Calvin News

“A lot of times we rest on assumptions and stereotypes,” said Mark Mulder, a professor of sociology at Calvin. He is co-directing a new endeavor in untrodden research territory: Latino Protestants.

“We largely equate Latino religion with Catholicism in the United States,” Mulder said. “We forget about this growing wing of Protestantism.”

Collaborating on research

The research will be funded by a $400,000 grant from Lilly Endowment, Inc., a group interested in studies of religion and sociology. The grant will be received and administered by Davidson College in North Carolina. Gerardo Marti, a professor of sociology at Davidson, is directing the research efforts with Mulder.

Neil Carlson, director of Calvin College's Center for Social Research (CSR), helped to craft the grant application and will oversee things like data collection, databases and survey tools.

“Since the inception,” Carlson said, “there has been some conversation with the worship institute and the principal investigators, Mark and Gerardo, about having CSR come alongside with some of our technical expertise.”

And that’s not the only collaborative effort related to Calvin. The college’s worship institute was also interested in helping with the project.

"Over the past several years, the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship has learned a great deal from the writings of Prof. Marti (Davidson University) and Prof. Mulder (Calvin) on multicultural communities,” said John Witvliet, director of Calvin’s Institute of Christian Worship and professor of worship, theology and congregational and ministry studies. “We have also been increasingly aware of the need of a new round of academic studies of Latino Protestantism in light of all dynamic changes in Latino communities over the past decade.  It was a joy to work behind the scenes to help forge a match between this talent and this need."

Bringing scholarship to class

The idea for the Latino Protestant Congregations (LPC) Project came from Witvliet, who wants to learn more about the different worship experiences and practices of diverse congregational traditions.

"I look forward to ways this project will teach us all about the dynamic and diverse texture of Latino Christian experience,” he said, “and about approaches to public worship that will strengthen congregations of all kinds."

Mulder expects the research to overlap with many areas of his sociology curricula.

“A lot of what I teach deals with the integration of race and religion,” he said. “And this [research] will fit seamlessly…it will add a lot of depth.”

Extending research nationwide

The LPC Project will take place in ten different U.S. regions, including the west coast, southwest, southeast, northeast, and Midwest; one research fellow per region will study five Latino Protestant congregations in that specific area. The directors want to have geographically dispersed fellows so that multiple regions of the country will be included in the study.

Mulder and Marti are partnering with Edwin Hernández, a research director at the DeVos Foundation and principal investigator of the congregational study, Gatherings of Hope: How Religious Congregations Contribute to the Quality of Life in Kent County.

"We already have a pretty good personal database-like connection to Grand Rapids Latino congregations," Carlson said.

The researchers will interview attendees and clergy and take note of congregational demographics, church buildings, rituals, prominent symbols and other observations.

"It will be a qualitative study, and it will be ethnographic in nature," Mulder said. "[We want] a thick, rich description of LP congregational life, especially worship, liturgy, the practices that occur inside the church.”

Providing a voice

For the next three summers, the ten research fellows will meet with Mulder and Gerardo to spend a full week per summer debriefing, discussing the project and considering publication opportunities.

Latino Protestants fall under three main categories: mainline, Baptist, and Pentecostal—about one-third of each. Mulder anticipates that the research will give a voice to a demographic often bypassed in academia.

“We need to know more,” he said. “It’s a growing part of U.S. culture. It also will give a voice to Latino Protestants…[This research] is an inductive approach--we’re going in and hoping to allow a forum for Latino Protestants.”

While data collection might sound rudimentary, CSR will be an asset to the project’s organization and inter-scholar collaboration, Carlson said.

“When you’re doing mixed-methods research, one of the main challenges is just keeping things that belong together together,” he said. “So providing a database that has a clear congregational identifier scheme so that every one of the congregations has a unique number that then everything else in the system can be tagged with.”