Trophies of grace: Religious conversion and Americanization in Boston's immigrant communities, 1890--1940

"'Trophies of Grace': Religious Conversion and Americanization in Boston's Immigrant Communities, 1890--1940," interweaves the fields of immigration and urban history with the history of American religions. From an examination of the work of religious institutions among immigrant communities, and the choices immigrants made to affiliate, this dissertation explores the relationship of ethnic identity and community within a religiously and socially pluralistic urban environment. The city was a complex site of contests, in which transnational institutions like the Roman Catholic Church sought to maintain their flocks while immigrants explored their options and made choices about religious affiliations in view of becoming Americans. At the docks and in the neighborhoods immigrants encountered missionaries and representatives of American social welfare agencies who had taken up the banner of Americanization and who saw a critical relationship between Protestant Christianity, democracy and good citizenship. Immigrants and their children were key players in this complex landscape. Previous studies depict tightly knit Catholic and Protestant immigrant groups formed around a single church that represents the religion of heritage. This project shows, however, that there were deviations from this model in each ethnic group and neighborhood in Boston. Immigrants (Catholic and Protestant, Italian, Swedish, German, Lithuanian and others) had and made choices about when and where to affiliate; not all immigrants stayed in the ethnic group's main or traditional church. Within the paradigm of cultural contest, I examine who converted and the reasons or factors behind changes in affiliation. This study shows that the factors involved in immigrants' religious choices necessitate a new convert typology, one that takes into account the immigration experience and the pressures of assimilation. "Trophies of Grace" begins to fill an important gap in historians' understandings of the ethnoreligious complexity of immigrant communities in the early twentieth century, and of the significance and extent of Protestant home mission work among immigrants.