For many Caribbean Americans, Christianity acts as a support system for dealing with the challenges of everyday life, and with the particular struggles of immigrant life.  This is articulated in part merely through the adaptations to Christianity applied within Caribbean communities.  At St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church, the fairly traditional Catholic Mass was interspersed with Caribbean spirituals and steel pan.  At the end of the service, the priest called all those celebrating a birthday or anniversary to the front, and when asked their nationalities the parishioners listed Brooklyn, St. Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and Guyana as their places of origin.  At the naming of each place, large sections of the almost exclusively black, largely Caribbean congregation cheered.  The church also offers services in Creole and Spanish.

For many Caribbean people, their church becomes a center of community life.  In one study of black Caribbeans, church attendance was found to correlate with decreased rates of depression (Taylor, Robert) Having the support of a religious congregation provides the parishioners with both a shared devotion to their faith and a reliable community with whom they form strong and consistent bonds.  These bonds are also important in other churches—in the Spiritual Baptist church , which is a combination of Protestantism and Vodou (Schmidt 43), the sometimes hierarchical community gives congregants advantages to advance and take on responsibility.  In the case of all kinds of religious groups, these communities give structure and support to the uprootedness of immigrant life.  Religion gives Caribbean immigrants a place to reinvest in cultural practices from their home nations, and to unite together with people who share their culture and religious backgrounds, which offers them a way to feel less out of step with their worlds.

 

Religion is a crucial aspect of community in the Caribbean, and the West Indian immigrant populations in New York City are no different in this respect. Located largely in Brooklyn, uptown Manhattan, and the Bronx, Caribbean-dominated neighborhoods value churches and other religious assemblies as integral parts of daily life, both on an individual level as well as a social level. What is especially intriguing about religious life in American-Caribbean communities is the incredibly diversified nature of their practices—while many Caribbean religions are influenced directly by African spiritualism, Western Christianity has also had a crucial impact on the formation of Caribbean religion today.

Religion in American-Caribbean communities is transformed even further due to its interactions with American religious culture, producing a new, unique entity. The give and take between these two religious cultures is a two-way street; Caribbean religion impacts American religion just as it occurs vice versa.  This is seen in various religious assemblies around New York City, such as the Yoruba-Orisha Baptist Church, which combines Protestant theology with Afro-Caribbean syncretic spiritualism, and St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church, which integrates Caribbean cultural aspects into its services.