Introduction

In the tradition of Durkheim and Malinowski, the integrative role of religion has been a recurrent theme of sociological and anthropological theory. This role apparent in the contemporary Greek-American community. This chapter examines the nature of ethnic identity and the church’s role in fostering and sustaining. The attachment of the Greek-American to his church has been well documented by researchers. In ultimately focusing on the interplay between church, community and individual, the chapter suggests that understanding the relation of the people to their church is to understand them as a people. Yet despite visibly strong attachment by the immigrants’ children and grandchildren, and the large body of scholarship on Greeks in America, relatively little has been written on the critical relationship of Greek-Americans to their church. The game plan, very simply, is to define the attributes of ethnicity and to look for points of intersection with the church and religion.