Christian Churches eases the transition to a new society. Based on ethnographic research with Sudanese refugees and American service providers, this paper.
Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 15, No. 2 2002
FIELD REPORTS Nuer Christians in America D I A N N A J . S H A ND Y Department of Anthropology, Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota This paper interrogates the socio-political role of Christianity in the forced migration experiences of southern Sudanese refugees living in the United States. Religion is implicated in the conflict in Sudan; faith-based organizations broker these refugees’ resettlement in the United States; and engagement with US Christian Churches eases the transition to a new society. Based on ethnographic research with Sudanese refugees and American service providers, this paper probes the ways in which cultural constructions of Christians influence the incorporation of these newcomers into US congregations. In addition, the paper highlights the need for more scholarly attention to the study of Nuer Christianity as an indigenized belief system that enables this population to cope with radical change in their lives.
Introduction This report explores the socio-political role of Christianity within the refugee resettlement process of southern Sudanese in the United States. It focuses on how cultural constructions of Christians affect the nature and quality of engagement between Nuer and American Christians. In addition, it probes the ways secular social scientists relate to belief systems and matters of faith amongst their study population and highlights the need for more scholarly attention to the study of Nuer Christianity as an indigenized belief system that helps forced migrants cope with extreme and rapid social change. Since the early 1990s, nearly 20,000 Sudanese refugees have been resettled in the United States (USDHHS 2002). This article draws on ongoing ethnographic research begun in August 1996 with several hundred Nuer and other southern Sudanese refugees in the United States. During this period I have interviewed more than 150 adult Sudanese refugees and more than 75 nonSudanese individuals involved with this population’s resettlement about myriad aspects of their lives associated with displacement, resettlement, and social change. Pseudonyms are used to preserve individuals’ anonymity. & Oxford University Press 2002
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Background One facet of the protracted conflict in Sudan is Muslim–Christian religious strife. It is impossible to disentangle the threads of religion, ethnicity, and control over resources, including oil, which feed the current civil war that has raged since 1983 (see Deng 1995; Hutchinson 1996; Johnson 1994; Jok and Hutchinson 1999). Nonetheless, the politicization of religious identity in Sudan is vital to how the crisis and the refugee flows it generates are perceived internationally.1 The Socio-Political Role of Christianity in the Sudanese Refugee Experience Here, I outline four points of articulation between religion and the experiences of southern Sudanese forced migrants. First, religious identity feeds the politics of difference in Sudan and legitimates the position of those seeking refugee status in ways that fleeing hunger, destruction of the means of livelihood, and other results of civil war simply do not. In contrast to many conflict settings, the religious element of the Sudanese crisis makes those who flee fit Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo’s (1989: 6) description of ‘classic refugees’ or those who are fleeing a life-threatening danger ‘with ‘‘life’’ referring to spiritual as well as physical existence.’ Framing asylum claims in the language of religious persecution allows Nuer and other southern Sudanese to make their experience meaningful to representatives of the international refugee regime. By way of illustration, some Nuer men recounted an interview experience in a refugee camp in Kenya in which a man named Ahmed Bol Deng was advised by a US legal advisor in the camp to eliminate Ahmed from his name and his son’s name if he wanted to qualify for resettlement in the United States. Ahmed was claiming persecution in Sudan on the basis of being Christian, but his and his son’s name (Jal Ahmed Bol Deng) were Islamic. In this case, outward markers of religious affiliation assumed importance in securing third country resettlement. This example illustrates the significance of religion in making a refugee status determination for a single case, yet religion also plays a role in the worldwide triage of third country resettlement priorities. Second, a Christian religious identity links southern Sudanese to a wider international community. To illustrate, in a recent US symposium on Sudan,2 a Presbyterian pastor opened the event by noting, ‘As a Christian, I feel obligated to participate in these matters.’ These transnational ties are significant in their ability to leverage international support for resources directed towards Sudan and southerners’ quest for political autonomy. Persecution of Christians, oil, and allegations of slavery in Sudan are all issues that generate broad-based domestic constituencies in the United States. This constellation of issues has made for strange political bedfellows. Liberal, secular social scientists find themselves standing on the same platform as members of the conservative, Christian right in American politics in advocating for the cause of southern Sudan. Increased recognition of the
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Sudanese conflict has coincided with the passage of the US International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which prioritizes the promotion of free religious belief and practice within a US foreign assistance political agenda (see Hackett, Silk, and Hoover 2000). Sudan is one of the countries targeted by this legislation. Third, in addition to its bridge building capacity connecting the southern Sudan to a global community of Christians, constructing a common Christian identity creates an idiom of kinship that has the potential to unite disparate ethnic groups and sub-groups within and across ethnicities in Sudan. This is noteworthy given the distinctive segmentary socio-political organization among groups like the Nuer and the Dinka in this region of Africa (see Evans-Pritchard 1940; Deng 1972). This unifying potential perhaps is illustrated best by the March 1999 Nuer-Dinka Peace and Reconciliation Conference in Wunlit, Sudan, sponsored by the New Sudan Council of Churches. However, any promise offered by an overarching religious identity must be viewed cautiously. Some argue that politicization of religious identities within Christianity may be implicated in escalating tensions in intra-group (i.e. Nuer) fighting in the South (Hutchinson n.d.). In light of the limited prospects for southern unity, a common religious identity as a galvanizing agent cannot be excluded without further consideration. However, as yet it remains to be seen whether any sort of overarching Christian religious identity in southern Sudan could have significant coalescing power. And fourth, among Sudanese refugees in the United States, Christian identity serves as a vehicle for social reconstruction. From the moment refugees are met at the airport by their sponsoring agency, religious institutions manage their integration into the host society. In the United States, many of the voluntary agencies that contract with the US government to implement its refugee resettlement programme are Christian-based, including Lutheran Social Services, Episcopal Migration Ministries, and Catholic Charities. While these programmes are obliged to and do operate along secular lines, Christian churches and congregations act as sponsors, and volunteers are often recruited within these bodies to assist in easing refugees’ transition to the United States. These volunteers are vital to the resettlement experience in that they are the ones who familiarize individual refugees with the essentials of quotidian life in an environment that is vastly different from the one with which they are acquainted. For example, in addition to hosting recently arrived refugees in their homes, volunteers associated with these religious institutions have gathered clothing and household materials; helped people find low-cost housing and cars, and employment; and provided instruction in how to ride a bus, do grocery shopping, and operate a microwave. Most recently, federal legislation passed in the United States strengthens this connection between the dissemination of social services and religious institutions (see Goodstein 2001). While refugee resettlement in the United States has long been managed by these same faith-based organizations, this recent legislation will expand the role of religious institutions in administering
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and providing social services. Controversy around this initiative stems from concern over whether this will lead to an abrogation of governmental responsibility to provide services, shifting this undertaking to faith-based organizations. Cultural Constructions of Christians Churches in the United States emerge as a key venue for the incorporation of Sudanese and other refugees into US society. Aihwa Ong (1996: 745) has noted in writing about Cambodian refugees in the United States that ‘churches are vital agents in converting immigrants into acceptable citizens,’ and these religious institutions exert considerable influence in shaping the adaptation process in ways that are consistent with their worldview. It must be noted, however, that these processes are not unidirectional, and refugees resist as they negotiate their way through American Christianity. Similar to the experiences of Jewish Ethiopians in Israel (see Kaplan 1992), Sudanese encounter cultural as well as spiritual Christian norms upon arriving in the United States. For example, an American woman in Nebraska who was reflecting on the interactions between Nuer and churches there put it this way: ‘They attend the First Covenant, the Presbyterian, the Zion Lutheran, and the Seventh Day Adventist churches, but the majority don’t go to church. They are really godly, but they live dispersed and don’t always make it to church.’ When Sudanese do attend, they frequent many different churches. This is related, in part, to the fact that Sudanese tend to live spatially dispersed (see Shandy 2001). It also is related to the ways that Sudanese engage with American Christianity. Two key features of American Christianity that Sudanese refugees appear to be tapping into are voluntarism and denominationalism. Disappointment over both regular attendance and what I call ‘denominational drift’ was a recurrent theme in my interviews with American church members. The denominational array of Protestant Churches present in the United States did not exist in Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s when these refugees left their country. Dee, an American who attended a Presbyterian church, noted that ‘in general, churches have been able to provide space, manpower, money, and promises of help, without fully thinking through what that entails’ for Sudanese refugees. She went on to observe ‘Sudanese jump ship for promises of aid from somewhere else. And Americans feel burnt when this happens.’ Bella, another Presbyterian woman, described this in poignant detail when she described her friendship over several years with a Nuer man and his family. The family had shown up one night unannounced at the church after a long bus journey from another state where they had been resettled initially by a voluntary agency. It was the dead of winter, and they had arrived without suitable clothes for the climate; members of Bella’s church mobilized and assisted the young family with housing, clothing, transportation, and a job. One day, without alerting anyone, the family loaded their minivan with some of their belongings and left. Bella
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grew tearful in recounting the story, saying that she would have been saddened if they had told her that they were leaving, but she was deeply hurt by the fact that they had not said goodbye to her or any of the other church members. She later learned through church channels that the man had been offered an opportunity to serve as pastor in a Covenant Church in another state. This movement from the Presbyterian to the Covenant Church is grounded in the, perhaps predictable, way in which Sudanese pastors who ministered to congregations in Africa frequently have found their credentials and achievements devalued in the United States. This seems particularly true in the Presbyterian Church, which was among the first to send missionaries to Sudan in the nineteenth century, particularly to Nuer areas (Pitya 1996). Many Sudanese refugees were Presbyterians or Seventh Day Adventists when they arrived in the United States. Individual Presbyterian churches, like other Christian denominations, have welcomed the southern Sudanese as persecuted Christians and offered them moral and material support. Presbyterian churches, however, have been hampered by their governance structure in allowing Sudanese to serve as official pastors. According to Sheila Sundren, a Presbyterian pastor who works with other immigrant populations, the Presbyterian Church, relative to other Christian churches, is rigidly structured; it struggles to incorporate these ‘other-language’ pastors and makes exacting requirements for those who have not attended a US Presbyterian-approved seminary. Sheila described this dynamic in the following manner: In churches where there are pastors from other countries, the English-speaking pastor is always the senior pastor. The other-language pastor is paid less. The power dynamics are always there.
Sheila characterizes Presbyterian immigrants who seek to be pastors for US congregations as falling into a category called officially ‘labouring within the bounds’ and perhaps more descriptively falling ‘between the cracks.’ These relationships manifest themselves in power and compensation inequities. Significantly, Sudanese who were pastors in Africa lack the requisite educational background to serve as Presbyterian pastors in the United States. An African service provider involved in refugee resettlement in California explained: A lot [of Sudanese] came here and are Presbyterian. They felt that they were not welcomed by the church. They came with elders and deacons, but there was no place for them in the church hierarchy. Truly, when pastors and deacons were ordained in Africa, it was by American missionaries. They don’t understand what happened to them during their long hours of flight on the airplane from Africa. It was a disturbing thing. In Africa, there was a pastor in the refugee camp. He was asked to go through training again in America. In San Diego, we are handling this by recognizing the Sudanese pastor as a visiting pastor.
An American service provider in Texas noted that a Sudanese man ‘had to walk on water to be accepted into the seminary.’ Sudanese face a conundrum in
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engagements with the Presbyterian Church in America: By virtue of being Christian, they were denied opportunities for education in Sudan. Due to little education, they are prevented from accessing pastoral training in the United States. Some Nuer have responded by attending other Protestant churches with a less stringent set of rules governing access to pastoral positions. These institutions provide material and emotional support, but perhaps most significantly they provide space in which Sudanese can undertake social and political organizing necessary for community building. While Sudanese do disperse for weekly church attendance, they reunite at inter-denominational holiday services. One final area relating to religion and refugees in the United States that merits mentioning is the social processes of incorporation of Nuer newcomers into existing American Christian churches. Within congregations that have incorporated Sudanese populations, there have been mixed responses ranging from extraordinary openness to hostility. For some church members, welcoming Nuer has provided opportunities to look far beyond the confines of their local community, prompting some church members to travel to East Africa and, remarkably, even to the war zone in southern Sudan. For other church members, the Sudanese newcomers have been unwanted and burdensome intruders causing dissent within the church. In light of these extremes, this is an area that warrants further investigation. Adherents of the Secular and the Sacred My efforts to situate the experiences of Nuer Christians within the forced migration literature, with a few notable exceptions discussed below, revealed a lacuna in the research on refugees and matters of faith or spirituality. Therefore, one final aim of this paper is to probe the ways in which secular social scientists relate to matters of religion amongst their study populations and, in pausing to consider how this relationship influences the social construction of knowledge about this subject, to prompt dialogue on this subject. In reflecting upon the intersection of religion and forced migration, Diana Eck’s perspective is helpful: ‘Studying religion means trying to understand the forces of faith that have created, undergirded, and sometimes undermined the great civilizations and cultures of the world’ (2000: 3). She goes on to note the importance of understanding religions as dynamic processes—and quite literally so when considered in migration contexts. Taking anthropology as a case in point within the social sciences, one can observe that all religions are not viewed equally. For instance, an anthropologist is more likely to assume a culturally relativistic stance when talking about magic than Mormonism. It is telling that in a recent poll of college faculty in the United States, more than three out of five anthropologists claimed no religion at all, making them the highest percentage among faculty of non-believers (Wagner 1997: 95).3 In my own fieldwork, it was only when I reviewed my notes and began to write that I realized the extent to which my
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own religious views shaped my research agenda. To the extent that I addressed religion at all, I focused on the socio-political role of religion but not on the affective or spiritual dimensions. Moreover, I was always more engaged when Nuer people spoke about their ‘grandparents’ religion’ (which sounds very much like what Evans-Pritchard (1956) describes in Nuer Religion) than about their own connection with Christianity. In retrospect, I was viewing Nuer appropriation of Christianity as ‘a type of capitulation or surrender’ (Piot 1999: 174) or culture loss, and failing to appreciate the additive and improvisational nature of processes of culture change. In a post-colonial world, the research emphasis, particularly on Christianity, remains on religion as an encroaching ideology or tool of oppression rather than on the ways in which formerly colonized peoples have made it their own (see Peterson and Allman 1999: 3; Comaroff 1986). Hutchinson (1996) describes this degree of flexibility and improvisation among Nuer belief systems relating to expiation rituals and incest. However, she goes on to develop the argument that Christianity is ill-equipped to respond to the social and spiritual ills that indigenous Nuer religion was able to address. I am not sure that Christianity and Nuer religion, at least as played out in the diaspora, exist in an adversarial framework. Hutchinson’s conceptual framework that focuses on the malleability of belief could be extended to understand the ways in which Sudanese negotiate American Christianity. This report has interrogated religion as a socio-political category but has not treated Nuer Christianity as a belief system with certain practices—creeds, codes, and cultus—that have some relationship to American Christianity, but, being culturally based, are not identical with it. Additional research is needed to understand the ways Nuer as well as other Sudanese populations have made Christianity their own. This relates to a larger research agenda in forced migration studies as faith and belief systems, as an integral orienting framework within culture, are something that forced migrants do not leave behind in their forced migration journey. Analysis of faith and belief systems is especially pertinent to the literature on forced migration that focuses predominantly on what is lost in the experiences of upheaval and trauma that characterize refugee populations (see Shandy 2001). A point of departure for generating further inquiry into the affective and spiritual dimensions of refugee experiences could be Wendy James’ (1997) work on ‘fear’ amongst the Uduk. In this article, James explores a violent incident between Nuer and Uduk refugees in Ethiopia. In so doing, she considers the ethnographic description and anthropological analysis of emotion in this refugee setting. By arguing against cultural and behavioural reductionism, James engages forced migration scholars in reflection on the connection between events and experience. Similarly, ethnographies of religious and spiritual beliefs as resiliency factors in the refugee journey would provide a more balanced view of the ways refugees make sense of their experiences of displacement (see Goz´dziak and Tuskan 2000; Trix 2000; Welaratna 1993).
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Conclusion Clearly, Nuer lives in America intersect with and are constituted in relation to Christianity in multiple ways: from the politicization of religious identity in Sudan; to their religious affiliation that renders their situation noticeable to a US constituency; to the agencies brokering their US resettlement; to the community support offered to support official institutional resettlement initiatives. Religion, in both a socio-political and an affective sense, is therefore a thread woven throughout the depth and breadth of Nuer refugees’ experiences. My comments in the above section on the relationship between adherents of the secular and the sacred are intended to be exploratory in nature and stem directly from dilemmas I faced in my own fieldwork experiences. Developing an understanding of the socio-political role of religion in Sudanese refugees’ journeys is one dimension of their experiences. Yet, in addition to this tangible, observable set of social events and processes is a spiritual one. My understanding of Nuer refugee experiences would have been deepened through a greater appreciation of how Nuer shaped events and experience into memory and used faith and belief in Christianity to make sense of their fragmented lives (James 1997: 116). By probing the nature of secular, anthropological inquiry in the realm of the sacred, my intent is to promote dialogue among those who study and publish, and thereby construct knowledge, about forced migrant populations. 1. The advent of Islam in Sudan is traced to the seventh century. The first contact between Christian missionaries and southern Sudanese came in the mid-nineteenth century. See Pitya (1996) for a full treatment of the subject of Christianity in Sudan. 2. The Future of Southern Sudan: A Symposium, Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, 1–2 March 2002. 3. Wagner (1997: 95) reports this finding from the following source: Institute for the Study of Evangelical Religion (1991) ‘Thirty Percent of College Faculty Claim No Religious Belief.’ Evangelical Studies Bulletin 8(2): 4. COMAROFF, J. (1985) Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DENG, F. M. (1972) The Dinka of the Sudan. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. —— (1995) War of Visions. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. ECK, D. L. (2000) ‘Religion and the Global Moment’, pp. 3–26 in A. Samatar (ed.) Contending Gods: Religion and the Global moment. Macalester International Volume 8. EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. P. (1940) The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1956) Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. GOODSTEIN, L. (2001) ‘States Steer Religious Charities Toward Aid’, New York Times, 21 July. GOZ´DZIAK, E. M. and TUSKAN, Jr., J. J. (2000) ‘Operation Provide Refuge: The Challenge of Integrating Behavioral Science and Indigenous Approaches to Human Suffering’, pp. 194–222 in E. M. Goz´dziak and D. J. Shandy (eds.) Rethinking Refuge and Displacement. Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, vol. VIII. Fairfax, VA: American Anthropological Association. HACKETT, R. I. J., SILK, M. and HOOVER, D. (eds.) (2000) Religious Persecution as US Policy Issue. Hartford, CT: Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. HUTCHINSON, S. (1996) Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (n.d.) ‘Spiritual Fragments of an Unfinished War’ (unpublished ms).
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JAMES, W. (1997) ‘The Names of Fear: Memory, History, and the Ethnography of Feeling among Uduk Refugees’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 3: 115–131. JOHNSON, D. H. (1994) Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press. JOK, J. M. and HUTCHINSON, S. (1999) ‘Sudan’s Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities’, African Studies Review 42(2): 125–145. KAPLAN, S. B. (1992) The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia: From Earliest Times to the 20th Century. New York: New York University Press. ONG, A. (1996) ‘Cultural Citizenship as Subject-making’, Current Anthropology 37(5): 737–751. PETERSON, D. and ALLMAN, J. (1999) ‘Introduction: New Directions in the History of Missions in Africa’, Journal of Religious History 23(1). 1–7. PIOT, C. (1999) Remotely Global Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. PITYA, P. L. (1996) ‘History of Western Christian Evangelism in the Sudan, 1898–1964’, PhD dissertation, Boston University. SHANDY, D. J. (2001) ‘Perils and Possibilities of Nuer Refugee Migration to the United States’, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University. TRIX, F. (2000) ‘Reframing the Forced Migration and Rapid Return of Kosovar Albanians’, pp. 250-275 in E. M. Goz´dziak and D. J. Shandy (eds.) Rethinking Refuge and Displacement. Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, vol. VIII. Fairfax, VA: American Anthropological Association. USDHHS (US Department of Health and Human Services), Administration for Children and Families, Office of Refugee Resettlement, Department of Human Services (2002) Unpublished data set. WAGNER, M. B. (1997) ‘The Study of Religion in American Society’, pp. 85–102 in S. D. Glazier (ed.) Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. WELARATNA, U. (1993) Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ZOLBERG, A., SUHRKE, A. and AGUAYO, S. (1989) Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
