Researching religion and migration 20 years after ‘9/11’: Taking stock and looking ahead

Z Religion Ges Polit https://doi.org/10.1007/s41682-022-00103-6 ARTIKEL Researching religion and migration 20 years after ‘9/11’: Taking stock and looking ahead Fenella Fleischmann Received: 17 January 2022 / Revised: 17 January 2022 / Accepted: 28 January 2022 © The Author(s) 2022 Abstract This contribution to the special issue on religion and migration reviews two decades of large-scale survey research on changes in immigrant religion and the relationship between immigrants’ level of religiosity and their integration into European societies. The body of work reveals that Muslims in European societies stand out due to their comparatively high levels of religiosity and greater stability in religiosity over time and across immigrant generations. While the comparative picture is rather clear, findings regarding the long-term trend in Muslims’ religiosity and its association with immigrant integration are instead inconclusive. A systematic review of empirical studies of the association of (various indicators of) individual religiosity with immigrant integration reveals positive, negative and non-significant results for all outcomes and domains. Thus, based on the current state of art it is hard to assess whether and why religion forms a bridge or barrier to immigrant integration in Europe. To move the field forward, the contribution ends with a twofold proposal for a research agenda that includes a broadened empirical scope, moving beyond the focus on Sunni Muslims, and a conceptual extension that focuses on differences in reasoning about religion and religious meaning-making as additional, potentially more consistent and more powerful explanation for immigrants’ social relations and positions in their new societies Keywords Religion · Migration · Integration · Religiosity · Religious attitudes · Religious cognition Fenella Fleischmann () Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-Mail: K F. Fleischmann 1 Introduction While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to claim headlines of newspapers worldwide and climate change moves to the centre of public and policy debates, another topic looms large and regularly reminds us of the other unsolved challenge of our time: international migration, particularly the unregulated form from less developed countries to the WEIRD1 nations. Migrants from the Middle East being used as human chess pieces in the geopolitical strategy game between Belarus and the European Union, record numbers of migrants crossing the Channel despite the largest number of casualties after a capsizing, and a continuous stream of overcrowded vessels in the Mediterranean are only some of the recent reminders that migration is a pressing societal issue in need of continued policy attention. Yet the admission of migrants, or even any form of migration governance that is not exclusively directed at keeping migrants outside, meets much resistance in European immigrant receiving societies, as evident in public protests against migration and more particularly the arrival of refugees. In this polarised setting, refugees are routinely equated with or primarily perceived as Muslims (Pickel and Pickel 2019) and this anti-Muslim sentiment, in turn, is a strong driver of voting for right-wing populist parties such as the German AfD (e.g., Pickel and Yendell 2018; Huber and Yendell 2019). Thus, in public and policy debates on migration, the religious dimension of the phenomenon occupies a central position, and this makes the focus of the present special issue on religion and migration timely and urgent. The social scientific study of religion and migration is situated at the crossroads of multiple disciplinary fields. In the sociology of religion, the migration-induced increase of religious diversity has led to a re-evaluation of theories of religious decline and spiked interest in the effects of religious diversity on the religious affiliation, practices and beliefs of large populations (e.g. Casanova 2009; Koenig and Wolf 2013). As a consequence, this field has shown a growing interest in religious pluralism and the religious expression of immigrants. Similarly, in migration studies, the research interest in migrants’ religiosity and how this relates to their position in their new societies has been increasing since the 1990s. Earlier scholarship in this field was primarily concerned with issues of legal and structural integration (work, housing, citizenship) and cultural characteristics of the new minorities only came to the fore when the notion of temporary labour (‘guestworker’) migration was slowly replaced with the realisation that the presence of newcomers and a steady inflow of new immigrants were no transient phenomena but here to stay. As a migration scholar, I will not further elaborate on the question of why migration is important to study from the perspective of religious studies. Instead my focus will be on the importance of religion for migration studies, and specifically the question of how religion changes in the context of immigrant integration. I will moreover focus my contribution on the European receiving context, and review studies that have examined religious change and the relation between immigrant religion and integration in the North-Western European societies that have seen the earliest large-scale migration after WWII. Considering that Muslims are the largest 1 Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (cf. Henrich and Norenzayan 2010). K Researching religion and migration 20 years after ‘9/11’: Taking stock and looking ahead religious minority in this context and that societal debates about religious diversity and accommodation have focused on Islam and Muslims in Europe, my contribution will be grounded in research conducted among European Muslims with a migration background. This contribution is structured as follows. After providing some background on the study of religion in migration research, I will review two decades of empirical research using large-scale data to investigate religious change among immigrants (not limited to, but focusing on Muslims) and the relation between migrants’ religiosity and their integration into historically Christian but increasingly secularised European societies. This body of research addresses two questions: (1) How does religion change in the context of migration? (2) Does religion form a bridge or barrier to immigrant integration? As my review will reveal, findings regarding the overall trend of immigrant religiosity and its association with multiple integration outcomes are rather inconclusive to date. To address these unresolved research questions, the last part of this contribution therefore proposes a research agenda that can potentially reconcile currently inconsistent findings and provide a better answer to the question of how and why immigrants’ religion matters for their participation and social relations (...truncated)