The Contexts of Spiritual Seeking: How Ghanaians in the United States Navigate Changing Normative Conditions of Religious Belief and Practice

Abstract

Abstract Two concurrent agendas in the sociology of religion explore how conditions of secularism in the United States result in widespread norms of “spiritual seeking”, and how religion functions as a basis of belonging for U.S. immigrants. This study brings these subfields together by asking whether new immigrants from Ghana, West Africa, also exhibit an orientation of spiritual seeking in their religious trajectories, and how they engage with normative conditions of spiritual seeking within institutional contexts. I find strong evidence of spiritual seeking in their narratives, and I identify processes within the social institutions of family and coethnic networks, higher education, and African Evangelical Christianity that support a seeking orientation. I argue for more focus on the counter-impulses of seeking versus dwelling in immigrant religion, and that more studies of religion and culture should explicitly analyze the institutional contexts that mediate between normative culture and trajectories of social practice.