When non-white groups immigrate to the United States, they form conservative religious organizations that act as ethnic enclaves, preserving ancient Old World traditions that hinder their assimilation into American culture—right? Not necessarily, as Carolyn Chen's fine new study, Getting Saved in America, demonstrates. Chen's narrative instead shows how in some cases newer immigrants become significantly more religious than they were in their home countries, how this religious activity often takes the form of modernist, more “rational” Christian and Buddhist spirituality than the forms they experienced at home, and how this increasing religiosity actually serves to inculcate or express decidedly American values as its practitioners transition into their new society.

Getting Saved in America is based on two years of fieldwork that Chen performed in the San Gabriel Valley, near Los Angeles. Her two primary sites of ethnography were an independent Taiwanese evangelical church and a Buddhist temple whose headquarters are based in Taiwan. Both serve large constituencies of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States and their descendants. An important background fact is that Taiwanese immigrants are largely educated, middle-class professionals; it also noteworthy that while Christianity is a tiny minority in Taiwan, it was disproportionately represented among the first immigrants who laid the foundations for the Taiwanese community in America. Chen estimates Christians to be 20–25 percent of the Taiwanese-American population (the numbers are roughly the same for Buddhists as well), with Protestant and especially evangelical forms by far the majority.

One of the most interesting things that results from this sort of fieldwork among two different groups is the natural comparison of Christians and Buddhists, whom Chen finds to have much in common but also to display intriguing differences. Most of the Christians are not initially attracted to the church for its theological or ethical teachings—indeed, few are particularly religious at all. Their primary motivations are social. Newcomers want somewhere to hang out, a place to make business or romantic connections. They seek new social networks in America since their families and old networks are far away in Taiwan. It is only subsequently that they become interested in religion and decide that at least some of the evangelical Christian message and practice makes sense to them. The church tends to draw members into an ever-tighter net of mutual relations so that one's free time (and finances) is increasingly devoted to the church community. In the end, Christianity comes to partially replace the traditional Confucian mode of Taiwanese ethics, and the church replaces the extended family. Yet the actual values are largely similar, and the amount of inter-personal entanglement in larger social webs is at least as great.

By contrast, the Buddhists are mainly driven to attend the temple by more overtly religious questions, such as concerns about death. The temple provides a far looser social structure, with much less intimate inter-personal ties between members. Whereas the Christians think of themselves, first and foremost, as members of a particular church, the Buddhists focus more on their interconnection with Buddhists worldwide and humanity in general. The Buddhists are also far less “pushy” with their religion, viewing their way as superior but by no means the only authentic religious path. In fact, the aggressive proselytizing by Taiwanese-American Christians is a frequent stimulus that pushes people into the Buddhist temple, where they seek an alternative to what they interpret as the obnoxious religiosity of their co-ethnics. Here we see that religious diversity in the community, rather than relativizing religion, actually increases the total amount of community religious activity, and that Christian actions not only increase the number of Christians but also drive up the numbers of other religions and stimulate new counter-developments in Buddhism.

Both religions are remarkably similar, however, in how they inculcate new forms of self-discipline in their believers, which is part of a larger shared shift toward this-worldly religious attitudes and orientations. In the American environment of greater religious and personal freedom, both Christians and Buddhists voluntarily take on far more restrictive individual codes of conduct and develop more psychologically sharpened practices of meditation and prayer for scouring the heart and mind in search of sinful thoughts and emotions. The gender dynamics within both groups also show notable changes in the New World situation. Women especially tend to benefit from distance from the constraining social networks of Taiwan (though there are downsides too), and their newfound religiosity allows them to assert independence from oppressive family obligations by asserting the primacy of their religious, rather than domestic, duties. Men, meanwhile, benefit from having an alternate system for achieving status and value, particularly in the face of white racism and other factors that frustrate their professional aspirations. Both Christians and Buddhists are also similar in how each view the other as superstitious and shallow in their spirituality, and they believe their own group to be more representative of genuinely American values of equality, democracy, and modern scientific reasonableness.

The arrangement of clearly defined subjects into discreet chapters (“Becoming Christian,” “Becoming Buddhist,” “Becoming American Men and Women,” and so on) lends Getting Saved in America value as a potential classroom resource, as excerpts can be pulled out to fit a variety of different course topics. And while there are a fairly high number of spelling and grammar errors for a university press publication, the language is mostly clear and accessible, well within the reach of undergraduates. Chen has thus provided a valuable new resource for both researchers and teachers, one which well compliments other studies on immigrant religion by focusing on its transformative, not just preservative, aspects. Scholars of both religious studies and sociology will learn much from this work.