Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change

In Follow the New Way, Melissa May Borja explores the religious components of Hmong refugee resettlement in United States after the “secret war” (1961–1975), in which the Central Intelligence Agency covertly conducted another battlefront of the Vietnam War in Laos. Borja focuses on how war uprooted Hmong spiritually and how the prominence of private Christian organizations in the resettlement process further contributed to this experience of displacement. As she puts it in the introduction, “the policies of refugee resettlement produced profound religious unsettlement” (p. 5). To cope with new circumstances—being displaced from ancestral villages in the highlands of Laos, traumatized by a brutally fought war, and forced to adapt to a life in America, where maintaining traditional household-based rituals proved difficult—Hmong refugees bridged their worlds by bringing Christianity into their lives. However, as Borja emphasizes, Hmong adopted Christianity on their own terms. I learned a lot by reading Follow the New Way, particularly through Borja's nuanced treatment of Hmong belief systems—which combine ancestral worship, animism, and shamanism. Adopting the language of Hmong refugees, she refers to traditional beliefs as the “old way” or “the Hmong way” (p. 23). The institutional religions that they encountered through resettlement were known as the “new way” (p. 4). By laying this groundwork in the first chapter, Borja is able to show how the Hmong were “religious migrants” because they integrated features of Christianity into their existing belief system, thereby changing the content of both traditional and Christian practices (p. 206). As a term, religious migrants works in another way too, by thinking about belief systems as boundaries that the Hmong traversed multiple times in the process of resettlement.