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Many scholars of the public sphere have recently turned to the question of how transnationalism--as both an increase in the prevalence and prominence of international organizations and in the numbers of people living between two or more nations--alters the relationship between the public and powerful actors. A parallel stream of research focuses on the role that religion can and should play in the public sphere. In this paper, I use transnational ethnographic data from a Pentecostal-Charismatic church organization originating in Ghana to explore a different possibility, specifically that globalizing religious organizations may themselves function as sectors of the public sphere, providing free and open spaces for a transnational public to engage in discourse on moral and political questions. In order to maintain the critical force of the public sphere concept, I follow Fraser (2007) in evaluating the evidence for political inclusivity, legitimacy, and efficacy in the formal and informal discourse within the organization. I find evidence of positive moves along all three of these dimensions, and argue that such organizations can indeed serve as important sectors of the transnational public sphere, but also highlight some of the inherent limits and tensions that hinder this development. There is real potential for such organizations to effect political change both directly and indirectly, but there are also significant theological and structural obstacles to them doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of religion and immigration have viewed church-going as positive for social incorporation, having been influenced by a social capital understanding of trust-building as a strategic enterprise that facilitates the attainment of migrant inclusion and upward mobility. Yet an important question remains unaddressed, namely whether migrants' patterns of religious association actually reflect the motivation to expand social capital, or whether other, more complex motivations might be at work. Utilizing transnational ethnographic data, I examine the subjective processes through which migrants from Ghana, West Africa, in Chicago decide where and with whom to go to church. I show that they are split in their choices between American evangelical congregations and Ghanaian congregations; and also that as a group they are torn between the motivation to diversify their church networks and the motivation to establish trust. I examine how church size and models of interaction facilitate trust in Ghanaian congregations but make it very difficult to establish in American evangelical congregations. These findings suggest that religious-based ties are often central within Ghanaians' post-migration social networks, and that diverse pathways of religious association can lead to very different levels of social incorporation even among the same group of migrants. The study's conceptual offering is a critique of the dominance of the social capital metaphor in studies of trust, countered with a more robust understanding of trust as something that is both strategically useful but also sought out for its own sake, as a relational good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]