Changing expectations within recent flows of highly skilled migrants mean that permanent settlement may not be considered, even if immigrants have permanent residence or official citizenship, and they may not have a desire for housing cohesion within their source group. Moreover, these migrant networks and associated social capital are often no longer confined to the same city or society. Indeed, the growth of transnational communities through migration can mean that people are “at home” in several places at the same time without having to form clusters to support them. In addition, transnational social spaces may represent other forms of integration into the wider social system than those interpreted from traditional settlement studies. Conservative religious groups may claim to refuse research on issues of sexuality. But American liberal and civil rights groups may make a similar claim about race-related research, an issue that is sure to cause emotional controversy. Two groups of events, both taking place at the intersection of race and genetics, illustrate this point. The two are similar in some respects, but also differ in a way that shows important nuances in assessing previous research reluctance. Religious organizations control valuable physical resources, including buildings, schools, temples, printing presses, cars and buses, as well as communications equipment such as radio and television studios.
Religious schools and temples control the space where community members and leaders can mobilize for political action, plan strategies for action, and withdraw from oppression. Schools and temples also serve as centres for communicating religious narratives, and these are often merged with the formation of political issues (Poulson, 2006; Morris, 1984). Schools for religious professionals are also crucial to the potential for mass mobilization. First, seminaries for religious professionals are less likely to come under state control, and it is a direct attack on a religious group when a political movement tries to take control of religious schools. Second, seminaries foster social networking links among religious professionals and forge a network of like-minded clergy who may be called upon in the future to provide community resources. Third, schools for religious professionals are distinguished by training individuals to become leaders of organizations where resource mobilization is essential to day-to-day functioning. Priests, ministers, imams and gurus are professional cadres of social movements, and since religious movements have political interests, these professional activists are ready-made leaders for political movements. Religious communities or groups can also be analysed in terms of a general system of secular stratification in terms of social class or caste. There is a vast and complex debate about the relationship between caste, professions, notions of pollution and Hinduism. The conventional view was that the concepts of purity in Hinduism served to maintain a social division of labor between manual and non-manual professions, which developed over many centuries into a complete caste hierarchy. Although the Hindu caste system was organized into four main castes (Brahmins, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra), there was considerable diversity at the village level, where these castes were usually divided into subcastes or jati.
Castes were hierarchically organized in terms of ritual separation around an idea of contagious pollution. This traditional model collapsed in the twentieth century, and since then there has been some mobility, thanks to which through the adoption of higher caste cultural practices, lower castes can rise socially and marginal cultural traditions can be integrated into the Brahmanic system. This process is called “Sanskritization.” There is therefore a debate on the differences between Asian and Western stratification systems and on the legitimization of these models of inequality by religion (cf. Dumont 1970). Some sociologists argue that the term caste can be applied to any rigid stratification system in which membership is permanent, hereditary, and protected or legitimized by religious notions of purity. For example, in the southern states of anti-war North America, there is a persistent system of racial orders reinforced by the stratification of Christian churches along a black-white divide. The National Baptist Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Churches emerged as exclusively black institutions and exemplify the racial stratification of American confessionalism (see Dollard 1998). Although religion has played an important role in legitimizing social stratification, the relationship between religion and class must be considered in a dynamic and historical framework. There is a considerable collection of historical and sociological research examining the social mobility of individuals and groups following their conversion to evangelical Christian sects. The work of H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1957), is a classic illustration of this tradition in the sociology of religion. The main argument is that “the churches of the disinherited” have traditionally been recruited from among the poor and dispossessed through active evangelization.
Due to religious asceticism and education, individuals from the lower social classes rise on the social ladder. The same argument applies to evangelical sects themselves, which, when dominated by the middle and lower middle classes, become more respectable. The process of confessionalization, in which cults take on the characteristics of middle-class denominations in the United States, has been paralleled with the social mobility of its individual members. The history of Anabaptists, Quakers, Methodists and the Salvation Army shows this pattern of social change, in which sects became denominations (see Troeltsch 1931). FB programs for drug treatment range from small local departments or missions to international organizations with multiple sites and programs.
