Religious change among immigrants: trends, meanings and implications for integration

Religion is a salient boundary marker between migrants and non-migrants in Europe and therefore there is much interest in the question how religion changes among immigrants after migration. In this presentation, I will bring together research on trends in religiosity among migrants with work on how immigrants understand and relate to religion, and how different understandings, in turn, relate to multiple dimensions of the broad concept of ‘immigrant integration’.

First, relying on a four-wave panel study of recent immigrants to the Netherlands from four different origin countries, I will depict trends in different aspects of religiosity and how they relate to migrants’ orientations towards their co-ethnic community and the receiving society. Results from latent growth models show that after an post-migration drop in religiosity from pre-migration levels, there is an initial recovery followed by a consistent downward trend, which applies to all indicators of religiosity and similarly to Muslim and Christian immigrants. Subsequently, I will problematize research on religious changes based on existing survey measures as this fails to capture individual differences in religious meaning-making, or literal vs. symbolic cognitions about religion, that are conceived to be independent of individuals’ levels of religiosity. Based on a two-dimensional framework that separates religious cognition from religiosity, I will present findings from a German survey among Turkish-origin Muslims that assess the relative importance of both dimensions for migrants participation in education and the labour market, along with social, cultural and political dimensions of immigrant integration.

Bio: Fenella Fleischmann is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Programme Group Institutions, Inequalities and Life Courses and the University of Amsterdam. Trained in interdisciplinary social scientific research with a topical focus on migration and quantitative methods, she received her PhD in 2011 from the universities of Utrecht and Leuven for her dissertation ‘Second-generation Muslims in European societies: Comparative perspectives on education and religion’. She worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB) and held positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at Utrecht University (Netherlands). Her research focuses on the social position of immigrants and their children in European societies, with a particular focus on religion, identity and discrimination. Her work has been published in multiple fields including Migration Studies, Sociology, Social and Cross-Cultural Psychology.

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