Religion, immigrant churches, and community in an industrializing city: Swedish Protestants in Rockford, Illinois, 1854--1925

The research on immigrant churches of the late 19th - and early 20th-centuries focuses overwhelmingly on the most numerous cases: Catholic churches. As a result, the accepted model of the immigrant church is decisively shaped by the empirical work on Catholic churches. Without comparative analysis considering Protestants churches as well, however, it is impossible to clarify the role of religious tradition in shaping the immigrant church and its role in an ethnic community, as distinct from the more general circumstances of immigrant life. This study examines the immigrant churches built by Swedish Protestants in an industrializing city, investigating the significance of five distinctly Protestant characteristics: a shared religious tradition with the surrounding culture, the organization of ethnically homogeneous denominations, division and denominational diversity, the practice of congregational discipline, and roots in societies with significant secularizing tendencies. Although the early immigrants strove to build a Lutheran church all-inclusive of the community, after the Catholic parish, their results were limited by a deep commitment to congregational discipline. The Lutherans enjoyed a near-monopoly from 1854 until the 1880's, but the pietistic upsurge and legalization of religious dissent in Sweden eventually supplied enough immigrants to create an Evangelical sector in Swedish Rockford. And as more Swedes turned to secular associations around the turn of the century, new waves of immigrants founded a secular sector. The Lutherans and Evangelicals accumulated substantial numbers, each using a somewhat different strategy, but they found less success in terms of membership and organizational development than many Catholic parishes. These differences are traced to fundamental contrasts in ecclesiology.