitation and marginalization. And that really the option before them is to figure out how to imbue meaning

and purpose onto their presence in the United States through this other channel. And evangelical churches do a really good job of that because they say you're here for a reason. It's not just chance. It wasn't a mistake. You're here to meet God. You're here to improve the United States through your vision. And it's all going to work out. So it's a very kind of consoling message when you think about it, especially in the context of that kind of grave disillusionment that many people experience once they get here. Yeah. It's sad that we don't support people better. What made this country is, like I said, the melting pot, everybody coming here and us being a nation of so many different diverse groups of people. Even in California, I can go to the little barrios in California where you have the Chinese food and Chinese culture and stuff. You can go all over L.A.

Just every little area. And the food is just so excellent. In fact, I'm getting hungry now. And the people are wonderful. I've met people in L.A. that they've probably been there for 20 or 30 years. They've never spoken a lick of English, but you go in their restaurants and, wow, the food is amazing. The people are nice. They're pretty much integrated in the society. If you make great food, you don't have to speak my language. It's not my language. It's

not my country. That's the beautiful part about this country. It's all a mixture of everybody. And hey, man, if you pay your taxes and we all get along and no one gets shot, we're all happy, I guess. I don't know. That's one way of thinking about it. Anything more you want to touch on or tease out about your book? No, I would just say I think that, again, hand in hand with the kind of growth of migrant evangelical Christianity is the enduring stalemate in terms of how we treat migrants in this country and kind of a inattention to what you're saying, inattention to the great contributions and reliance that we have and that it's all of a piece. Yeah. People come here with the dream of coming to America and no other place in the world is a place. No one's like going, man, I really want to go to Russia someday and live there. That sounds like a dream. Like I'm willing to die to get into Russia. No one's doing that. And the fact that people have that attitude towards us and they want to come here and do something great with it, we should allow it. And I hope your book will open more

people's eyes and maybe overcomes people's prejudices that they have and maybe learn a whole lot more about the future of this country. Because we need to grow. A business that's dying is a business that will go out of business. A business that's shrinking is a business that's dying. We're a country that's shrinking and dying right now. And our birth rates, our marriage rates are abysmal. I think they got this little bump on marriage rates, but that might be because of some holdover from COVID and people

finally getting around to it. But it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on. Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate it. There you go. Give me your.com so we can find you on the interwebs too, please. So if you go to the University of Oregon and you just Google my name, Jay Richland, Johanna

Richland, my faculty page will come up, University of Oregon. Okay. All right. And check out the book. Order it up, In the Hands of God, How Evangelical Belonging Transforms Migrant Experience in the United States came out May 24th, 2022, wherever fine books are sold. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss.

Go to youtube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Any other place you might see the Chris Voss Show, subscribe there. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe,

and we'll see you guys next time.