Cultural Report #2 Helen Mildish

My cultural report will consist of a focus on Migrant- Host relationships, particularly a focus on assimilation. When migrants value the host culture over their personal culture it is considered assimilating (Martin and Nakayama, p.324).  

In the case of Christianity, history has shown us that colonialism had strong ties to Christianity and conversion of religion.  In this particular case the natives were forced to assimilate causes a “pressure cooker” of problems (Martin and Nakayama, p.325). Most Christians it the United States chose the religion by choice forsaking their previous beliefs to fully immerse themselves in the Bible and their new belief system. Even though Christians are a very dominant culture in religious societies they have different denominations, which emphasize different parts of the Bible.  I believe the idea of assimilation is pertinent because you either are a Christian or not, there is no middle ground.

I believe that most Christians would say that they strive for moral high ground and hope to share the love of their God with others.  In essence, they would also forsake behavior that could be considered immoral. In general it sounds very good; the problem is that the Bible is written in such a way that it leaves a lot of room for interpretation.  This is the main reason why there are so many denominations of Christianity. 

I plan to send interview questions to three people from different denominations, regional locations, and backgrounds via email to broaden my research pool. I also plan to attend two different church services and ask complete strangers to answer a few interview questions about their beliefs as well. My goal is to get a pool of ten interviews from different locations, denominations, age groups, backgrounds, and different relationship to me.  Hopefully this will give me enough diversity to fully show how Christianity is very diverse even though in focuses on the same central idea. 

Works Cited

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2012). Intercultural communication in contexts (6th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.

Faith Photograph, http://joshandchandabrown.com/2011/06/faith-vs-wishful-thinking/, retrieved March 8^th 2013.

Tree of Christian Denominations, http://mrserevision.blogspot.com/2009/03/diiferent-types-of-christians.html, retrieved March 8^th 2013. 

Blindfold Photograph, http://www.reasons.org/articles/faith-and-reason, retrieved March 8^th 2013.