Graduate Student Appreciation Week

The movement of people from one country to another and the subsequent settling of migrants in host communities diversely affect all parties in relocation processes. Directly or indirectly, both migrant and their host communities respond differently to the worldviews of the migrants and the socio-cultural contexts of the host communities. While the religious beliefs of people appear to be the least considered values of parties involved in the migration processes, its centrality in orientating the behavior patterns of the parties cannot be downplayed. This makes people’s religious beliefs and practices an important value for knowing, understanding and creating an atmosphere of tolerance and harmonious leaving in societies. It is more important, especially in America, where changing policies are applied to immigration processes. Since the enactment of the First Amendment however, the United States has relegated teaching and learning of religious subjects in her foundational education curriculum. This stance towards religious education has its own ramification on people’s socio-cultural and political behavior. On the one hand, the removal of religious subjects has denied citizens the opportunity to learn about religious values of the other and subsequently becoming ignorance about how people’s religious values shape their behavioral in the society. On other hand, the absence of transmitting authentic knowledge about people’s religious orientations with academic approaches leaves individual to acquire religious knowledge from sources which sometimes impact knowledge grounded on misinformed religious indoctrination. Considering the ever increasing religious diversities in America with immigration as a major factor, this paper explores the extent to which immigration has changed the religious landscape of the American society in a pluralistic one. Using Otto Maduro’s framework of power, knowledge and values, I argue that religious underpinnings influence the outcomes of encounters between migrants and their respective host communities in America. And one of the surest ways of keeping tolerance with other’s religious worldviews, prevention of conflicts and crime fashioned out of misinformed religious indoctrination is for America to consider reintroduction of teaching and learning religious subjects into the foundational education curriculum.