An Alternative National-Religious Space: The Danish Seamen’s Church in Singapore

Abstract

Immigrants settling permanently in their new country may eventually acquire new citizenship, but the majority of them do not change their religion. As already noted by Will Herberg half a century ago, it was primarily through their religion that immigrants to the United States, and their descendants, in the great wave of immigration before the 1920s “found an identifiable place in American life” (1960, 27–28). They did so by anchoring their national background in religious associations rather than by joining the churches of their co-believers from different national backgrounds (Herberg 1960, 110–11). The Scandinavian immigrants to the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century are illustrative of this trend: although the vast majority of Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians shared the same Evangelical-Lutheran faith and their languages were closely related, independent Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian churches were established on American soil (Simonsen 1990).